The Sacha Baron Cohen Poll: Ali G vs. Borat vs. Bruno

Ali G In Da House? Or just the character?

I suppose just the character? Your call.

ali g was the funniest.
the show was too short.
he should have taken this character to the road before borat.
now it's too late

Wow. Popular poll here.

ali g was the funniest.
the show was too short.
he should have taken this character to the road before borat.
now it's too late

― Zeno, Monday, July 13, 2009 9:56 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

this is hilarious poetry

the answer is so obv ali g

ali g

when i first saw ali g, he was hosting the europe vmas (iirc) and i was like 11 or 12 and was like "what the fuck is this guy?!! what the hell is wrong with britain?!!" then i saw the show and understood it all. also discovered l0u1s jagg3r.

SBC is the cankles of British comedy

also it's pretty easy to trace out ali g characteristics and ploys in borat and bruno

need to repoll to include LJ

^^ otm

cant wait until we all have to sign releases for our appearances in the "l0u1s jagg3r" movie

movie or blog?

Vlog.

Ali G movie was on TV over the weekend. unwatchable.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

What's LJ?

oh how we envy you

Signor Pirelli

None of the Above

Ali J

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

otm

jesus christ just fucking go away already

New one "The Dictator" looks a bit dump TBF. Anyone anticipating?

My wife and I saw that trailer this past weekend. She turned to me and said, "Is that supposed to be a comedy?"

In "Hugo" he looked exactly like http://media.screened.com/uploads/0/509/309395-16_oficer_crabtree_small.jpg and sounded exactly like http://www.iwise.com/authorIcons/13674/Peter_Cook_48x48.png

The Dictator looks pretty o_O

in addition to appearing completely unfunny, it also looks blatantly racist in the crudest possible way.

i guess i'm sorta holding out hope that they can't show any of the funny parts on tv, but yeah it looks awful

apparently some of it is set in a Williamsburg food co-op, so that has potential.

The Girls crossover we've all been waiting for!

I really used to love the Ali G show and I had kind of high hopes for him at one point. Career has been a downward since then.

guy is just generally terrible imo. if there was a stereotype about asian people being antisemitic he'd be wearing yellow makeup and yelling "CHING CHONG ME SO HORNY ME HATE JEWS" in his next movie.

downward slope.

yet curiously he has gotten much richer

The Borat commercials made it look pretty bad too though. It's probably at least way better than Ali G Indahouse

Is he still doing a Freddie Mercury biopic?

that's allegedly coming together, yes

most of it will take place in Zanzibar and will be full of hilaaaarious accents, i'm sure

whatever, I'm betting this actually turns out to be pretty funny, though I'm sure everyone else here is likely going to rain smdhs and nagls upon it

Really funny movies sometimes have awful commercials.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/sacha_baron_cohens_dark_political_farce/

Ugh yeah watched The Dictator a few weeks ago, it was really bad. There were a few parts in it that i thought offered actually good political satire. Mainly the bit where they are on the helicopter excitedly talking about touring NYC and the frightened tourists in front of them only hear frightening terrorist buzzwords. And the speech at the very end about how the US more or less embraces the same horrible practices we fear in dictator-run countries. But really this was a few good political satire skits wrapped around a really stupid plot connecting a bunch of gross-out setpieces. It feels like the kind of movie a high schooler would make if you gave him a lot of money and an MTV production crew at his disposal.

Yeah, pretty terrible. The only bit I can remember really making me laugh was the conversation about cartoon bombs. His accent was really weird, sounded almost Irish at times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmgVDLjSk-s

Looks, uh, unlikely to be good.

Was reminiscing with H about some of the better Ali G/Borat/Bruno bits and a few still crack me up to think about, e.g. Bruno meeting with the gay conversion priest, Borat campaigning door to door in a US local election, Borat with the dating coach, Ali G interviewing Chomsky. Sort of sad just how huge the gulf is between his best and worst stuff and just how voluminous his worst work is.

the leaked SONY emails revealed some fascinating stuff about this

http://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/Sacha-Baron-Cohen-s-film-Grimsby-characters-hide/story-26353224-detail/story.html

wish he'd managed to do the freddy mercury film, he would have been really good

read the director's name as Ivan Loadsa

SBC is a fucking wretch obv

"The comedy has already proven controversial after pictures taken on the set depicted the town as largely populated by 20 stone women and "tattooed fatties"

Christ are they still throwing money at this fucking clown?

he's several degrees of magnitude worse than gervais, maybe

a true blight on culture

whatever, I'm betting this actually turns out to be pretty funny, though I'm sure everyone else here is likely going to rain smdhs and nagls upon it

i'm not hating to be fashionable. i sat through the borat movie and it was a very unhappy time in my life

As a stout defender of unfashionable northern towns I never find it a good look when people use places that have suffered a lot of social decay for decades as one-joke comedy setpieces. sorry wins, I am a miserable old bastard, but I can't accept this type of shit.

