Showtime debuted Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series on Sunday, finally providing a partial to the question its title poses. “Who Is America?” The answer, on its face, will not surprise you: we are a nation of easy marks. Not merely easy, but willing.
Baron Cohen bases his career on that knowledge, but watching it in action was much more entertaining two decades ago in the heyday of “Da Ali G Show.” His HBO prank show became a cultural phenomenon before the omnipresence of social media and its accelerated mainstreaming of conspiracy theory as news, before a sitting president began making the denigration of objective journalism into a sport and before the proliferation of junk science as fact.
Back then cameras were not so prevalent as to persuade everyone that they were only one turned corner away from stardom. But today, being on camera is so natural and desirable to most of us that we are willing to say or do just about anything for a few of the 15 minutes we believe to be our birthright.
“Ali G” and the characters the show introduced, including Borat Sagdiyev and Brüno Gehard, also were born years before Project Veritas and InfoWars and other right-wing vehicles of disinformation made hidden camera hoaxing into something sinister.
All of which is to say, “Who Is America?” is not, as Showtime would like you to believe, “the most dangerous show in history.” At best, it is an occasionally funny one.
But to anyone who mourns the collective deterioration of our population’s capacity to engage in critical thought, but has no idea of how urgent of a crisis that happens to be, Baron Cohen’s new endeavor is less of a comedy than a fright show. “Who Is America?” A nation of pliable dullards ripe for the hacking.
“Who Is America?” was produced in secret, and its pre-show marketing largely consisted of publicized declarations of outrage by such right-wing figures as Joe Walsh, Sarah Palin and Roy Moore. Each attempted to transform their extreme embarrassment at having been duped by a British clown hiding behind layers of latex and spirit gum into some approximation of righteous anger at said comedian’s dishonesty.
Showtime, meanwhile, maintained the aura of mystery surrounding the series almost to the brink of its debut, revealing the title only a little more than a week prior. The network released the briefest of clips featuring one famous interview subject, Dick Cheney.
This in itself was a bit of flimflam Showtime’s part: “Hope you’ll tune in next week for an interview with me,” Cheney says in the video, only to be a no-show in the premiere.
You can’t blame “Who Is America?” for saving its biggest fish for later, because the famous politicians in the opener prove the problem of our collective gullibility just fine by themselves. In fact, although liberals may have gotten a hearty guffaw out of hearing Palin’s wailing about having been faked out by Baron Cohen, the very same character — Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr. PhD of Truthbrary.org — sat down for a conversation with none other than the honorable junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
Prior to the premiere Billy Wayne tweeted a response to Palin’s accusation that he made fun disabled veterans. “I did NOT say I was a War Vet,” Ruddick’s “official” response reads, going on to explain that the service was in was “not military, but United Parcel”.
Nor does he make such assertions to Sanders, with whom he debates the merits of a universal healthcare plan. And when I say debate, what I mean is that Sanders very calmly shares statistics with Billy Wayne long after the interviewer’s line of questioning stops making sense. And when Sanders asks Billy Wayne to confirm that he is disabled, given that he is conducting the interview while seated on a motorized scooter, Baron Cohen’s character replies that no, he is not. “This here scooter is to preserve my body’s finite energy,” Billy Wayne says.
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One may be tempted to qualify Sanders’ appearance by pointing out that he acquitted himself well in the face of a person best be described as a few coconuts short of a beach vacation in Binomo.
But this fails to answer the question of why Sanders signed a release, allowing this interview to be broadcast. Did anyone on Sanders’ team vet Truthbrary.org the moment Billy Wayne mentioned it? Even if they thought he was genuine, what is to be gained from being seen in a televised debate with a guy whose site includes a page titled “Obamanoids -- For Real!”?
(To be fair, reportedly Baron Cohen almost fooled veteran news anchor Ted Koppel as part of his project. Koppel told The Hollywood Reporter that he was contacted to appear in a Showtime project titled “Age of Reason,” said to feature "conversations with distinguished experts in science and public policy, highlighting the brightest and most reputable minds on today's most important topics." Koppel, perhaps receiving brainwaves from his colleague Sam Donaldson, wised up before Baron Cohen could pull him too deeply into his game.)
A second character introduced in the premiere, an NPR shirt-wearing hyper-liberal named Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, visits the opulent South Carolina home of wealthy Trump supporters he says are “afflicted with white privilege.” But it soon becomes clear that his marks’ problem isn’t close-mindedness but over-correcting in the acceptance department. When Baron Cohen’s interviewer waxes on about encouraging his daughter Malala to “free bleed” on the American flag as a lesson, they simply nod and listen; when he chats about his wife’s ongoing affair with a dolphin, they don’t have any questions like, say, whether what they’re hearing is real.
