Today, Explained - Does America need Sacha Baron Cohen?

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

Bernie Sanders, Sarah Palin, and Dick Cheney walk into an interview. Sacha Baron Cohen is waiting for them. Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Kainaz. Hi, Sean. Visuals editor here at Vox. You just got back from like a trip. I did. And you got engaged. That's right. And I thought it'd be nice if we got you a little gift.

Oh, thank you. Do you see the box in that studio? I do. Can you guess what's in there? Yes, I can. What do you think's in there? I think it's a toothbrush. Well, don't open it yet.

We should have some suspense, you know? What do you mean? The label says Quip. Does it say getquip? What do you mean? The label says Quip. Does it say getquip.com slash explained? No, it says Quip. All right. Remember Sacha Baron Cohen? This is my wife.

That's a niche, niche. Booyah, kasha. He's back with a new show, Who is America? In America, there is big problem of shootings in schools. The NRA want to arm the teachers. This is crazy. They should be arming the children. Yalla!

It seems like it was done in pretty extreme secrecy, but there's going to be seven episodes unfolding over the next several weeks. Todd Vanderwerf writes about TV for Vox. He also hosts a podcast called I Think You're Interesting. It's really just kind of a revisit of the format he set up on Ali G's show, where he plays these characters who go out and interview people. Most of the people he's interviewing are everyday Americans, but the show's getting a ton of attention right out of the gate

because some of the people he's interviewing are famous, like Dick Cheney, Bernie Sanders, Sarah Palin, famous. And a lot of them are very mad at Sacha Baron Cohen right now. Various political figures, mostly on the right, were talking about how they had been duped into recording an interview for some sort of program. Most notably, you had Sarah Palin and Roy Moore saying, you know, I was tricked, I was duped. And that really sort of brought the program to a new level of publicity. And in a way, that's a fascinating and shrewd publicity strategy because everybody had heard about this show.

What were people like Sarah Palin and Roy Moore saying specifically? Were they getting into how they were duped or just saying, you know, that's Sacha Baron Cohen. I'm going to sue him if I get the chance. Roy Moore definitely said he was going to sue for defamation. Sarah Palin, however, talked a little bit about how she was duped, which was she was told it was a program about veterans, she says. She actually flew herself out to be on this program, and then she discovered it was not the case. You know, this quote-unquote comedian is obviously very good at lying, at duping people, because look at the long list now, since I've come out and described my experience. All these other guys, all these men coming out now saying, oh yeah, me too. people because look at the long list now since I've come out and described my experience all

these all these other guys all these men coming out now saying oh yeah me too. It certainly seems like they kind of used the tools of the media and how these things typically work to to sort of trick some people into appearing. And that's to say that he wasn't offering money for these interviews he was just offering publicity on an issue that might look good for the subject of his interview? It doesn't seem that he was paying anybody off. Again, this is all sort of shrouded in secrecy. But yeah, it really was like you watch in the first episode,

he talks to Bernie Sanders, and he's talking about income inequality, and the Sacha Baron Cohen character is, you know, being very stupid about it, as you'd expect, and Bernie Sanders sort of sits there in befuddlement. Rather than complain about the 1% or the 0.1%, why not make the rest of America and put them into the 1%? Well, if you put everybody into the 1%, they wouldn't be the 1%. Well, no, it still would be. No, it wouldn't be. If I can... The rest of the population, by definition, they're not in the 1% if, no, it still would be. No, it wouldn't be. The rest of the population,

by definition, they're not in the 1% of the rest of the population. All of the population is 100%. And like, you can imagine that the email to Bernie Sanders was like, we want to have this guy interview you about income inequality. And that's a thing that Bernie Sanders likes to talk about. So he was only too willing to go on television to do so. Bernie opens the first episode, but the rest of it is basically skewering people on the right. You've seen another episode. Who's he targeting here? I honestly don't know. It does seem like the humor is primarily aimed at sort of making fun of conservatives, but not specifically Trump supporters.

Like Trump is not really brought up. And if you look at the various Republican figures we know are in the show, you know, it's people like Roy Moore, like Sarah Palin. Dick Cheney is in the trailers that they released. I hope you'll tune in next week for an interview with me. There's a long gap between when these people were most relevant and where they are right now. And that's not to say that you can't like do humor about them, but like if you're talking about the modern state of the Republican party, and if you want to do comedy about that, like this is kind of stuck 10 years ago, you know, the first episode aired Sunday night. Did it get people talking? Did it have the intended effect? Yeah, the final segment,

which features a number of Republican lawmakers and spokespeople and things like that, reading from what seems like a teleprompter cue cards or something, their support for a program that will arm toddlers and other young children with guns. The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good kid with a gun. A good kid with a gun. A good child with a gun. Happy shooting, kids. I saw everyone talking about that segment online on Sunday. Does this feel new?