;-)

Telling a rodeo crowd "I hope George W. Bush drinks the blood of every Iraqi man, woman and child" was a good moment.

a true blight on culture

^^^^

was bummed that he showed up at the end of Eastbound and Down but luckily he wasn't in it enough to derail it too much

https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/9/17550016/who-is-america-trailer-sacha-baron-cohen-new-show

My friend who has developed this with SBC is a Brasseye alum and has been teasing this to his mates alllll week.

that's the first tidbit to give me even the slightest bit of hope for this

Roy Moore apparently also targeted in the Sacha Baron Cohen thing, per statement... pic.twitter.com/hFY0v7e8Bb

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 12, 2018

ok I think this is going to be very good actually

this is going to be good

Brass eye was really good but it gave rise to so much shitty ambush comedy such as pretty much every baron Cohen has ever done

pissing off these ppl needs no defense

ambushing assholes is good

I mean shitty as in unfunny and bad not whether the targets were deserving tbc

^^^

there's no way that i won't find something palin or roy moore do on this show funny

ambush/cringe comedy can be really good (nathan for you) or really bad (a lot of cohen's stuff). cohen's done some stuff that was very funny, too, so i am hopeful that dick cheney was humiliated in a particularly clever and enlightening way

If he sticks to people in power (current or present) I'm game

I find that sort of stuff completely unwatchable now. I can't even watch Chris Morris doing it on Brass Eye.

the current people in power are historically stupid and narcissistic so I'm guessing there's no shortage of material here

I find Cohen's humor to be all over the map, the Ali G movie was stupid but the show was classic. Borat was funny but it's one of the few movies I felt pretty bad about laughing at. I also think it did not bode well for the rest of his career since he seemed to learn all the wrong lessons from its success. but I still have hope for this

Borat's lone funny scene (the nude wrestling match in the hotel w his manager) is p basic gross-out humor, well-staged and executed. His more "conceptual" stuff where he thinks he's being clever/clowning on clueless people is mostly garbage.

yeah, brasseye hasn't aged like a good Bunuel vintage has, probs overrated tbh. But this fucking twerp does my head in to start with, it's noisy talentless cunts like him that give comedy a bad name imo.

I stand by my opinions on this thread: Larry Charles to direct Borat movie

Looking forward to this. "Talentless?" Give me a break. How some of you manage to type out your grumpy-ass responses without spilling haterade all over your keyboards never ceases to amaze me.

well America is the home of talentless comedy-fail shite, so he'll be a star player in that sphere!

lol

I remember when all it took to get a laugh out of me was a sprinkling of cunts and shites.

a pride of lions
a murder of crows
a sprinkling of cunts

the colors faded into darkness
I was on my own

Huh, didn’t expect to get turned on by checking the new answers to this thread

fuck everyone this is all-time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7EgyGgVZSA

Lmaooooo

holy shit sasha baron cohen got arpaio, who was so mad he promptly called breitbart to complain. every word of this is gold pic.twitter.com/8W6RFBOERV

— KT NELSON (@KrangTNelson) July 13, 2018

ok even as an SBC skeptic/agnostic these butthurt quotes from everyone are objectively funny

That sneaky Borat has maliciously misled me once again. When his video camera recorded moving images with synchronized sound of me articulating in words my hateful belief system, I did not know that those images and sounds would subsequently be transmitted to other human beings

— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) July 13, 2018

Here's the truth @SarahPalinUSA 🇺🇸 #MAGA #buildthewall #boycottsashacohen pic.twitter.com/iFZWrFTxWL

— Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD (@BillyWRuddick) July 12, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk

armed toddler advocacy

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/15/entertainment/who-is-america-review/index.html

I'm left wondering if Chris Morris would still get away with what he was doing 20 years ago with Brass Eye. Would think that once the word that somebody was going around pulling pranks like this it would mean it was difficult to get away with. Presumably there is a whole season of this Who Is America but is it automatically going to be short lived.

Like the ability to get people to be willing victims does presumably mean a lack of awareness doesn't it?
Or does it just show how much people are willing to do in front of a camera. Would have hoped taht Bernie might be a bit more savvy than this though.

What does a consent form for one of these things look like? It's not enough of a giveaway in itself or anything?

