Sacha Baron Cohen is Hit-And-Miss In "Who's America? : Monkey See: NPR

Sacha Baron Cohen has two basic shtags that he uses in his new show Showtime Who is America? which aired Sunday night. One of them works well, and the other does not work. Unfortunately, on the four segments of the first, he uses the effective strategy once and the ineffective three times.

Those who do not know about Cohen's past work in films like Borat and Bruno only need to know that what he's doing, in short, is Is interviewing (and interacting) with people alter ego absurd. It's a joke show, for all intents and purposes.

The most effective incarnation of this routine comes when it persuades powerful people that any character that it has adopted is an ally, and then it pulls them, gently, softly, while they agree, say, and do things more and more outrageous.

That's what he's doing in the last and the longest segment – the one you'll hear about – in which he presents as an Israeli "terrorism expert" named Col Erran Morad who is launching a program called "Kinderguardians". The Kinderguardians program, he says to those whose support he seeks, trains three- and four-year-olds to carry guns to school to protect themselves from shootings in schools.

In his drag that lasts so unlikely a walk that you would only see him in a sketch of Monty Python, Cohen meets gunfighters Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and Larry Pratt , Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America. Both swallow the bait, then suck a few feet more line. Pratt ends up laughing heartily at stories of Cohen 's marital rape, an innocent Muslim gunshot while he was praying, and much more. Van Cleave, meanwhile, participates in an educational video for children featuring rifles disguised as stuffed animals. He even sings a little song.

What makes the bit effective is that the targets are active, and that's their behavior that creates both shock and laughter. The other three segments all involve people who patiently tolerate someone whom they clearly believe to be a nutty while Cohen keeps the spotlight on himself. When that happens, the strength of the piece rests entirely on Cohen's own comedy. And this is not usually enough.

The first segment of the first is a little more than Bernie Sanders, an elected official, doing what the elected officials have done since the dawn of time – listening to people and treating them diplomatically even when they do not know clearly what they talk. The character of Cohen in the segment is a caricatured uncompromising yahoo named Billy Wayne Ruddick, Jr., PhD, who comes from a website called Truthbrary.org. (As liiiiiibrarry, do you understand it?) Ruddick spits out ridiculous information that he claims to have obtained from various unreliable sources while Sanders wonders when he can leave, and that's just about all that There is something to be done. Surely, Cohen knows that he's not the first crazy old senator. The weirdo truck, in fact, has probably made stops in almost every office in D.C. for decades to drop its goods.

In the second segment, Cohen wears his NPR t-shirt (branding!) For essentially the same hippie liberals that people have been doing since liberal hippie clichés were invented. He plays a super-serious, calm and a middle-aged guy who greets you with "Namaste", then introduces himself by saying, "I am a white and cisgender heterosexual man for whom I am # 39; excuse. "(I'm sorry to say that these are actually jokes, people.) He sits down for an elegant dinner at the home of a well-to-do Trump voters to try to understand them But here, Cohen does not use the strategy that he has in the firearms segment – he presents himself as an intruder – as someone whom they do not know.

Thus, they are completely on their guard, and as he presents increasingly ridiculous stories about how his family pee standing up and "bleeds freely" on the American flag, while what they do is sit there and try not to react and nothing they do, really, it's funny. they really buy that all this is real – which I'm not sure they do – that they feel a lot of stereotypes confirmed by a guy who intentionally acts on stereoty There is not much tension in the segment; It's just Cohen who does the same business of singing / kale / purse that has been done a lot, a lot, a lot of times before.

The third segment is the one that is the most unpleasant, and not because it is one that relies on Cohen's well-established affection for extravagances. He plays a man recently released from a long prison term who comes to an appointment in an art gallery to show his work. The woman, identified only as "Christy", goes from curious to slightly amused to have a serious case of "it's going to be a big story that I can tell later" because the character of Cohen explains how he learned in prison to do of the art possess various bodily secretions.

What makes it unpleasant is not this part – this part is har-dee-har standard juvenile harassment, quite tame for Sacha Baron Cohen, in fact. What's unpleasant is that this segment ends with what Cohen seems to think is an abject sexual humiliation – that he has made this woman down almost as much as Van Cleave did when he showed a preschooler how to shoot with a head. a stuffed puppy on it. This humiliation is what he considers a punishment appropriate for, I suppose, the fact that she was pretentious about the art? That Christy does not seem absolutely troubled by this, and that it's probably not by chance the most eccentric person who has ever tried to show him the art, hardly matter.

It is worth noting that what Cohen does does not always work. The Florida representative Matt Gaetz, for example, appears to be Cohen's "terrorism specialist" since the jump, asking if the guy really thinks he's going to tell the camera that he prefers to give weapons children aged three and four. But not everyone is so skeptical. The former Senator Trent Lott and others at least appear – and the role of editing and controlling the story is always important to keep in mind – to accept with Enthusiasts at least one exam to give weapons, in Lott's words. , "highly qualified preschool children." It's Pratt who gets the most conventionally joke, however, persuaded to recite a script that says Blink-182 is a pheromone and that rita ora is part of the liver.

This part is pretty funny.

] (On the other hand, it is a little surprising that someone is fooled by some of these makeup jobs, to be honest, since some of them look like commercials for a mail order disguise business.It is hard not to doubt it closely, they look worse, but to say it with too much emphasis would be the tempting fate of me. reveal that the friendly woman whom I pampered the dog yesterday was, in fact, Sacha Baron Cohen.)

Sketches – those with short segments like this one, even if they are made differently – are often inconsistent. This is the central feature of Saturday Night Live too. In the episode of the first, there were three weak and uninspired pieces and one that was a solid success. How much you want to watch this show will depend on how you feel about this ratio and how much patience you have for how funny Cohen thinks he is.