The bravery, quick wit, accent skills and ability to keep a straight face that Sacha Baron Cohen has displayed in his new TV show Who is America? is quite staggering, and he pulls off pranks few comedians could manage. As a weekly half-hour piece of light, absurdist comedy it does the job nicely, but as the exploration of a divided America that it claims to be, it has fallen well short.
Vox recently argued that the show reinforces the Right’s “fake news” narrative and will only serve to make Republicans even more suspicious of an entertainment industry that it already assumes is out to get them. This may well be true, but it could have been avoided if only Who is America? had been even-handed in how it sends up its politicians.
The format for a classic Who is America? prank is simple and as follows: find a political target, present them with a character who broadly shares their opinions but takes them to their extremes, then give the target enough rope to hang themselves with as they either endorse the character’s egregious views or don’t distance themselves from them as much as they should.
The show has done this time and time again with Republican figures and hardened Trump voters, but proves completely ineffective whenever a Democrat is persuaded in front of the camera. Invariably, instead of being paired with self-loathing cis gender professor Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, they are interviewed by Baron Cohen’s alt-right conspiracy theorist Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD. This was the case with episode 6, which saw Ruddick Jr. put forward his crazy takes on Hilary Clinton and “climax change” to former DNC chair Howard Dean and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, both of whom simply dismissed the crackpot theories and moved on. No laughs, no deep-seated bigotry or hypocrisy exposed. These were toothless and laughless segments that you wish you could have skipped.
Sure, satirising the Right might be a more noble pursuit in this dangerous moment in America’s history, but the Left is just so ripe for the prodding and picking. Think just how easily the Dr. Nira character could get a prominent Democrat to endorse some nonsense simply because they fear opposing a social justice movement they haven’t heard about which could make them a pariah amongst fellow Twitter liberals.
Had Who is America? poked fun on both sides of the aisle, it could have made an important point about intellectual dishonesty, performative politics and destructive polarisation and tribalism in America in 2018. Instead, we’ve simply been given yet another Trump ridicule machine, albeit a better one than the shit show that is the opening monologues of the pandering late-night hosts in the past couple of years.
Worryingly, if unsurprisingly given the censorial limitations currently being imposed on comedy – when the breadth of taboo is widening a mile a day and offence is not part of life but deemed unacceptable – Who is America?‘s inability to lampoon the modern Left is probably not an oversight, but instead stems from a fear of alienating its own Left-leaning audience.
