"Whereas clowns were naive idiots, bouffons savagely undermined the people in power."

"They were doing something important: using biting and at times cruel humor to undermine systemic injustice. It’s what satirists have done throughout history.... Ali G is a white imbecile—a delusional cultural appropriator—who steals the fashion and lyrics from his favorite gangsta rap and dancehall idols, from Compton to Kingston.... Like a good bouffon, he undermines that establishment—not the culture he loves and borrows from.... Each of my characters has a specific mechanism to encourage people to drop their guards and show what they really believe, prejudices and all. Borat, an antisemitic journalist, exposes Jew hatred, xeno­phobia, sexism, and casual racism. Erran Morad, a stereotype of a tough-guy Israeli commando—'I’ve been in 14 terror attacks,' he says in my new movie Ali G: Who Iz I?, 'and started two'—exposes Islamophobia.... Ali G works on another level. He’s not extreme—he’s just extremely dumb. But his absurd questions lead powerful people to underestimate him and answer in earnest, revealing their own biases...."

Writes Sacha Baron Cohen, in "Why Satire Is No Laughing Matter" (Time). 

According to Baron Cohen, the "bouffon" is a "tradition dated back to 11th century France, where societal outcasts—gay people, heretics, those with deformities—would be let back into their villages once a year to put on shows viciously mocking the ruling class."

I noticed that Time essay because of "What to Know About ‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ Sacha Baron Cohen has revived his fictional wannabe rapper in a new movie that will be in theaters for just this weekend. Here’s what to know" (NYT).

Here's an excerpt from that (showing why Baron Cohen is highly motivated to justify his continuation of the Ali G character):

Just what we need: an oiled-up, glowering comedian.

From the link:

Baron Cohen says his workout regime with the celebrity trainer Alfonso Moretti stops his mind spinning. “Instead of lying in bed overthinking and staring at my phone, I get up, jump on FaceTime and train with Alfonso. It sets a positive tone for the whole day.”... 

We all confront mortality, invisibility, loss of sexual appeal and having to use reading glasses in dark restaurants: the task is to work out the most constructive way to deal with all that....

He's "positive" and "constructive" and looking at us angrily. I'm sad to see he got divorced!

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

"... I’m an asshole. Much like Sacha Baron Cohen is an asshole. Although unlike Sacha, I labour under no illusions about my assholeishness..."

"... and am fully resigned to my status. Sacha, on the other hand, is so sure that he is not an asshole that his 'representatives' have been trying to stop publication of a memoir by the Australian actress Rebel Wilson in which she claims that he is one. It’s classic Hollywood. Just the sort of classy bantz Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn got up to. Indeed, Wilson claims that Baron Cohen is more than just an asshole. She claims he is a 'massive asshole.' Which, to be fair, is no laughing matter. I think I am right in saying I am widely perceived only as 'a bit of an arsehole' (to anglicise the trope).... This story has perhaps gained the traction it has because of Wilson’s initial decision not to name Baron Cohen, but merely to reveal that her forthcoming memoir would contain tales of 'an asshole' with whom she once worked, followed by the later revelation that 'now the asshole is trying to threaten me … He’s hired lawyers … but the book WILL come out,' before finally revealing: 'The asshole that I am talking about in one chapter of my book is: Sacha Baron Cohen.'"

Writes Giles Coren, in "The real Sacha Baron Cohen has always been on show/Rebel Wilson may be right about the Borat creator, but being an ‘asshole’ is part of what makes him a comedy great" (London Times).

I'm giving this my "Streisand effect" tag!

"What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis."

Said Sacha Baron Cohen, quoted in "Jewish Celebrities and Influencers Confront TikTok Executives in Private Call/TikTok faces escalating accusations that it promotes pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel content. 'Shame on you,' Sacha Baron Cohen said on the call" (NYT).

“If you think back to Oct. 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate,” Mr. Cohen said in the meeting. He accused TikTok of feeding similarly incendiary content to young people....