This brings us to another answer to “Who Is America?”: we’re so aware of cameras, and desperate to have its focus upon us, that we will do and say anything without thinking of its possible permanence.
Demonstrating this is Baron Cohen’s third character Rick Sherman, an ex-con turned TV host who visits a Laguna Beach, California gallery to show his work, which is a series of capable but otherwise unextraordinary portraits rendered in feces and ejaculate.
Now, it’s entirely possible that the woman who runs the gallery might have been thinking she could have the next Andres Serrano on her hands. On the other hand, please.
This is a subject entirely aware of being on view, so obsessed with appearing erudite that while Rick is off camera, having excused himself to the facilities to commit another brown-and-white vision to paper, she addresses the camera like the host she was born to be.
“Who knew the world was capable of such oxymoronic paradoxical juxtapositions?” she muses. And this is before the homemade pubic hair paintbrush comes out.
Baron Cohen has pushed the limits of tolerant everyday people many times in the past, mostly in a way that makes them look reasonable or, at the very least, more intelligent than the put-ons he inflicts upon them. And this is perhaps one of the most depressing aspects about “Who Is America?”, its demonstration of how endemic our lack of analysis truly is. I’m not say that gallery owner is a stupid woman, understand.
But her interview is an example of prizing exposure over lasting consequence. By that I’m not merely referring to the fact that she placated a man who not only handed her pieces of cardboard purportedly smeared with his own dried excrement, or waited to receive a fresh sample of his work, but that she decided she needed to share her expert observation as to why she needed to do so by uttering a sentence full of five dollar words that add up to absolute nonsense.
(Either that or she’s a friend of Baron Cohen’s and in on the gag. I hope it’s option two, as opposed to her actually legitimizing the artistic relevance of number two.)
A number of reviews of “Who Is America?” have pointed out that Baron Cohen’s sneaky deceit is no longer funny because the formerly insane viewpoints Baron Cohen’s tactics expose have been normalized.
This has always been the danger, but it’s one every sort of parody or satire contends with in the current climate. It’s difficult to lampoon leaders seeking to legislate ludicrous patches to crises like gun violence instead of adopting common sense solutions like stricter regulation.
Which brings us to the portion of “Who Is America?” guaranteed to dominate Monday’s gallery of crazy clips, fronted by Baron Cohen’s Col. Erran Morad, a self-styled Israeli anti-terrorism expert who calls himself “the terrorist terminator.”
The fake Mossad officer is there to promote his “Kinderguardians” program, a proposal that aims to train and arm toddlers in the classroom because, Moran says, arming teachers is crazy.
And this is the portion that has Walsh’s boxers in a bunch, because he joins House representatives Dana Rohrabacher and Joe Wilson in lending on-camera endorsements. Walsh’s comments are interwoven with a series of fake testimonials from the likes of Larry Pratt, executive director emeritus of the lobbying group Gun Owners of America and rape joke enthusiast.
Nobody forced Walsh to say, with gusto, “The way to stop a bad guy with is a good child with a gun. Happy shooting, kids!” If he didn’t want to say it, he wouldn’t have.
What Walsh might be upset about is being upstaged by Pratt, who earns some of the episode’s biggest laughs by reading the “science” behind the effectiveness of the fake program, revealing he doesn’t know the difference between human anatomy and hitmakers who grace Billboard’s pop charts.
Yes, “Who Is America?” gets mileage out of highlighting the callousness, sexism and extraordinary gullibility of conservatives, as Baron Cohen always has. But the things they say to him in disguise aren’t all that different than what they’d say on CNN, Fox, MSNBC or talk radio. Whatever power his comedy used to reveal is diminished by the fact that the charlatans no longer operate in secret.
Next week’s episode introduces one or two new characters, although I don’t imagine they do anything more “dangerous” than the four we met on Sunday. For a number of viewers who love Baron Cohen’s schtick, that won’t matter.
To them “Who Is America?” is precisely on brand, showing Americans famous and everyday reacting to bizarre situations with varying degrees of what we consider to be normalcy in a time where the baseline version of normal is constantly morphing and shifting.
To other viewers, however, “Who Is America?” is a confirmation that Baron Cohen has run some tests and can confirm there is limited and ever decreasing brain activity in this worsening patient we know as America. It is something to behold, that’s for sure. But I’m not sure it’s the stuff of groundbreaking comedy. It’s not even really news.
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