Trump Has "Elements of Brilliance," Says Sacha Baron Cohen

Satire that only tells you the powerful are stupid is comfort food, and the man who built Ali G seems to know it.

Sacha Baron Cohen has brought the character back in Ali G: Who Iz I?, which opened in theaters on October 23 and is due on Amazon Prime on October 30 ^[1]. In a Variety interview published the same day, he said people were too quick to dismiss Donald Trump as a "nincompoop" and that Trump has "elements of brilliance" ^[1].

That is no stray provocation. It is the argument of the whole project. Ali G was always a joke about how easily we laugh at fools, and Trump is what happens when the fool is not harmless.

The man who kept them waiting

Cohen's evidence is a meeting from more than two decades ago. Trump kept Cohen and the director James Bobin waiting about 40 minutes before the Ali G interview, which aired in 2003, Cohen told the Variety event ^[1]. When Trump realized that Ali G, and not Bobin, would be asking the questions, he appeared furious, Cohen said ^[1].

Those are Cohen's recollections, and they should be read as that. But the lesson he draws from them is worth taking seriously: apparent foolishness is not the same as an absence of political skill.

He did not say whether he thinks Trump's transformation of the country has been good or bad. He would not call it positive or negative ^[1]. Nor has he offered much beyond his own reading of Trump's success to back the word "brilliance." I think the word is doing less work than the warning inside it. Cohen is telling his audience that the person on the other side of the joke may be sharper than the joke assumed.

What Ali G was for

The character's mechanism is easy to forget under the catchphrases. Cohen has said that Ali G's absurd questions lead powerful people to underestimate him, so they answer earnestly and expose their own biases ^[2][5]. In his TIME essay, published October 20, he calls Ali G a white imbecile and a delusional cultural appropriator, and writes that the joke is on Ali G and on the predominantly white male establishment that takes him seriously ^[2].

It was a trap with two jaws. One closed on the fool. The other closed on the person who sat down across from him and decided he was nothing to worry about.

So I will grant Cohen the strongest version of his case. The character worked for years because the guests were the ones who looked foolish, not the man in the tracksuit.

And his supporters have a serious defense. The film writer Colton Dunn told the BBC he signed on because, in his view, Ali G is not a racist character but a tool to expose racists ^[4]. When the target is a guest who patronizes a stranger, that is a fair description of what the interviews did.

I laughed at those interviews, and I suspect you did too. The question now is what we were laughing at.

Who gets made ridiculous

The trouble is that intention is not effect, and the objection to Ali G has never been simply that he offends. The comedian Dane Baptiste told the BBC that people took the character's catchphrases, including "Is it because I is black?", and used them to shrink real grievances about systemic and institutional racism into a caricature ^[4].

That is a claim about what the audience did with the joke, not about what Cohen meant by it. A satirist can aim the blade at the establishment and still hand the audience a handle for something else. If the line that survives the scene is the catchphrase and not the guest squirming in his chair, then the joke has changed targets without the author's consent.

Cohen's answer, in effect, is the structure of the new film. Its premise has Ali G learn that his long-term girlfriend Julie is pregnant and travel to America ^[3][4]. There he is paired with an ultraprogressive rival, and Cohen told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted to show extremism on both sides of the political spectrum ^[3].

Since Cohen's own essay calls Ali G a delusional cultural appropriator ^[2], a foil like that invites the old dispute onto the screen.

That is a clever move, and a risky one. If it works as billed, it lets the film argue with its critics inside the story. It does not settle whether the argument is won. A film can put the objection in a character's mouth and still treat it as the punchline.

Both sides, and the fool who isn't

Here is where the Trump remark matters most. Cohen has said the film aims to make people laugh while examining conspiracies, lies and extremism at both ends of the political spectrum ^[2][5]. He told CBS that he wanted audiences to laugh hard, with satire "smuggled in there" ^[5].

Those two ambitions pull against each other. A both-sides structure is the safest shape in comedy. It offends everyone a little and nobody enough to matter. A fool at each end of the spectrum lets the audience feel superior to both, and that is exactly the comfort I mean.

Cohen's own Trump story points the other way. If the lesson of 2003 is that the man people called an idiot was not one, then a film that serves up two idiots, left and right, has learned the wrong lesson. The sharper joke is on the viewer who has always assumed the fool is the one without power.

There is a practical reason the old method cannot simply be repeated. Cohen told CBS he retired Ali G in 2007 because the persona had become too well known to trick people ^[5].

Nobody sits down across from Ali G unaware anymore. The surprise that exposed the guests is gone, and what remains is the character as a known quantity, which is a different thing from a trap. A known quantity has to earn its laughs by what it says about the room, not by catching anyone off guard.

Cohen is clearly aware of the cost of the trade. He told The Hollywood Reporter that undercover comedy is dangerous and physically demanding. He described an eight-hour continuous final scene across 12 locations and said several people, including a bodyguard, went to hospital for dehydration ^[3]. That is a lot of effort to put into a joke, and it suggests he thinks it is worth making.

What to watch

I have not yet seen how the film's jokes land, and neither has anyone else who is not in a seat. Reviews and audience reaction after the theatrical opening will show whether the satire has teeth. The Prime release on October 30 will put the film in front of far more people than a cinema run can.

Watch two things. First, who is left squirming at the end of each scene: the guest, the progressive rival, or only the man in the middle. Second, whether the catchphrases escape into the world again as shorthand for dismissing real grievances, which is the very thing Baptiste described.

Cohen has told us the fool is not always a fool. The film's job is to treat the audience as though it might be the one who forgot.