Like something Sacha Baron Cohen hasn't done before? This is very much within his MO. He certainly has always tried to get people to follow the logical ends of their political logic to sort of extreme outlying positions and then like seem as if they're defending those positions. So a lot of people I know who are tuned into the pop culture sphere were like, oh, okay, he's doing, you know, Ali G show for 2018. And he's invented new characters because his old ones are now so recognizable.

He can't very well do Borat anymore, you know, because everybody knows who Borat is. So he had to come up with new characters. A friend of mine like, like texted me and was like, is Sacha Baron Cohen going to bring down the Trump administration? I was like, no, like if he had done that, we would know, you know? It was this weird confluence of like, it's the same thing he's always done. And then this wild overhype that was sort of driven by Sarah Palin and Roy Moore being very upset about what had happened to them. That, you know, like just got turned into this over the top sense that this was going to be more than it could ever possibly be. Sacha Baron Cohen may not be taking down any politicians anytime soon, but is who is America hurting America? Do we still need to laugh at trolls?

I'm Sean Ramos for him. that's next on today explained i've never been able to like um not just rip through a gift as a kid and you still you're young at heart yeah my birthday is july 4th it's perfect yeah tell the. And you're still young at heart. Yeah, my birthday is July 4th. It's perfect. Yeah. Tell the people what you're experiencing right now. Okay, so I just ripped open a box and in it is a silver bag with a Ziploc on top. It feels very spacey. Very sort of...

It looks very spacey. Very modern. It's beautiful. I love the color. Oh, yeah. It's like a toothbrush in a vial. It's of the future. Yeah.

The design is really gorgeous. It's really easy to sort of open up. You're like unscrewing it. I'm unscrewing it. If you want to see some of the ones I didn't get you, there's more at getquip.com slash explained. Hey, I'm a sucker for design, so this is great. Happy birthday, happy marriage, happy wedding, happy engagement, happy quip toothbrush. You're so kind. Thank you. I really

appreciate it. Todd, Sacha Baron Cohen built this wildly successful brand of comedy partly on making powerful people look stupid, on tricking them. Does that still make sense in 2018 when Donald Trump is president? I don't want to say there's no longer room for comedy like that. But comedy like that has to be cognizant of the fact that it's in a world where trolling as comedy not only is everywhere on the internet, but also arguably helped get a president elected in 2016. Who is America? In some ways, it's just more interested in upping the ante and being bigger and brassier than anything that Sacha Baron Cohen has done before. Now, I look at a program

like the Comedy Central show, Nathan For You. That show is very specifically constructed in a way that makes Nathan Fielder as much a butt of the joke as anybody he interviews. And I feel like Who Is America does that sometimes, but it varies from segment to segment. And also it like doesn't really have a point beyond people are stupid and will do things to be on television. And like, yeah, great. But that joke has been made so many times before that I don't know what I'm getting out of it, seeing it again. Was there a time where this actually worked? Where trolling someone the way Sacha Baron Cohen is doing now and has in the past accomplished something other than an easy laugh?

Yeah. I mean, I feel like Borat is a really smart dissection of American civility culture, which is the thing we're talking about a lot in this day and age, as a matter of fact. That movie is about how many Americans, and especially white Americans, are interested in being polite to the detriment sometimes of doing what's right. And Borat, of course, places that in a comedic context, but I think it's an interesting way to look at what happens when you have this guy standing in front of you who says that in his country they sing a song called Throw the Jew Down the Well, and a lot of people sing along. Throw the Jew down the well. Throw the Jew down the well.

So my country can be free. So my country can be free. You must grab him by his arms. You must grab him by his arms. Let me have it big, partner. Thank you. Like that is a dissection of a fundamental American thing that we like to be polite above all else. And it sort of points out comedically where that can fail. I have problems with that movie. I don't always like the way that Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy like takes people who have so much less power than him and then like makes fun of them endlessly. But I think Borat had a message that so far,

who is America just doesn't. Yeah. It's like it doesn't have a thesis statement. I think so. I think that they're trying to answer the question posed in the title, but so far they've mostly just come up with we're angry and we're a little bit stupid. That's fine, I guess. And that would probably be like revolutionary in 2003. But there are so many people on the left to admit to something unsavory. James O'Keefe is kind of the famous example of that. We posed as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. And we said we wanted to make a $5 million donation to National Public Radio. We used hidden cameras and met with their senior

vice president for fundraising, Ron Schiller. They were caught on tape ingratiating themselves our donation to National Public Radio. We used hidden cameras and met with their senior vice president for fundraising, Ron Schiller. They were caught on tape ingratiating themselves to our fictitious Muslims, calling the Tea Party racist. We really just like live in this world that Sasha Baron Cohen created in some regards. And I don't know how you cope with that when you're the guy who sort of started this movement. And of course, he was building off plenty of other people in the past and the most famous one being like Candid Camera. But he really upped the ante for wetting that with a performance, with playing a character. And now it's everywhere. And I feel like Who Is America just doesn't have what it takes to exceed so far beyond them that you watch it without thinking,