Thought most of that was a bit heavy-handed and lazy, but the very-Chris-Morris-bit at the end where he got them to talk about Blink 182 and Wiz Khalifa was sort-of worth it.

Those clips aren't that far off from the shit they play on NRA TV.

So can you only watch this on Showtime?

Not really heavy-handed when it's about getting those folks to actually make those videos. If it was just an animated South Park episode, sure.

It's being circulated on torrent sites already.

The I-can't-believe-people-fall-for-this part for me isn't even about what he's saying, or getting other people to say; it's about the fact that the "Israeli" character (like the other characters he plays in this) looks like a dude wearing a full-head rubber mask from a Halloween shop. How do people not enter the room with this guy and say "OK, come on, who's under there?"

The whole appeal of this kind of crap is based on ppl misunderstanding how TV is made, having a fundamentally idealized/misunderstood version of how TV is made is a prerequisite for being entertained by it

It feels like another level of normalization if having reps and senators say these things is judged as entertainment.

Like omg ppl will do anything if they think they are on TV what a novel observation from 75 yrs ago

Dude we have a reality TV show star for president, horse has left the barn

"My son was in the very first program, may he rest in peace.. "

worth it just for this.

Like omg ppl will do anything if they think they are on TV what a novel observation from 75 yrs ago

― Οὖτις, Sunday, July 15, 2018 10:25 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought most of the people he pranks would have gone through at least some forms of media awareness course as part of the training for the job.
Also that people would be growing up knowing that people are out there making shows like this.
& the rubber mask thing should be a giveaway too.

But all the people on Brass Eye who fell for a 'made-up drug' was stunning enough at the time. Also the ourouboric Elephant.

GEFAFWISP or gtf

Brass eye is so good, mandatory for anyone who wants to talk about sbc whether hater or booster

The prank side of things is actually quite a small part of the programme but like if you’re gonna be a bofa appreciator this is god level

That Matt Gaetz guy looks like he's wearing a mask, too. And Joe Wilson slurs his interview.

Pills 'n' soap.

at age 4 a child processes images 80% faster than an adult, meaning essentially, like owls, they can see in slow motion

I find that hard to believe given the increase in myelination of the brain through adolescence.

don't know if that was ironic, I was quoting from Larry Pratt (Gun Owners of America) in one of the SBC interviews

but genuinely interested to see someone else here who has an interest in neuroscience

I'm left wondering if Chris Morris would still get away with what he was doing 20 years ago with Brass Eye. Would think that once the word that somebody was going around pulling pranks like this it would mean it was difficult to get away with. Presumably there is a whole season of this Who Is America but is it automatically going to be short lived.

― Stevolende

chris morris isn't _interested_ in doing what he was doing 20 years ago with brass eye and appears to have some certain degree of self-awareness which has kept him from just remaking old black mirror episodes unto eschaton.

It was more taht I would have assumed that once a few people in the media eye were caught out the same prankster wouldn't be able to continue. Hoping that levels of gullibility weren't that high.
BUt always funny to see people like Noel Edmonds make themselves look like idiots especially when the script in front of them or owrds they've been given at least presumably give the game away. I keep thinking about that 'it's a made up drug' which I would think would parse as this is fictional i.e. made up and presumably was read as it was created, if there was anything semantic involved.
But once it got on TV I would have thought the show wouldn't be able to keep catching people out indefinitely.
Is that me having more faith in human nature than is deserved.

Is that me having more faith in human nature than is deserved.

― Stevolende

yes

The part of the episode where he plays the ex-mossad agent is 100% worth watching and gold from start to finish. The other ones aren't nearly as strong, unfortunately

This was funny but felt like rubbing salt in the wound to me, I mean the US is ducked as is. Laughed but felt sad as well

that was some of the funniest shit I've seen in a long time, absolutely incredible what these people go along with

I'll be curious enough to stay apprised of who gets clowned on, but I don't think I have any desire to cringe through another round of SBC.

Sacha Baron Cohen pls trick my dad into saying he’s proud of me

— Sophia Benoit (@1followernodad) July 14, 2018

Οὖτις kinda otm here

i liked Ali G and Borat and all that about 10 years ago. but even then the schtick was getting tired. too bad he already made The Dictator

for me im not really hankering for yet another place to promote/own horrible people & be cynical about politics. but for those reasons this will probably be a huge hit.

Is him looking like Freddie Mercury-with-a-shaved-head in the gun clips just a coincidence or a snook being openly cocked at Queen? He looks way more like Freddie than the fella that's actually now in the biopic.

He was actually attached to the biopic for a while iirc

Yeah that's what i mean..it ended badly.

