The Los Angeles Times
Sacha Baron Cohen, whom you may know better as Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev, Brüno Gehard and/or Admiral General Aladeen, returns to television Sunday night with the first in a seven-part Showtime series, Who Is America?
As in his previous works for the littler and bigger screens, Baron Cohen assumes a variety of disguises — not that many people would recognize him out of costume — in order to gull unsuspecting citizens into making fools of themselves.
The kind of asymmetrical improvisational comedy he practices, in which only one party understands the game, is not new or unique to Baron Cohen. It goes back to "Candid Camera," at least.
Some of Baron Cohen's guests, or whatever you want to call them, are (or lately were) public people involved in policy or punditry — lobbyists, talking heads. It seems fair to expose their willingness to endorse the star's absurd statements and proposals — a "Kinderguardians" program, for example, promoted by Baron Cohen as an Israeli security expert, with its child-friendly "puppy pistol" and "Uzi-corn" — or even just to point out their inability to spot an obvious faker.
More than a few such figures say ridiculous things publicly all the time without any help from a Baron Cohen, of course; if he's exposing anything, it's the mad eagerness some people have to go on television.
As in his previous works for the littler and bigger screens, Baron Cohen assumes a variety of disguises — not that many people would recognize him out of costume — in order to gull unsuspecting citizens into making fools of themselves.
In other cases the star is merely playing a fool in front of people whose only mistake is to treat him kindly. When, posing as a Trump-loving conspiracy theorist — the same character who issued the rebuttal alluded to above — he offers nonsensical solutions to income inequality and blames Obamacare for his "obese legs" and "chalky deposits," Sen. Bernie Sanders is patient and polite; more than that, he’s beside the point, a prop.
And when, in the guise of a cartoon granola liberal ("a cisgender white heterosexual male, for which I apologize") on a bike tour to heal a divided America, he sits down to dinner with a wealthy conservative couple, one is more impressed by their curiosity and friendly tolerance than anything Baron Cohen's character has to say, as he goes on about his wife having an affair with a dolphin and their daughter being made to menstruate on the flag. ("Honey, don't pass judgment," the woman says to her husband, as he is finally about to.)
In the remaining segment of the opening episode, Baron Cohen plays an ex-con ("I made one mistake — just 14 times") bringing his art, made from his bodily wastes and secretions, to a Laguna Beach art gallery. The woman who represents it is willing to take him more seriously than she should, perhaps — though, in fact, the drawings are not bad — and when he shows her a brush he has been assembling from the pubic hairs of famous artists (Banksy and Damien Hirst are the names he drops), she wonders, "Are you asking me for a sample?"
"That is so generous," he responds, and here, at least, he is telling the truth.
