Larry Charles

Larry: There's a great comic tradition of the very intellectual and yet vulgar comedy going back to [François] Rabelais, Lenny Bruce or Jonathan Swift. Thomas Pynchon is like that today. There's tremendous humor on all different levels, puns, subtle humor, behavioral humor, character humor, conceptual humor, satire, broad satire, physical humor, political humor. All of those things can coexist and there is a comic tradition of it.

Larry: (on directing Borat) Well actually I am a great actor. Part of being a great actor is being real and I was able to really convey the sincerity and genuineness of what we were doing to people and almost create a state for people where they were comfortable with the idea. Then once that was set up, anything could happen within that constructed reality. We constructed a reality where this man from Kazakhstan just got here and you can't make any assumptions about what he knows. He's never been in a hotel, he's never been on an elevator. In the middle of it sometimes, people would come out of the trance a little bit and say, "Is this real? Is this real?" and I would say, "Yes, it's totally real." But what I wouldn't say that it wasn't necessarily the reality that they thought it was, but it is real. I had to be able to convey that with sincerity.

Larry: That's right. I couldn't pass as a normal person. I look like some type of Gandalf reject or something. So I cut my hair and put on a blazer and khakis and looked like a community college professor or something.