Let's look at the complaint in Noelle Dunphy v. Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Filed in yesterday in state court in Manhattan. I'm just going to extract some things that stood out to me, so I encourage you to do your own independent reading. My selections are entirely biased, as is this entire blog, toward what catches my attention: 

Giuliani worked aggressively to hire Ms. Dunphy, offering her what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work as his Director of Business Development with a salary of $1 million per year.... He made clear that satisfying his sexual demands—which came virtually anytime, anywhere—was an absolute requirement of her employment and of his legal representation. Giuliani began requiring Ms. Dunphy to work at his home and out of hotel room, so that she would be at his beck and call. He drank morning, noon, and night, and was frequently intoxicated, and therefore his behavior was always unpredictable. Giuliani also took Viagra constantly.

"The Queen Mother liked to mimic Ali G, Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, with Harry."

The London Times reports on Prince Harry's book, which it quotes:

“I taught her to say Booyakasha, showing her how to flick her fingers the way Sacha did. She couldn’t grasp it, she had no idea what I was talking about, but she had such fun trying to flick and say the word. With every repetition of that word, Booyakasha, she’d shriek.”

"Judge Cronan's dismissal is the joke, and more than a bad joke at that."

Said Roy Moore's lawyer Larry Klayton, quoted in "Sacha Baron Cohen, Showtime win dismissal of Roy Moore defamation lawsuit." 

Moore fell for one of Baron Cohen's pranks and then sued Baron Cohen for $95 million, alleging defamation. 

The judge said it was "clearly a joke," and "It is simply inconceivable that the program's audience would have found a segment with Judge Moore activating a supposed pedophile-detecting wand to be grounded in any factual basis."

Sacha Baron Cohen — "not hot as himself, by the way" — confronts his cancel-worthy alter egos...

 ... as he accepts a "comedic genius" award:

 

"Thank you MTV; to the millions of fans out there who voted for me, I salute you. This is yours, I’d be nothing without you. I’m so humbled by this. I’m just a human being creating complex nuanced characters — sophisticated tools to expose …"/"Did somebody say they want me to expose my sophisticated tool?"

This time around, Kazakhstan rolls with the "Borat" satire and makes tourism ads with the catchphrase "Very nice!"

 

The NYT reports: 

[Dennis Keen, and American who lives in Kazakhstan] hosts a travel show on a state television channel. (“I’m kind of like the American Borat,” Mr. Keen said.) When Mr. Keen learned about the sequel, he thought... Kazakhstan should embrace the Borat character’s catchphrase and turn it into the country’s tourism slogan: “Kazakhstan. Very nice!”...  Two weeks ago, Mr. Keen and a friend, Yermek Utemissov, who helps foreign film companies arrange shoots in Kazakhstan, pitched the board of tourism....

The government of Kazakhstan banned the first film and threated to sue Sacha Baron Cohen, but now, Utemissov says, “It’s a newer generation. They’ve got Twitter, they’ve got Instagram, they’ve got Reddit, they know English, they know memes. They get it. They’re inside the media world. We’re looking at the same comedians, the same Kimmel show. Kazakhstan is globalized.” 

Is that "Borat" sequence with Giuliani "revenge porn"?

I didn't get around to the Giuliani story yesterday. I'd put a lid on my blogging at 12:56 PM when I finished my podcast and got to work painting my closet. I hadn't even thought about the display of video, recorded with hidden cameras in a private hotel room, edited into movie, and presented as out-of-context clips/stills to stun/shock/outrage/delight the people of the entire world. But sitting down to blog this morning, I thought: revenge porn. 

Do we accept that the rules of life in American society today include video recording private behavior and selecting the most revealing moment to put on the internet for everyone to see? If what Sacha Baron Cohen did is accepted, then why can't everyone set up a little camera in their hotel/bedroom and lure someone into that space and see if they get something that they're interested in putting on the internet? This could be used to hurt any person.

Quite aside from the ethics of treating other people this way, the trick — which the clever man Sacha Baron Cohen did not invent — has been enough of a problem over the years that laws — criminal laws — have been passed. Googling "giuliani" and "revenge porn," I found these tweets:

Congrats to everyone posting those Giuliani pictures, you just broke the New York State revenge porn lawhttps://t.co/L28VsRKCkt

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 21, 2020

Revenge porn is an ex boyfriend releasing intimate pictures of his ex girlfriend, not a comedian filming a creepy old man that represents a major oppressor and enemy of US democracy, willingly masturbating to a woman who was interviewing him. Stop twisting laws to save a monster

— 𝑀𝒶𝓇𝒾𝒶 𝒹𝑒 𝓁𝒶 𝒯𝑜𝓇𝓇𝑒, 𝒫𝒽.𝒟. 😷 (@Caidadelatorre) October 21, 2020

I contemplated whether Maria de la Torre might be a pseudonymous comedian (like Titania McGrath), but no, I think she's this college professor. A professor can still use humor, but I think she's at least partly serious. The idea that criminal law protects only the victims you view as good people is legally wrong and blatantly unethical. And by the way, it's an idea that was used to allow rapists to escape conviction! 

