Visiting foreign TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev is telling a group of middle-aged American feminists about life in his native Kazakhstan. There, he says, "it is illegal for more than five women to gather in one place, except in a brothel or a mass grave."

Is this funny?

Yes, of course — it's brilliant.

Why is it funny?

Because it's a finger up the nose of humorless PC knuckleheads everywhere.

What about the scene in his primitive home village of Kuczek, where Borat shows us "the running of the Jew" — a sub-Pamplona event in which costumed villagers throng the street, poking and tormenting a person wearing a giant monster-head, complete with fangs and horns. Is that funny? Why?

Because Russia has a long and deep-rooted tradition of anti-Semitism, and Kazakhstan is, like, near Russia somewhere (isn't it?). So this is bold satire, and the boldness of it is funny. Anyway, Sacha Baron Cohen, the fearless English comic who inhabits the character of Borat in this anarchic movie, is Jewish himself. So ... there.

"Borat" — or "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," its full title — is an 84-minute cross-cultural train wreck in which the flamboyantly bigoted and cluelessly enthusiastic reporter and his camera crew make their way from New York to California (in an ice-cream truck), staging guerrilla encounters with unsuspecting locals all along the way. The movie, shot on video, looks cheap because it is. Not that that matters. (Borat claims the government of Kazakhstan kicked in a little production money raised by "selling uranium to some brown men" — a lie, of course.) And while the film's candid-camera concept — making fools of people who don't know they're being set up — isn't new, Cohen's dauntless refusal to break character, even in the most uncomfortable situations, is amazing to behold. The picture is often gaspingly hilarious.

There is, for example, the priceless scene in which Borat, decked out in tacky cowboy gear, makes his way to the center of a rodeo ring in Virginia to declare his love of America. "We support your war of terror," he announces. The patriotic crowd, clearly taking in only the familiar key-words, roars its approval. "May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman and child in Iraq!" Borat shouts. We see a close-up of one man yelling "Yeah!" But then, in a wider shot, we see the rest of the crowd suddenly starting to register that ... something weird is going on here.

Then there's the guy who tells Borat he should shave off his mustache so he won't look so much like a Muslim — and then is coaxed by the smilingly confiding reporter into sharing his thoughts about the need to kill homosexuals. (Borat is of course fiercely anti-gay — which is odd, given his apparently tribal predilection for disco dancing and naked wrestling with other men. In fact, his nude tussle with a fat, hairy man on a hotel-room bed sets the bar for gross-out humor at a possibly-unmatchable new height.) There are also some casually tossed-off moments that are pretty funny, as when Borat, having checked into a hotel, steps into an elevator with his suitcase and thinks he's arrived at his room. And the sequence in which he gets religion at a Pentecostal prayer meeting (and expresses his desire to continue on to California "with my new friend, Mr. Jesus"), isn't something we, or the speaking-in-tongues Pentecostals, are likely to forget any time soon.

Not everything works, though. The episode in which a group of street thugz offer Borat lessons in hip-hop jive goes flat when he parades his newly-learned ghetto mannerisms at the front desk of another hotel (and gets kicked out). His encounter with the right-wing political firebrand Alan Keyes — who would seem to be a perfect subject for Boratian mockery — doesn't pan out. And two poop-joke interludes fail to rise above the level of traditional toilet humor. (Although the second of them, at a genteel suburban dinner party to which Borat has kindly been invited, is certainly outrageous, if not in a particularly likeable way.) In addition, his stumbling, glass-crashing visit to a Dallas antiques store is something that was already done to perfection (and then done to death) by Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau character 40 years ago.

There are also structural problems. In order to build the movie into something more than a procession of wild-card gags, Cohen and his director, Larry Charles (from the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" cable series), have attempted to inject a rough storyline into the proceedings. This involves Borat taking up with a frumpy hooker — which feels strained — and developing a crush on Pamela Anderson, which in the end (when Anderson herself puts in an appearance) adds up to nothing. (Although the scene in which Borat sits broken-hearted while a van full of drunken frat boys screen the Pam-and-Tommy sex tape for him is pretty wonderful.)

And the underlying hostility of the film's premise (which is also the source of its humor) is sometimes off-putting. In order to snooker average people into taking part in the Borat experience, The filmmakers told them this was a legitimate documentary being shot by a legitimate foreign TV host; they were then convinced to sign release forms couched in the vaguest possible terms. I think it's fair to assume that none of these people had ever been in front of a TV camera before, and their nervous incomprehension sometimes makes them seem more like victims than the dumb clucks the movie wants to portray them as. In one scene, Borat goes into a gun store and asks the mild-mannered clerk, "What is the best gun to defend against a Jew?" We can see the man hesitate for moment — wondering, perhaps, if he's really understood the question being posed in Borat's thick accent. Then, going along, he says, "Well, I'd recommend a nine-millimeter ...." As edited, the clear implication of this exchange is that the clerk is a typical red-state anti-Semite, possibly a violent one. But the man doesn't give off that kind of vibe at all, and sucker-punching him in this way seems grossly unfair.

That said, Sacha Baron Cohen is a quick and funny man, and with this movie, he's taken confrontational comedy into scary/hilarious new areas. At one point, Borat is informed that there exists an organization that's against cruelty to animals. Obviously bewildered, he says, "Against ... ?" In scenes like this, you know you're seeing something new, and long overdue.

Check out everything we've got on "Borat."

Visit Movies on MTV.com for more from Hollywood, including news, reviews, interviews and more.

Want trailers? Visit the Trailer Park for the newest, scariest and funniest coming attractions anywhere.