I guess this is okay. Is there something here about the limits of this kind of comedy? I remember back when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the rally to restore sanity here in D.C., I went down there with like 200,000 other people. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

And they just played Peace Train. And then it transitioned into Crazy Train. Like nothing actually happened. Is there just a limit to what satire can do politically? I think that what we're seeing here is this divide I talked about before, who is America debuted, which is those of us who cover culture, who cover entertainment professionally know there are extreme limits to how comedy can reach somebody who doesn't agree with your point of view. And I think that people who cover politics or cover the news more heavily sort of see someone like a Jon Stewart, someone like a Sacha Baron Cohen and say, you know, he's saying exactly what I'm thinking, but in a more entertaining, seemingly less confrontational way. But comedy relies on a certain set of shared cultural values. Like one of the reasons that fart jokes are always funny is because everybody farts and everybody's embarrassed about farts. And like everybody has been in a situation where they

farted and didn't want to. That's why everybody will laugh at a fart joke. But if you start telling political jokes, then you're operating on a shared cultural assumption that increasingly we know not everybody shares. You know, 50 years ago, you could make a joke about how, boy, the president is kind of a dummy. And like everybody would laugh because like it was so mild. But now increasingly, as we have these hyper-partisan polarized media landscapes, our comedy has gotten hyper-polarized as well. And that means that like there's just this very limited ability for it to reach anybody beyond who it's already targeting. And there is a limited ability for comedy to change minds. How did this happen? I mean, I think I get how our news became so siloed,

but how did this happen to comedy? So I think there's two trends that are sort of playing out at this point. The first is kind of the death of the irony-drenched political incorrectness culture of the 1990s. Shows like South Park, politically incorrect with Bill Maher. Even Sacha Baron Cohen kind of came out of that world, which is we're going to say the most outrageous things, the most un-PC things in the name of like trying to provoke a reaction and hopefully getting at a deeper truth. That has sort of gone out on the wayside.

And on the flip side of that, you have this kind of absurdist streak that the Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruning has written about as millennial humor, which is basically that millennials have been placed in this context where the world seems really stacked against them and the only response to that throughout history has been absurdism. So you kind of have these two things that are converging in the same place, which is why somebody like Bill Maher now no longer really seems like, you know, he has a centrality in the culture that he once did. Are there examples of comedy you've seen within the past two years that deal with Trump in a smarter, better way than Who is America?

My favorite example is the Comedy Central program The President Show. It's very careful not to just be like, Trump is a dummy. It is placing him within the context of the country that created him. Why can't your party pass a health care bill? Because football players' national anthem.

Kneeling. Where's the outrage? You didn't answer the question. Excuse me. Pointing out that I didn't answer the question is disrespectful to our flag. Compare it, for instance, not to Who is America, but to something that I'm relatively certain everybody listening to this will have seen, which is Alec Baldwin's impersonation of Trump on Saturday Night Live. That is an impersonation that is designed to flatter you, the left-leaning member of the audience, into thinking, boy, Donald Trump is just an idiot and I can't believe he's president, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It is not designed to make you question the role that you play in a society that led to his rise and the way that the president show is. The president show, there is a central question to that program that a lot of political humor has lost, which is like, what is our shared cultural value? What has led to the rise of Trump and how are all of us a part of it? I think that Who is America, while I certainly found bits of it very funny, it is kind of stuck in this old way of looking at political humor and that ultimately hurts it. Todd Vanderwerf hosts the podcast, I Think You're Interesting. It's from Vox, as is this one. It's called Today Explained. My name is Nathalie Idron.

I live in Malmö, Sweden. My favorite episode of Today Explained would probably be the one about the really expensive ice pack because it's so absurd. And getting a bill after you take an ambulance is crazy. Oh, and here's a brief shout out to your Twitter account at today underscore explained. Since it sounds like you've never been to getquip.com slash explained, I wonder what

do you what do you got at home? What are you sporting? I've got a standard toothbrush that sort of vibrates. Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh, like the kind you buy at like a CVS or something? Yeah, I won't tell you the brand because that's not kind. That's weird.

Yeah. Okay. So I'll just go with the Quip. Okay. Or like one can become your work toothbrush. So like, you know, no one needs to waste things. Oh, is that a hint? No, no, no, not at all.

Not at all. Yo, it's your birthday. I'm not going not gonna talk smack guess i need a work toothbrush news to me congratulations thank you sean