Giuliani might not want to argue that what was done to him was revenge porn. It's inconsistent with his assertion that nothing happened — he was just tucking in his shirt. 

I have not research the revenge-porn issue in any depth, and I assume Sacha Baron Cohen has his legal advisers and the scene was planned with an interruption that occurred exactly where it needed to end to preserve the argument that it was not a violation of criminal statutes. But I do think it is a violation of social norms to lure a person into an intimate encounter for the purpose of recording compromising video. And yet, it's a practice as old as photography, and there's a long list of political figures who've been tricked and disempowered this way.

Oh! That reminds me! Today's the day the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition is coming out. So much sexual exposure this week. 

"Mr. Baron Cohen... wrote his thesis on 'the Black-Jewish alliance' and identity politics in the Civil Rights movement. So he was primed to play the puckish Abbie Hoffman."

"'Essentially, he was trying to be a stand-up comedian,' Mr. Baron Cohen said of the man who co-founded the Yippies and preached flower power. 'He was very influenced by Lenny Bruce and he realized that if he could make people laugh, he could get them engaged in the cause.'... [Aaron] Sorkin, who wrote and directed the Chicago 7 film, said that the day Mr. Baron Cohen shot his scene on the witness stand reminded him of the day Jack Nicholson shot his courtroom scene in 'A Few Good Men,' noting, 'Everyone wanted to watch; 120 extras didn’t care that the camera wasn’t on them, they stayed to watch.'

From "Sacha Baron Cohen: This Time He’s Serious/Reviving his Borat character and playing the political activist Abbie Hoffman, the actor feels he 'had to ring the alarm bell and say that democracy is in peril this year'" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"Borat 2 trailer reveals Sacha Baron Cohen was the Trump impersonator who interrupted Mike Pence's CPAC speech."

"Vice President Mike Pence didn't know it at the time, but when he delivered his speech at CPAC earlier this year, he was actually taking part in a secret sequel to Borat," Yahoo News reports.

Here's the trailer for the film, which seems to be titled "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan":

"This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit. It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top."

"It looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive. This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shake-down, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away... I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me."

Said Rudy Giuliani, explaining himself, in "Rudy Giuliani called the NYPD on Sacha Baron Cohen over prank interview" (Page Six).

"Why do none of Trump’s ‘jokes’ feel like jokes?"

A column by Richard Zoglin in WaPo. And if you're jumping to answer the question with something like they're not funny to people who hate Trump or who are the butt of his jokes, you're wrong. Zoglin — author of "Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show" and "Hope: Entertainer of the Century" — has something way more interesting and — as far as comedy matters go — erudite.

Zoglin looks at some important Trump jokes/"jokes": 1. "When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’ ”  2. (about Hillary's emails) "Russia, if you’re listening,” 3. (about police putting arrestees in squad cars) “Don’t be too nice,” 4. whatever he said about injecting disinfectant, and 5. challenging Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to an IQ test.

Zoglin says Trump is using an "avant-garde and subtle" form of humor!

Trump’s chief model, it seems to me, is the deadpan performance-art comedy of people such as Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen. They created elaborate put-on characters, like Kaufman’s obnoxious lounge-lizard Tony Clifton or Cohen’s blundering Kazakh journalist, Borat.

The key to pulling off this sort of comedy is to stick with the ruse, to stay in character, to dupe the audience for as long as possible....

Trump, the Tony Clifton of presidents, has proved equally adept at sustaining the put-on. He never breaks character. He never laughs at his own jokes (or anyone else’s, for that matter). On those rare occasions when he feels compelled to backtrack from an especially ridiculous comment, he does so with a scripted monotone of can’t-miss-it insincerity.

