Who Is America? British Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen Has The Answer

Although Sacha Baron Cohen now claims differently, Donald Trump was one of very few people to suss out his Ali G character – or, at the very least, figure that there was no harm in quickly walking out on the interview they shared. Whereas most people who ran afoul of Ali G – and, indeed, Cohen’s similar characters Borat and Brüno – felt curiously compelled to be polite to these unfortunate-seeming comic characters, this was one instance where it at least seemed that The Donald’s rudeness had worked in his favour. No small achievement, given that Ali G had previously taken in senior members of the FBI, or, as he termed it, ‘the FB, aye’.

Now, it appears Cohen is taking aim at America generally and Trump specifically once more, with the teaser for his new project, Who Is America?, ending with a prominently displayed Trump University logo. (Of the many fly-by-night crooked colleges in the world, Trump University is one of very few to have been successfully sued into oblivion – giving you some idea of what a grand scale of con-job the enterprise was.)

Cohen has been making comedy hay from interviewing Americans ever since the first days of Da Ali G Show – yet he didn’t crack it as a market until the 2006 release of the heftily-titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. While Da Ali G Show had operated almost entirely on the spoof interviews for which Cohen is now infamous, the film adaptation, Ali G Indahouse, was a conventional scripted narrative which was a little too colloquially British for a wider audience (as indeed the character himself might have been – most Brits of a certain age attended school with five or six would-be Ali Gs).

The Borat film adaptation, on the other hand, featured Cohen’s distinctive interview style throughout, and reaped the rewards for it, making a good $260 million at the box office (ten times what Ali G Indahouse brought in) and lodging Borat’s garbled English catchphrases in the world’s memory. This was followed in 2009 by Brüno, which was largely retreading the same comedy beats as Borat – a funny foreigner is let loose on the unsuspecting American public – but can boast that it prompted the Motion Picture Association of America to specifically note which films contain male nudity.

Although little has been released about Cohen’s return to the mockumentary format, Showtime have been gleefully touting it as “perhaps the most dangerous show in the history of television” in a series of trailers. These are hampered somewhat by the strict secrecy in which Cohen is creating the show, unable to really say anything about it beyond generalised hype-man praise, and as a result they resemble nothing so much as a particular South Park skit where a disappointing movie trailer declared that words would fly at you very fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NpDD0P33c

A video released by Cohen on Twitter is perhaps more illuminating, claiming that Cohen has been working undercover creating the show for a year, and showing former Vice-President Dick Cheney – the power behind the throne of the Bush Jr. years – happily autographing a ‘waterboarding kit’, presumably by the request of Cohen’s unseen character.

pic.twitter.com/ngkMhXeReK

— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) July 8, 2018

The most obvious assumption to make, between this and the title, is that Cohen’s new creation is some flavour of American ultranationalist or war-hawk imperialist – certainly someone for whom Cheney would feel comfortable literally endorsing his vulgar legacy of torture and military adventurism. Yet to imagine that this is what Showtime would describe as ‘the most dangerous show in the history of television’ seems somewhat empty. After all, pretending to be a frothing right-winger in order to show up right-wingers was Stephen Colbert’s whole shtick in The Colbert Report, and that dates all the way back to 2005, when Cheney was actually in office – and more importantly, it’s next to impossible Cohen wasn’t well aware of this at the time.

(Then again, nothing is certain. And Colbert’s 2007 tie-in book – I Am America (And So Can You!) – seems, in retrospect, worryingly similar in both title and spirit to ‘Who Is America?’.)

Even if Colbert had never existed, though, whole-hearted attacks on right-wingers in general and Donald Trump in particular aren’t particularly brave moves in the current media landscape, with its neoliberal, a-viewer-demographic-for-everyone consensus. This is why the Roseanne reboot was hailed as such a breath of fresh air before star and executive producer Roseanne Barr was fired for racism. Most current network comedians have, at some point, joined in with the two-minute-hate directed towards Trump, and if this is all Cohen has to offer in this new project, it’ll be nothing more than a drop in the bucket.

It should be said, though, that contra the likes of Jim Jefferies and John Oliver, Cohen has never been content to sandwich himself between a desk and a greenscreen and go off on one about ‘the other side’. His approach has always been a kayfabe-style maintenance of character (quite a show in and of itself), and an actual person-to-person engagement with whoever he is attempting to mock – who, as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out, as often as not end up looking good by comparison.

It’s entirely possible that Cohen really has found a new angle through which to comment on Trump’s America – and for the sake of their credibility, Showtime should probably hope so. We’ll find out soon enough: Who Is America? is set to premiere on July 15, with President Trump’s response speculated to follow it directly on Twitter.