From the New York Times:
Sacha Baron Cohen: This Time He’s Serious
Reviving his Borat character and playing the political activist Abbie Hoffman, the actor feels he “had to ring the alarm bell and say that democracy is in peril this year.”
By Maureen Dowd
Oct. 17, 2020
Updated 4:38 p.m. ET… Ali G pitched Donald Trump about investing in an ice cream glove that would prevent your hand from getting sticky.
Mr. Trump, who walked out of the interview in disgust, told me afterward: “I thought he was seriously retarded. It was a total con job. But my daughter Ivanka saw it and thought it was very cool.”
Mr. Baron Cohen, who turned 49 this past week, said, “Obviously, I’ve realized that I’ve had a longstanding distaste for the president. That was why I wanted to interview him as Ali G.”
He added, “His brilliance was to commandeer the very term that was being used against him, ‘fake news,’ and use it against every journalist that had journalistic integrity.”
Well, actually …
Anyway, as I’ve been pointing out since 2006, Baron Cohen is an extreme ethnocentrist, by nature a man of the right. His main characters have always been satires of Amalekites of various flavors motivated by his deep-seated ethnic animuses: Ali G began as a British Muslim yoof, Borat is a Cossack and the Borat movie is one long Polack joke, Bruno is an Austrian, and The Dictator is Colonel Gadaffi.
Most of the directors and writers he hires come out of the Seinfeld / Curb Your Enthusiasm Jewish Hollywood center-right, like his long-time director Larry Charles. From Maureen Dowd’s interview:
Q. You gave a Zoom toast at Larry David’s wedding to Ashley Underwood, who was a producer on “Who Is America?”
A. Me and my wife introduced him to her at my birthday party. Together, we have set up three weddings.
Q. Your favorite Adam Sandler movie is “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
A. Listen, I actually tried to get that movie, to rewrite it, to appear in it.
But due to his satires of American Republicans, nobody notices.