[Some things Trump says] make sense only as performance art. And in that respect, Trump is peerless. Even Tony Clifton and Borat couldn’t keep their acts running for four years straight.

If you buy the theory that Trump is doing performance art... what a great artist!

And, as you know, hot dog is Mitt Romney's favorite meat.

My favorite meat is hot dog 🌭 Happy #NationalHotDogDay! pic.twitter.com/xrForVbLOF

— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) July 18, 2019

Meat 'n' Mitt — America's favorite combo.

Actually... if I were Mitt, I'd worry about prodding people with "dog"... If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an entire Wikipedia article, "Mitt Romney dog incident." From that article:

Responding to Democrats who emphasized the Seamus story, conservative bloggers such as Jim Treacher drew a comparison between the Seamus incident and Barack Obama sampling dog meat as a child in Indonesia, where it is a local delicacy, as mentioned in Obama's autobiography. While an Obama spokesman called it an attack on a small child, Obama himself has displayed a sense of humor about it.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner saw Obama saying that Sarah Palin's stint guest hosting The Today Show reminded him of an old query: "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious." Delaney, Arthur; Stuart, Hunter (April 30, 2012). "Obama Ate Dog, And He'd Do It Again To Remind You Of Seamus Romney". Huffington Post (Video).

Ah, I got to use my old "Obamedy" tag again. And it's interesting to see Sarah Palin again. She's been off the radar screen for quite a while. Do we ever hear of her these days? Well, there's this outré acknowledgment from Sacha Baron Cohen, who just got an Emmy nomination for that barely watchable show he put out:

"While I am flattered at these nods, it is a shame that my co-stars were not recognized," Cohen wrote on Twitter. "Particularly Dick Cheney, who I had hoped would come across on camera as someone who’d gleefully sent hundreds of thousands to their pointless death — and boy did he deliver." He added, "There’s one more person I need to thank even though she didn’t appear in the final project, Sarah Palin. Sarah, if you are out there, and you are WAY out there, please know the last time unseen footage generated as much interest, was when Donald Trump visited a Moscow hotel room."

Well, this post went down the rat hole. Here we are in the Steele dossier!

Sacha Baron Cohen show ended its season without ever using his encounter with Sarah Palin.

The Daily Beast reports:

Despite Showtime’s attempts to tamp down expectations, it seemed inevitable that Baron Cohen would save Palin’s sit-down interview with Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, PhD for the seventh and final episode this Sunday. But it was nowhere to be found, perhaps for legal reasons or simply because the comedian just didn’t think it was good enough.

Instead the finale had O.J. Simpson. See if you think was worth doing:

Watch O.J. Simpson high-five @SachaBaronCohen after he makes a joke about murdering his girlfriend on the #WhoIsAmerica finale https://t.co/DfnzmTBKq4 pic.twitter.com/cEoZM2k5C5

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 27, 2018

IN THE COMMENTS: Darrell gives Cohen the joke he deserves: "It would have been funny if OJ stabbed HIM seventeen times."

"Does Sacha Baron Cohen Understand Israel?/The comedian’s new show makes a mockery of Israeli machismo. But he doesn’t know who we really are."

In the NYT, Shmuel Rosner critiques Cohen's character Morad — "an ultra-macho ex-Mossad agent who travels around the United States duping Israel-loving conservatives into embarrassing themselves."

We cannot escape the suspicion that there are still some Morads in our midst: Brave commandos who become political leaders or arms dealers or pundits; Israelis who are blunt, macho, crude, boisterous, pompous and trigger-happy; Israelis who forget to shed their uniformed mentality even when their services are no longer needed....

We still have dangerous enemies, so maybe keeping this stereotype going is useful. We seem tough after all, with our big muscles and love of guns. On the other hand, the Morad caricature makes us look bellicose and pigheaded, if not downright absurd. And it probably makes us seem hideous to many Americans, especially young ones, especially liberal ones — the Americans with whom Israel already has an image problem....

Israel’s most avid supporters in America might like us more as crude machos than as start-up entrepreneurs. They might even prefer our satirized fossils to our real selves....

