Behind the absurd outfits, garish bling, imbecilic interactions and Caribbean-cockney slang of Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Ali G: Who Iz I?” lies an unsettling indictment of how extreme the extremists have become on both ends of the spectrum since the last Ali G film in 2002.
The premise of the mockumentary is straightforward. Twenty-four years after the first film, an aging Ali G and his pregnant partner Julie (Morgana Robinson) jet off to America after discovering a long-lost fax from HBO inviting him back, only to learn it dates from 2004 and has since expired. Out of options, Ali G agrees to host a racist television show for Dirk Visser, a South African former arms dealer and producer, featuring cameos from Kari Lake, Newt Gingrich and George Santos.
As in earlier films, the real action is what Cohen, in his directorial debut, gets unsuspecting people to do. He dupes fanatics on both the radical left and the fringe right into behavior that is hard to watch and hard to stop watching.
Much of the shocking behavior onscreen echoes an infamously disturbing study of obedience from the 1960s known as the Milgram Experiment — a demented test in which everyday people could be easily convinced to deliver what they believed to be deadly shocks to innocent strangers. The test became a notorious example of ordinary people’s willingness to carry out immoral orders when instructed by authority figures.
That unsettling psychology was instructive while sitting through “Ali G: Who Iz I?” in a packed AMC movie theater in Times Square as Cohen exposed the dangers of extreme prejudices across the spectrum.
On the far left, Cohen reprises his role as Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, a professor of “Afro diasporic ethnomusicology,” who sets out to debunk Ali G’s claim to be black and the son of rapper A$AP Rocky. Cain-N’Degeocello presents himself as a moral authority on racial equity. When he introduces his obviously mistreated, unpaid black intern from Gambia to his progressive colleagues, they raise no objections.
He then persuades one of those colleagues to break into Ali G’s hotel room and watch what he believes is Cain-N’Degeocello having sexual intercourse with an incapacitated Ali G. He doesn’t realize it’s a prank. Instead of intervening, the progressive colleague collects a semen sample to submit for a DNA test in the hopes of proving Ali G isn’t black.
On the far right, local Republican leader Michael Aboud and former preacher Joshua Loudermilk agree to a plan concocted by ex-Mossad agent Colonel Erran Morad (also Cohen) to kidnap a pregnant woman, the wife of a fictitious South American drug lord, and transport her baby by drone to Mexico to prevent its birth on American soil. When the drone malfunctions mid-flight, leaving the baby dangling in its grip, one of the men (unaware that the baby is a prop) dutifully drops the baby from a significant height.
In another disturbing scene, disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos willingly participates in a game show where he has to throw mannequins of “illegals,” including babies, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals and Jews, into showers labeled with “Zyklon-B.” The game show segment concludes with a mass Nazi salute performed by the contestants and live in-studio audience. When the game show ends, Santos reflects on his performance and says he should have grabbed more babies because they were smaller and more could fit in the shower.
“Ali G: Who Iz I?” was screened in UK and US theaters for just two days, on Oct. 23 and Oct. 24, amid a firestorm of boycott and cancellation campaigns. Critics online slammed the Ali G character as a “deeply tired and stale” anachronism too out of touch and racially infuriating for 2026. Supporters of Cohen suggested that his past support of Israel and public stances against antisemitism contributed to those boycott efforts.
Meanwhile, from row two of the packed AMC movie theater (the only seats left), the audience erupted with laughter throughout the 89-minute screening. Sammy, a 31-year-old fan seated nearby, described the film to The Post as a “breath of fresh air and a throwback to the old type of comedy we all used to love.” Cohen, Sammy said, could simultaneously make you “laugh hysterically and make you cover your eyes in shock while also sharing a deep message at the same time.”
Cohen has long maintained that the critics misunderstand him. In a recent essay for Time Magazine, Cohen described his characters, from Ali G to Borat and Bruno, “as vehicles to expose prejudice, bias and stupidity, though I realize not everyone sees them that way.”
He classifies his work within the tradition of the bouffon, a form of mockery dating back to 11th-century France that, in his words, “savagely undermined the people in power” by using “biting and at times cruel humor to undermine systemic injustice.”
His satire of institutional authority extends to other characters, too. At a recent talk at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, he recalled how the United Nations refused to let him film a General Assembly scene for “The Dictator” (2012). After reading the movie script, Cohen said, the UN’s protocol committee told him they were “not allowed to shoot inside the United Nations [because] your movie is anti-dictatorship … [and] we [the UN] represent dictatorships and democracies, and we don’t want to really take a side.”
Jonathan Harounoff is a British author and the host of “UNscripted with Jonathan Harounoff.”
Source link
#Sacha #Baron #Cohens #Ali #stuffy #world #comedy