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The point is that the movie's funniest laughs come from people and their reactions, not the material written by Cohen and his crew. Their humor is mean, not funny. Cohen spends the movie gladly accepting the kindness of strangers who accept him, despite his outlandish appearance and demeanor, then he takes advantage of their good graces by turning them into laughing stocks for his audience. Cohen sometimes goes too far to get those laughs, like when he starts breaking things in a Mom 'n' Pop shop "by accident." Tom Green has been doing this same schtick for years and been attacked by critics for it. The only difference is that Borat uses a funny foreign accent, which apparently makes it "more intelligent." Certainly Andy Kaufman had a stellar career doing a similar character without resorting to racial epithets, and Eugene Hutz of New York band Gogol Bordello, an actual Eastern European, plays a similar cartoon character onstage--one slightly modified for Liev Schreiber's "Everything Is Illuminated"--without it being so offensive.