The actor:	Maria Bakalova
The character:	Tutar Sagdiyev
The film:	Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The line:	“I have a baby inside me and I want to take it out of me.”

Most people in America know who Joe Biden is, and more people know who Donald Trump is. I’m sure most of them could figure out who was who if you showed them pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. After that? I’m dubious! I’m not sure that a plurality of Americans could tell you who the guys on the money are once you get past George and Abe. All you have to do is get on the normie Internet for, oh, thirty seconds to realize that no one realizes how the legal system works. Most of us in the States live in a kind of ignorance bordering on the innocence of babes. When I heard that there was going to be a sequel to Borat, I didn’t think about America like that. I assumed that one of the key elements of the first film, that people might actually believe that Sacha Baron Cohen was a Kazakh man running around the United States in search of Pamela Anderson, would be lost.

I misjudged my people. They didn’t recognize Borat, though in fairness Borat showed up in more disguises than he used to and with a sidekick, his “female son.” But the voice was still there! And there’s a good case to be made that Borat is one of the most famous non-superhero, non-Tom Cruise movie characters of the century thus far! They say that the real difference between Britons and Americans is that the former think that one hundred miles is a long distance, where the latter think that one hundred years is a long time. Turns out that a decade and a half was more than long enough.

I didn’t know, and neither did Rudy Giuliani, that the addition of Maria Bakalova to this team of shameless people out to shame people would be so remarkable. (One of the most pleasant surprises in my Oscar prognostication life was seeing Bakalova get an Oscar nomination for playing Tutar, which she absolutely deserved.) What a marvelous comedic actress, a stonefaced killer who can say just about anything with a straight face. Let’s rescue her from having to do crap like Bodies Bodies Bodies; Borat Subsequent Moviefilm shows that we have a genius in our midst.

The scene before this one is funny on its own, although part of the joy for me is in watching Borat go to the Upstate. (I lived in Greenville, South Carolina for years, which is where Borat buys his diguise; Spartanburg, where they buy Tutar’s cupcake, is just up 85.) Tutar has never had a cupcake before, and chooses one with a little plastic baby figurine on it. She’s so excited about it that she doesn’t think very hard about what she’s eating, and then all of a sudden she makes retching noises. Are you okay? Borat asks. I swallowed the baby, Tutar replies, her face covered with blue icing and her eyes resigned to her poor decision. I’m as gullible as most of the Americans Borat fools, apparently, because I thought this was going to be its own punchline. And then they take Tutar to a doctor, where they drop the hammer so hard that my eyes are still crossing a little. The perfection of this joke is in its conception, the slow build, the misdirect, and then finally the remarkable moment where Bakalova asks but doesn’t ask for an abortion.