Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G.

Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves.

But how often, even at his best, does Baron Cohen ever make you laugh? The grin you wear throughout his skits is an embarrassed rictus, not a smile of pleasure. That’s because what his various characters are doing to his victims is more often sadistic than it is witty; and the satirical point is rarely clever or valuable enough to justify the cruelty involved in reaching it.

I remember first feeling this when in 2006 I went to see his breakout movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I like Borat as a character: his appalling, ill-cut suit; ridiculous moustache; the insinuating silliness and innocent bonhomie which allows him to say the most dreadful things (such as his jaunty traditional folk song ‘Throw the Jew down the well’). What troubles me is the misuse to which Baron Cohen puts his considerable acting skills, his quick brain and his undoubted ballsiness.

That scene, for example, where Borat is entertained by a dining society in the Old South and rewards his hosts’ hospitality by bringing along an uninvited black prostitute. This wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan.