One weekend atop the box office chart would be one thing. But two? For a brainy British comedian whose Ali G show never really broke into the American mainstream? Something is going on here.

I don’t think Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a big, steaming pile of anti-Americanism. That product does sell in America (ask Michael Moore), but this movie doesn’t really capture it. You have to be a writer for the New Statesman to write the following sentence with a straight face: “Trying to find the ideal car for mowing down gypsies, or seeking the best gun for killing Jews, he encounters only compliance among America’s salespeople.”

Well, yes. They’re trying to sell things. You can put up with an enormous amount of grief and bigotry from a complete stranger to make some cash or commission. And, as a whole, the Borat movie actually shows an America of almost fathomless politeness, hospitality and manners.

And that is America’s terrible secret: compared with Britain, it’s a very polite place. Strangers call you “sir” here. And the hostess of a Southern dinner party will take pains to help you understand how to use the toilet paper, even after you have shown up — like Borat — at the dinner table with a bagful of your own faeces.

And, yes, part of Borat’s success is simply due to the fact that it’s really funny in an elemental fashion. The film critic of The New York Times rightly saw the movie as less effective than the quick Borat sketches Sacha Baron Cohen includes in Da Ali G Show. But he also saw its one towering moment of breakthrough: when Borat wrestles his fat, hairy sidekick Azamat, both nude, through the corridors and elevator of a New York hotel.

Hazarding entry into Pseuds Corner, AO Scott wrote that this single scene “achieves the condition of cinema, climbing the ladder from titter to yowl, past belly laugh and into the wordless Utopian realm of the boffo”. Yes, it was very, very funny.

But the ecstatic, sustained response that America has had to the Borat movie requires a little more explanation. My own best guess is that its unique combination of elements was almost designed to give Americans permission to laugh at this moment in time.

Americans, after all, are in a miserable war against a completely unknown and close to unknowable enemy in a second-world country. The best they can hope for is avoidance of a terrorist catastrophe in an American city, and a grinding war of attrition in a desert far away for reasons now almost forgotten.

Americans have been brought to this position by a handful of foreign extremists with funny names and by the somewhat clumsy, if well-intentioned, over-reach of their overwhelmed president. They feel frustrated, depressed and, as the election result proved, more than a little angry.

For a comedian, this is a great moment of anxiety to puncture. And Borat pricks it with near-perfect precision. He is a strange-looking primitive in a very grey suit from a foreign land.

Oblivious to his own insignificance he persists in invading American life and culture, from sea to shining sea. The finale has him literally kidnapping an iconic piece of Americana: Pamela Anderson. It’s a different foreigner and a different set of twin towers, but you get the analogy. It’s tragedy replayed as mini-farce.

Borat also sums up the essential ridiculousness of globalisation.

He comes from a place that is a parody of second world charm, full of every stereotype of developing world backwardness: brutal misogyny, nasty homophobia, primitive hygiene, funny accents, irony-free 1970s moustaches and virulent anti-semitism.

He loves America but is not afraid of it. He operates in a technologically sophisticated world and is busy making a television programme, and yet he is proud that one of his sisters is the fourth best prostitute in Kazakhstan.

At a Texas rodeo, or in a Los Angeles bookshop, he is both at home and yet completely out of place. This is the world we now live in — where deeply backward places communicate on a superficial level with societies far wealthier, more developed and, yes, more civilised.

Borat in America is like a first-generation Moroccan in Amsterdam with an internet connection. He’s a symbol of a deeper ridiculousness that globalisation has spawned, and the cultural clashes it has intensified.

Borat is not ostensibly Muslim, which saves him from becoming too crass a vehicle for anti-Islamic sentiment. But his attitudes toward women, gays and, especially, Jews creates a close fictional cousin to Islamist extremism.

And because Borat is ostensibly making fun of Americans, in however gentle a fashion, he gives Americans permission to laugh back at him.

America has been waiting five long years to laugh at the ridiculously primitive, bigoted nature of some of its enemies. And a British, Cambridge-educated Jew has given them their chance.

One way to look at this is to call it asymmetrical humour. Think of it as the West’s revenge against asymmetrical warfare.

With all Americans’ wealth, freedom and power, they are not supposed to laugh at people in foreign lands, steeped in poverty and prejudices. It would be unseemly, not to say politically incorrect. And America is still a polite society, as Borat proves again and again.

For five years now Americans have been subjected to asymmetrical warfare in which a handful of strange foreigners have brought their entire country and now their mighty military to a standstill using a few box-cutter knives and improvised explosive devices.

Fighting back in Iraq merely confirmed the tactical advantages of the tiny, asymmetrical enemy. So one option is not just to fight back, but to laugh back. Somehow, Baron-Cohen has threaded the needle of providing enough mockery of America to make mockery of America’s enemies socially acceptable.

Americans, in other words, have finally been given permission to laugh at their own awful predicament at this moment in history.

No wonder they don’t seem to be able to stop.