Yes, he died of an AIDS related illness before he could join the fight against badger culling.

i like joe walsh justifying everything with "they flew me out and gave me an award"

my unnecessary take is that this isn't good, based on the clips. the small push that it takes to get someone to agree with opinions close enough to ones they've voiced support for in the past on cable news (+ point out that they don't know wiz khalifa and are dumb enough to record drops for a guy with a prosthetic) or try to out openly evil public and semi-public figures in their 70s and 80s as monsters isn't worth the trouble or funny because you could get a 24 year old defend western civilization youtuber to go in and elicit the same responses, spoken rationally into a galaxy s9 camera, and without some goofy character.

but it's hilarious!

Watched the first Sanders segment and don't know if I'll bother continuing. There's simply no joke in it

I think it improves but I can't remember one section and the middle class dinner isn't overly brilliant just a bit better than the bernie bit. Middle class dinner seems to be self consciously gross.

xp
also this is getting close to a handwaving liberal twitter take but, honestly, the fact that this—it's coming out after being hit over and over again with scenes of gun violence where i can't help but imagine children getting shot in the head and replaying scenes of violence in a country intractably fucked up about gun violence, when i can open youtube and they make sure i get to see steven crowder debunking gun myths etc. so and the fact that it goes after the softest targets (right wing gun nuts that have made a living saying offensive shit), seems out of touch with the culture when in the past few years shit is even more surreal and terrifying than lol a gun for babies in a teddy bear, and really isn't packed with jokes and never gets very funny, it's kinda unpleasant.

imho tricking bob barr into eating breast milk cheese is as political as sacha baron cohen.

"should get" are the two words to end that sentence.

really isn't packed with jokes and never gets very funny, it's kinda unpleasant

Satire's not actually supposed to be "funny," you know.

This sounds as insufferable as expected, it sounds like he's done a Shatner's Bassoon ripoff as well. Fuck this tool!

satire huh so that's what this is.

mods can you delete my last three posts i clearly missed the point

Sacha Baron Cohen's not actually supposed to be "funny," you know.

it's quite possible that his ambitions/aims have evolved...

Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America” is much more disturbing than the surface-level of officials saying “give children weapons.”

(Brief thread)https://t.co/vmI6pk8pIs

— Ms. Entropy / سيدة الفتنة (@MsEntropy) July 16, 2018

He has evolved beyond "Grimsby".

It’s hard watching satire post-Trump. 2 years or so back, during every episode of Last Week Tonight about the NRA or Drumpf’s bankruptcies or whatever i was like “Wow how can he survive THIS…” and then you’d see it didn’t dent his image one jot somehow.

Outraging liberals IS his image

xp thought it was kind of obvious that the use of the character had as much to do with Israel and the terrorism paradigm as with gun control. I mean he makes a joke about shooting an arab gardener, that's pretty "surface level" but thanks twitter thread

the sanders bit was pretty funny if you watched it with scott steiner's "steiner math" in your head (tbf tho it's always in my head)

Baron Cohen also came from a highly educated university iirc

THe show seems to be doing well enough that it can sponsor the Late Show. I'm not 100% sure what that entails but surprised tehy would have extra budget if its what I thought it was.

But it was tagged as sponsor on one of the last 2 nights.

That's Showtime looking to take the lead from HBO. Between having Billions (better than Succession) and this show (more buzz than any recent HBO comedy), makes sense they'll spend to sponsor it.

I feel like his star fell a lot with the Borat movie, the Bruno movie and various dumb antics, but the Ali G show was legit very funny imo.

Borat movie was his peak, Bruno was when everyone got sick of him

the wrestling-event sequence in Bruno was arguably funnier and more scandalous than anything in Borat - I remember virtually nothing else in/about it, though

super greg is peak

https://youtu.be/V8wrIgbiCgs

xp I meant more his critical star than his popular star. IN the movie he sort of played out the Borat character by turning it into an SNL-style catch phrase guy with some shock humor thrown in. The sketches were much more clever.

Ali G show was one of the best DVD purchases I ever made, honestly

the segment where Bruno keeps making the Spring Breakers spell out PARTY is so classic. dude jumping off the van always makes me lose it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhP0tOm6yt0

I loved this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXuI3DqaCyw

Borat the sketch always sort of toed the line btw laughs at the expense of a foreign caricature vs laughs at the expense of Americans' naivite with respect to and ignorance of foreigners, but mostly leaned toward the latter. The movie really tipped things toward the former imo.

