Sacha Baron Cohen brought down the house at the Kennedy Centers Honor ceremony for U2 on Sunday night. Despite claims that he’s been thinking about retiring the character, Cohen dusted off Borat and roasted Kanye West‘s descent into full-blown anti-Semitism.
via: Rolling Stone
As The Guardian reports, Baron Cohen/Borat was technically on-hand to help celebrate U2, who are one of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees. While he did eventually do that, it wasn’t before he squeezed in a few jokes of his own. For instance, the singer-songwriter behind “In My Country There Is Problem (Throw the Jew Down the Well)” took a moment to express his frustration with the recent uptick in antisemitism in the United States, quipping, “It’s not fair. Kazakhstan is the number one Jew-crushing nation. Stop stealing our hobby. Stop the steal! Stop the steal!”
Turning specifically to Kanye West, Borat quipped, “Your Kanye, he tried to move to Kazakhstan and even changed his name to Kazakhstan-ye West. But we said, ‘No, he too antisemitic, even for us.’”
Borat even managed to squeeze in one joke about U2 during this ostensible digression, parodying “With or Without You” with the lyrics, “With or without Jews.” After singing a bit, he joked, “What’s the problem? They loved this at Mar-a-Lago. They chose ‘Without Jews.’”
Speaking of Mar-a-Lago, Borat offered a few jokes for President Joe Biden at the expense of his predecessor. “I know the president of US and A is here. Where are you, Mr. Trump?” Borat cracked. “You don’t look so good. Where has your glorious big belly gone? And your pretty orange skin has become pale.”
Turning his attention to First Lady Jill Biden, Borat then joked, “But I see you have a new wife. Wawaweewa! She is very erotic. I must look away before I get a Bono!”
As for his actual U2 routine, Borat jokingly referred to the rock outfit as “Me 2” and praised their “Irish shanty.” And, of course, he tapped the bottomless well of jokes about U2’s infamous decision to give their 2014 album Songs of Innocence away for free to all iTunes users, whether they wanted it or not. After reading a letter from his parents in Kazakh, Borat said, “It translates to mean ‘Please remove your wretched album from my new iPhone 6.’”
No video of Borat’s Kennedy Center Honors set has popped up online, but it will hopefully appear (in some form or another) when the show airs Dec. 28 on CBS.
