For once in his life, Ali G, Sacha Baron Cohen’s iconic white guy who thinks he’s black character, did something quietly.
Ali G snuck into theaters in Israel and around the world for the new movie Ali G: Who Iz I?, which was set for a two-day release on Friday and Saturday.
It will come to Amazon’s Prime Video later, but the good news for fans in Israel is that certain theater chains, including Planet, Cinema City, Movieland, Rav-Chen, and Hot Cinemas, have extended the release until Wednesday.
For those who can roll with Baron Cohen and his often sophomoric humor, it could be the perfect movie to see on Election Day on Tuesday, especially because most of the participants, from both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, were not “in on it”: they were duped into taking part in what they thought was a serious political documentary, a guerrilla tactic that Baron Cohen has been pulling off for decades.
The movie starts with a quote from Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities,” and it’s key to understanding the movie.
Baron Cohen handles lawsuits over pranks in the movie
Even though the movie says that only Baron Cohen and Morgana Robinson, who plays his pregnant girlfriend, Julie, were in on the joke, while watching it, I had a hard time believing that this was true. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who is not mentally ill or drugged could have gone along with the pranks that Baron Cohen pulls in this movie.
But they did, and he is currently dealing with a few lawsuits from participants who don’t find it funny and regret that they gave their permission for him to use the segments he filmed with them.
It’s an insane piece of performance art that functions as a critique of our absurd political climate, and it will hit harder than a thousand op-eds, mainly because it is designed to be not only entertaining but a teaching moment aimed at those who would never read an op-ed.
As the movie opens, it’s tough times for Ali G, who has had trouble adjusting to life as a regular guy since his HBO series was canceled over 20 years ago. He is back at home in a quiet British suburb and reeling from the news that Julie is pregnant.
As he sells various relics from his former life as a celebrity to support her and their soon-to-be-born child, an ancient fax machine spits out one more page that says that HBO has agreed to pay him an additional $3 million. So it’s off to Los Angeles and back to the high life for Ali and Julie.
You can guess the reception he gets in Hollywood (HBO says the offer is null and void), but at the same time, an ultra-left, straight, white Berkeley professor who hates himself, Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello (an utterly unrecognizable Baron Cohen, using one of several characters he introduced in the series Who Is America?) decides that Ali G is a menace who must be stopped because he is a cultural appropriator.
Baron Cohen's critique of the left
He recruits a few young, woke, useful idiots to help in his pursuit of Ali.
These recruits don absurd faux-Rastafarian costumes and a sequined bodysuit with strategically placed black hands in a plot to deceive and entrap Ali G by collecting his DNA to prove he is white – and if you’ve ever seen a Baron Cohen movie, you can guess what bodily substance they end up getting.
These characters are the main source of Baron Cohen’s critique of the Left, and it’s the more restrained part of the movie. At the heart of his satire of the Right, Baron Cohen gets a similarly clueless band of useful idiots from the other side of the spectrum involved, in his guise as a poker-faced Mossad agent, Erran Morad.
I won’t give away the main joke, but the sequence gives him the chance to use a little Hebrew.
Hearing these all-American good old boys reciting Israeli slang terms for certain body parts got the biggest laugh and even applause from the mostly 20-something and younger audience in the auditorium where I saw the movie.
Unlike in the Borat movies, where Baron Cohen speaks Hebrew when Borat is supposedly conversing in Kazakh, there isn’t nearly as much Hebrew in this movie.
Those laughing away may not have known or cared that Baron Cohen duped a baker’s dozen of right-wing media and political figures into taking part in the movie, including disgraced former congressman George Santos and Jacob Chansley, aka the Qanon Shaman.
Ali G is tapped to host a show on a right-wing network called The Free Speech Show with Ali G. It shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point that he gets the studio audience for this show to imitate Elon Musk and has them all doing a “Heil Hitler” salute.
Celebrity features in the film
A couple of celebrities from the entertainment industry appear in the movie, including Rihanna and A$AP Rocky. While they may not technically have been “in on it,” they were smart enough to know that Baron Cohen was playing the Ali G character.
How entertaining you will find the movie depends on how much of Baron Cohen’s bathroom and sex humor you can stomach. In addition to the verbal jokes, the movie has some of the funniest costumes Baron Cohen has ever come up with, from a giant puffy jacket to the return of some of the FUBU (“For Us, By Us”) outfits he has sported in the past.
All jokes aside, Baron Cohen has said in interviews that he returned to the comedy of Ali G for a serious reason: “Because I’m terrified of where our society is headed, and the way I can comment on that is through my comedy. I wanted to show the extremism on both sides of the political spectrum and the danger of virtuous violence,” he told The Hollywood Reporter last week.
While he has not spoken out on issues concerning Israel, other than to call for the release of the hostages held by Hamas after October 7, when he was asked by The Hollywood Reporter about a boycott campaign proposed by left-wing activists against his movie and whether it was linked to antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment:
“Well, I haven’t said anything about Israel … I think people are being portrayed as things that they are not on social media and it’s problematic. We are in a world where people can’t distinguish between facts and lies, and that’s something that I’ve spent a lot of the last few years trying to fix …
“So, I’m not surprised that prominent Jews are being targeted. I knew that this was going to happen. The level of organization is surprising, but this is a trend of Jews being portrayed in certain ways and trying to be silenced.”
In an essay he penned for Time Magazine, he wrote, “We are once again entering an age of ‘virtuous’ violence, where any atrocity – by racists, Jew haters, or Islamophobes, the Right or the Left – can be somehow justified. It is not a place any of us should want to live.”
Perhaps the biggest virtue of Ali G: Who Iz I? is that it shows that while we may not have much of a choice about living in such a world these days, the ideologues on both sides don’t have enough smarts or sense of humor to get Baron Cohen’s jokes. As such, Ali G’s creator has his pick of endless targets, and he can give us something to laugh at.