THis seems to be very hit and miss. I found myself laughing at a couple of bits but miss seems to outweigh things.
Californian vacuity seems to be a favourite topic of his, at least i'm assuming both of those women were califonian.
Way too much non-firing sketches anyway.
So wonder how many bad pub impressions it will trigger.

Agreed. First episode was pretty zzz. It's been done better many times before and in this batshit political climate not particularly shocking.

The mosque segment was depressing.

i take back some of my criticism after seeing the jason spencer thing.

party clip frog linked is so good

he he yeah it's great

Haha that Bruno clip.. haven’t seen it since it aired but I can still remember vividly the moment when the dude rips off the mic spoffle. Such a weird instantaneous moment of anger.

Still my favourite in terms of sheer nerve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iMjFoT7yWE

whoops

Georgia state Rep. Jason Spencer, who attracted nationwide ridicule after yelling obscenities and dropping his pants on Sacha Baron Cohen’s TV show, has submitted his resignation from the Georgia House of Representatives, the office of the House speaker confirmed to The Washington Post early Wednesday.

I guess this is already by default the year's best american journalism then

i was considering adding this to the Looks Like an Onion Headline but Isn't thread...

Georgia State Rep. Jason Spencer to Resign in Wake of Pants-Dropping Debacle

note that "pants-dropping debacle" takes precedence over repeatedly shouting racial slurs and Islamophobic sentiments

that cheese video is agonizing

From BBC:

Mr Spencer had initially refused to quit over what he called a "ridiculously ugly episode".

The four-term representative was defeated in the Republican primary for his seat in May, but had intended to serve his remaining five months in office.

He said in a statement Baron Cohen had taken "advantage of my paralysing fear that my family would be attacked".

"My fears were so heightened at that time, I was not thinking clearly nor could I appreciate what I was agreeing to when I participated in his 'class'," he said.

Mr Spencer apologised to "my family, friends, and the people of my district", adding: "I deeply regret the language I used at (Baron Cohen's) request."

does this mean I have to watch the show now ?
I am not usually a fan of this kind of thing …

v cool that this guy’s able to admit that he’d be so overwhelmed by fear in the event that he was attacked that he’d be of no practical use in defending his family

i assume that his guns will be confiscated by the state for his safety and the safety of others

amazing how far the media contorts itself to avoid calling people racist

Sacha Baron Cohen made an Arizona town seem racist. Now officials are promising change. https://t.co/2ExeY9yILi

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 25, 2018

trying to find that clip yesterday by googling 'kingman az mosque' and it turns out there actually IS a mosque there...

Kingman has the creepiest Walmart I've even been in, which is saying something

"seem" racist

Well to be fair there was what? 40 citizens at the town hall? It would be irresponsible to call the whole town of 45,000 citizens racists because of these 40 folks. Unless there is something about Kingman that I missed. Man I laughed when he announced the Mosque. Parks and Rec had good bits about town halls and what kind of people attend them.

Arizona is hella racist tho like, as a state

I all states are hella racist to varying degrees but like there's "Public Enemy specifically wrote a song about how racist your state is" racist

There are definitely racists in arizona but living in california i met a lot of mexicans who moved/retired in arizona and love it

Also arizona is heavily advertised as a retirement spot in japan, so there are more and more asians there

Well the mayor's response is:

The comments in the show, fairly or unfairly, show that we still have more work to do. So here are additional steps we are going to be taking as ours is a community like too many others in America that still encounter such issues.

Love how politicians are always ready to throw the whole country under the bus when they have pointed fingers at them for racism.

I googled the place as well and it has not only a mosque alreaddy but one quite large and obvious ffs. People are stupid.

Delicious Donut, you have to understand that uh, you have to follow the Constitution and the law and allow people to have guns.

on war footing with tech companies

borat sucks

the naked hotel fight in Borat is the hardest and longest I have ever laughed in a movie. well, either that or PSH in Along Came Polly coining "sharted." god, my mom and I were laughing at both for like 20 minutes.
like sands through the hourglass...

I have to agree about that Borat fight scene. I saw it in a theater, and I was in tears at the end of that scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ryIztqI5g

SBC oughta be careful, his entire project is in danger of cultural redaction

he will be fine

no doubts there

"SBC the human who presumably needs sustenance to keep living" and "SBC's satirical project" are v different things

Is there another Borat thread? the new movie is masterful.

That clip up above (which of course is in the film) feels like a lifetime ago. Also I've had "shoot him up with the wuhan flu' in my head all morning.

Larry Charles to direct Borat movie

Kinda want this to happen now:

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/02/sacha-baron-cohen-rudy-giuliani-contest-golden-globes-borat-loses-1234614399/