Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? Is a Nightmare Show for These Nightmare Times
I was not allowed to tell you anything about Who Is America?—including how I felt about it—until after the first episode had finished airing. Which turned out to be fine, because I needed a few days to decide how I felt about it. It’s rare that a "comedy" show has filled me with so much despair. I didn’t laugh at Who Is America? I just sat in silence and felt the queasy knot in my stomach get bigger and bigger.
That’s not necessarily an indictment of Sacha Baron Cohen or his satirical mission (though I’m not exactly convinced this is a smart or responsible show to be making in this heightened political climate). But it is not a good look for his subjects: Various powerful cultural and political figures who were duped, under varying pretenses, into saying and doing various awful things on camera. And because we live in the country that enabled these cultural and political figures to become so powerful in the first place, I guess that makes it an indictment of all of us, too.
In broad strokes, the structure of Who Is America? is similar to Cohen’s Da Ali G Show, which saw him assuming three different (and extreme) personas to mess with his unwitting interview subjects. The first episode of Who Is America? introduces four Cohen characters, all of them new: an Alex Jones–esque right-winger named Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., a Portlandia-esque left-winger named Nira Cain, an ex-Mossad gun nut named Erran Morad, and an ex–con artist named Rich Sharron, who paints with his own shit and blood and semen.
Cohen’s broad cross-section of characters seems, at first glance, to indicate that he intends to lampoon both sides of the political spectrum. To conservatives, Cohen would play a cartoonish liberal; to liberals, Cohen would play a cartoonish conservative. In that version of the series, the object of satire would be our collective willingness to believe every stereotype Cohen presents about the other side, no matter how bizarre or egregious.
And maybe that was the original intention. But in reality, the two sides of the political spectrum are not the same. Faced with Cohen’s right conspiratorial nut-job, Bernie Sanders is basically just confused and kind of sleepy. But when Cohen’s gun fanatic proposes an insane program to arm children as young as three years old, a series of current and former congressmen—including Dana Rohrabacher, Joe Wilson, Joe Walsh, and Trent Lott—film enthusiastic video endorsements for this "Kinderguardian" program.
It might be funny if these weren’t the people who have such an outsized influence over so many lives. These are the moments of Who is America? that make you feel sick: the scenes when conservative politicians—either full-blown nutjobs or cynical, mercenary assholes, and either way in lockstop with our know-nothing white supremacist president—get cajoled and emboldened by Cohen’s ridiculous characters, drop the standard political rhetoric, and state what they actually believe. Or laugh about, say, spousal rape—apparently under the assumption that this "friendly" journalist won’t use the footage in the final cut. (It’s the uneasiness of these segments that makes you wish Cohen had cut the softer targets altogether—with subjects like these, did the soft and shallow pretensions of the art world really need more lampooning?)
And now that the cat is out of the bag, the really interesting thing about Who is America? is watching its targets as they finally realize they’ve been tricked. At the time I’m writing this, Sarah Palin, Roy Moore, and Joe Arpaio have all issued preemptive statements about getting duped by Cohen—a clear effort to get ahead of footage that will almost certainly paint them in a very damning light. You can presumably expect many, many more bet-hedging statements like these before Who is America? finishes its seven-episode run.
And that’s the easy defense here, right? It’s the same wedge that’s always been used against Cohen’s methods—that he pulls everything out of context, and edits his segments to make his satirical targets look as awful as possible. Cohen’s bad-faith tactics will always leave room for doubt. But in the end, there’s only so much he can do with misleading invitations and leading questions and tricky editing—particularly when so many of his subjects are media-trained public figures, who should really know better than this. Cohen can’t present footage that doesn’t exist; when the camera is on, these people can only hang themselves. The reverse is also true. You can see the limits of Cohen’s approach in the first episode—when the conservative couple is understandably weirded out, but unfailingly polite to Cohen’s Dr. Nira Cain—and in the second episode, in a segment I can’t describe in detail, when a public figure politely but firmly pushes back against Cohen’s ridiculous antics.
Cohen’s tactics have always required a great deal of secrecy, but this is something different. Who is America? doesn’t feel like a completed project—it feels like the first phase of a big, weird experiment about how this country will react to a show like Who is America? If Roy Moore actually sues Sacha Baron Cohen, as he has already threatened to do, does it just add another layer to Cohen’s satirical project? You can already hear the defenses of Cohen’s embarrassed targets—the rallying cries of "fake news" about Cohen’s fake news show, on which real people with real power do, undeniably, say and do some real and terrible things. It’s not a flattering portrait of America in 2018, but it’s going to be hard to look away from it.
