Who is America? Sacha Baron Cohen's new show aims high but goes low | Television and radio

S somewhere where Sacha Baron Cohen remembers being cuckolded by a dolphin while he was on vacation with his wife, a viewer is likely to be hit by a wave of nostalgia. Sitting through the largely tiring driver of the latest Cohen Who Is America program? inspires nostalgia for a simpler past, when Cohen's profile was still low enough not to have to hide his face with nightmarish prosthetics to go incognito. He plays four characters in the first episode of this new series – an obese charlatan doctor, an NPR-listening uberliberal, a limey ex-scam, and a gruff Israeli commando – all of which evoke more fond memories of sweet Borat, the fellow Traveler of a "very beautiful" world full of "great successes"! As a left-wing and right-winger, swindlers and bloody-eyed activists, the confrontation is rooted in the very premises of this new quartet.

The true nostalgia is for the time of Borat, the relatively unimportant idyll of the late Bush administration. Cohen is now returning to a form that he popularized at a time marked by a different set of notions about how comedy works best, and a different audience to receive it. For Borat, the tough boy Ali G, and the flamboyant talk show host Brüno, George W. Bush was the perfect bad president, an ideal target. He was just incompetent enough to provide endless fodder for mockery, and yet not so dangerously harmful that there would be no fun to make fun of. And people proud to identify as living in Bush America have revealed psychosis under heart values, as jovially racist as hospitable. Cohen was considered a daring subversive for being polite to his unintentional victims, giving them the rope by which they could then hang themselves. (His segment "throwing the Jew into the pit" remains surrealistic, hysterical and deeply troubling.)

Much has happened since then, and Cohen knows it. He is resolutely political in his aspirations for this program, trying to define an American identity by questioning his wild and woolly citizens. The implication here, as with any comedy that dares to distort politics in 2018, is that it's an urgent job for an urgent moment. The first threats of litigation from well-known reproachers like Joe Arpaio and Roy Moore promised cathartic coexistence; after watching these slimy characters take all the pages of the periphery booklet on information programs trying their best to stay decent, the public would have the chance to see them run up against someone who does not want to. had no professional scruples hinder his hatred.

And when he does it, by God, it works. Cohen saves for the last time the clean and clear segment of the first episode, in which, with a minimum of difficulty, he convinces a handful of congressional members to support a bill to arm four-year-olds with guns. fire. It will be considered one of the most effective works of Trump's satire, as overwhelming, terrifying, and disarming as the Commander's last tweet. The sight of a geriatric man brandishing a semi-automatic rifle equipped with pretty rabbit ears will not leave the memory of those who look at it anytime soon.

To the detriment of Cohen, this only throws the flaws of the other segments the relief. In the first three parts, he bluffes Bernie Sanders as a yokel with a fundamental misunderstanding of what is the "one percent," discussing the free bleeding of his daughter on an American flag during a dinner with dedicated conservatives from small town. secretion works to a Laguna Beach dealer. While the last of the three has the peculiarity of being surprisingly weird (the woman who willingly hangs a strand of her pubic hair is, hands in the air, the most playful person that Cohen has ever interviewed) , they are all paralyzed by a feeling of inconsistency

With Cohen coming out of his way to position Who is America? in a troubled and chaotic nation besieged by torn families, militarized forces repressing protests and lost lives, he sets the bar extremely high for himself. When he manages to erase it, the results are dazzling (the last segment has already become viral gold on Twitter), but nothing less looks like. to be a waste of time. The woods burn, and he gives us jokes of shit? The line on Cohen was at first that it could be too dangerous for the United States, a country that likes nothing but fighting an inflammatory comedy for this reaction accurate. However, strange and fascistic twists reversed the situation. After a stint in the ruthless nature of role play, Cohen goes back on the American mainstream to discover that he has become too dangerous for him.