Sacha Baron Cohen’s return to incognito trickery is, in current conditions, a little like pouring rubbing alcohol into the nation’s open wounds.
Employing the same ingenious commitment and subterfuge that made him famous in the guises of Ali G., Borat Sagdiyev and Bruno Gehard, Cohen now plays several characters in Showtime’s Who Is America? which starts out seeming like another one of those naively altruistic shows that listens to ordinary people’s widely varied political beliefs in hopes that we can better understand our differences.
Showtime kept the series under tight security, not even revealing its title until a week ago. Some of its unwitting participants (including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Alabama judge and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore) began decrying Cohen’s technique of misleading subjects into interviews with a host (Cohen in disguise) who tries to goad them into making or agreeing with outrageous statements.
The first episode, which premiered at midnight Sunday, featured Cohen as Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., a right-wing, electric-scooter-bound talk show host who blames Obamacare for forcing him to see a doctor, who promptly diagnosed him with “Diabetes I and II, obese legs and chalky deposits.” Ruddick interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., an easy-enough get, who tries to follow Ruddick’s inane math about the country’s richest 1 percent.
Another segment featured Cohen as Nira Cain-N’degeocello, a ponytailed liberal who visits the South Carolina home of Trump supporter Jane Page Thompson and her husband Mark (they are “afflicted with white privilege,” Cain-N’degeocello notes). During dinner, Cain-N’degeocello tells the couple how he and his wife force their male child (named Harvey Milk) to urinate sitting down and their female child (named Malala) to “free bleed” during her periods, all of which the couple appears to believe without question.
Back in truer form, Cohen concluded the show disguised as Col. Erran Morad, an Israeli commando who comes to Washington to promote “Kinderguardians,” a new program to teach and arm schoolchildren as young as 3 to use firearms to protect themselves. (Children who are younger are not ideal, Morad says, because of “the terrible twos.”)
That he finds willing advocates in the gun lobby (Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League; and Larry Pratt, the executive director emeritus of the Gun Owners of America) to join his effort is not all that surprising. It’s not even surprising that he finds a rather pathetic bunch of current and former lawmakers — former Senate majority leader Trent Lott; Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.; Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; and former Illinois congressman/conservative radio host Joe Walsh — to tape enthusiastic endorsements for Kinderguardians.
Instead, the surprising thing is that this all seems normal. Whatever shame or embarrassment might once have accompanied an unflattering appearance in one of Cohen’s elaborate stunts hardly matters anymore. We’re fresh out of shame in this country right now. Whatever blows Cohen might land — well, that doesn’t seem to have much effect anymore.
The joke hasn’t changed, but in the years since Cohen last played this sort of game, the American political climate has grown nastier and more partisan, experiencing a corrosion of trust, in constant sway of a president who falsifies and distorts even the most basic facts. What part could a Cohen character hope to play when White House spokespersons and Cabinet secretaries are getting hounded out of restaurants? Our world has become as absurd as anything Cohen could conceive.
If nothing else, Who Is America? might cause its audience to examine its own double standards. 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.