When I was working on this article, I called a friend of mine, a former paratrooper, to get his thoughts. “Are there still a lot of Morad types in our country?” I asked him. And then he gave me the answer that made it all clear: Every Israeli who serves in the military knows that we still have Morads. But for every idiotic Morad, we also have two prankish Cohens. That’s why we can afford a laugh.

So there are idiots and pranksters in a 2 to 1 ratio. What's the ratio of idiot-or-prankster to those who are neither idiot nor prankster. Rosner doesn't say.

The word "macho" (or "machismo") is used 4 times in Rosner's column. "Masculine" is used once — in a phrase that stands in for "macho": "blustering, masculine image." So "masculine" is nothing but bad and retrograde — in Rosner's words, "bellicose and pigheaded."

Rosner says that Americans might prefer such awful people to "our real selves." But what are your real selves — "prankish Cohens"?

I can't watch Sacha Baron Cohen's show (and I used to like him) because he comes across as an aggressive jerk. Not just his characters. He seems clearly to hate the character he's invented, even as he gets into embodying the character and having the freedom to act out that guy's hatefulness. I find it sad and demoralizing.

Is there no way to be a good man — a good man? Rosner doesn't talk about that, and I wonder if Cohen believes in it at all.

Sacha Baron Cohen must be desperate for footage. He uses this sequence with Roy Moore even though he gets nothing comical or embarrassing from Roy Moore.

I forced myself to watch this whole thing, because WaPo did an article on it, "Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest prank: Using a fake pedophile detector on Roy Moore":



It's very slow going, with Cohen in ridiculously thick and expression-impairing makeup and a very heavy accent. Cohen tries to get Moore to say something embarrassing about "freedom-loving" Alabama, but Moore remains stable and reserved and uses abstractions that give Cohen nothing to work with. Moore sat down for this interview because he was led to believe that he was being honored for his support of Israel.

Cohen brings out a device that, he says, the Israeli military uses to detect pedophiles, and it goes off when it's held near Moore. This might have been funny if Moore had become very angry or upset, but Moore was stoical for a little while, then says, "I am simply cutting this conversation right now. Good night. I support Israel. I don’t support this kind of stuff."

It's quite simply a prank that failed and should not have been used unless Cohen wants us to conclude that he can't succeed in his tricks anymore. This is another perspective on the Era of That's Not Funny. It's harder for comedians to derive comic material from non-comical characters like Moore. Moore knew enough to keep a pleasant smile, then a poker face, and then to walk away. That's not funny.

"[Sacha Baron] Cohen is still an undisputed genius at punking... But if 'Who Is America?' is worth any praise, then what are we to say about the techniques of Project Veritas..."

"... the conservative, undercover operation that has tried to infiltrate and expose liberal bias among news organizations and community organizers? What Cohen does is not all that different... To giggle at and delight in Cohen’s pranks is to believe that you can have it both ways: that you can be horrified at the collapse of truth and democracy, and then laugh at a guy who seeks to undermine whatever remains of trust. As watchably galling as Cohen’s techniques may be, America in 2018 doesn’t really seem like the right time or place for it."

From "Sacha Baron Cohen still knows how to punk America, but his new show erodes what little trust we have left" by Hank Stuever (WaPo).

I'm giving this my "Era of That's Not Funny" tag.

By the way, the commenters at WaPo are strongly resisting the comparison of this comedy show to the Project Veritas sting operations. The key argument is that Cohen presents his footage as a network comedy show. He just wants laughs. Project Veritas presents its footage as internet video, for the purpose of affecting real-world policy. But (I would add) there is a side effect of humor in some of the Project Veritas video, and Sacha Baron Cohen does have a political viewpoint and does intend to undermine the power of the politicians he targets.

No one — not Stuever or his commenters — mentions "The Daily Show." A few years ago, we continually heard the observation that Americans are getting their news from that comedy show. A satire was the primary source of factual information and opinion spin. The line between showbiz and journalism was blurred long ago. I mean, look at how the WaPo commenters are willing to call Project Veritas "journalism"! It used to be critiqued as not journalism at all, as if it really were more of a comedy show.

The line between seriousness and comedy — between journalism and entertainment — is just completely blurred now. The idea that it should be sharpened up... is that some kind of joke? I couldn't tell you, because the line between joking and sobriety is gone.