‘Who Is America?’ startles, angers
Cohen scoops up the unsuspecting in satire
As expected, Sacha Baron Cohen takes no prisoners with his satirical new show, which was surprise-announced last week.
“Who is America?,” which premiered on Showtime Sunday (10 EDT/ PDT), is the politically charged new project from British comedian Cohen, who has pranked celebrities and lampooned American culture through characters such as Ali G, Borat and Bruno. He wrote and directed the new seven-episode weekly series.
The personalities he portrays in “America” are no less outrageous. The first is the motorized scooter-bound Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, founder of fictional right-wing news site Truthbrary.org, whose aim is to take down the “main- streme” media. The premiere kicks off with a sit-down interview between Ruddick and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who seems increasingly befuddled by Ruddick’s bizarre line of questioning.
“I was a healthy man, and then Obamacare came in and I was forced to see a doctor,” says Ruddick, sporting blond mutton chops and a leather jacket. “All of a sudden, I had three diseases.”
Ruddick then cites figures from the fictional International Institute of Truth and Knowledge, explaining that the only way to spread the wealth among Americans is by “keeping the 1 percent, but you move the 99 percent into the 1 percent.”
After a few minutes of trying to understand Ruddick’s garbled logic, Sand-
ers throws in the towel: “Billy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t.”
Other characters include the pussy hat-wearing Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, who shocks a card-carrying Republican couple in South Carolina with his extreme liberalism. (To challenge gender roles, for instance, he tells them that he makes his son, Harvey Milk, pee sitting down and daughter, Malala, urinate while standing.)
A third character, freed criminal Ricky Sherman, is only occasionally amusing, convincing an art-gallery owner to give him her pubic hair for a paintbrush. That’s after he shows her a series of crude “paintings” he made in prison, using feces and his cellmate’s semen (or so he claims).
Cohen saves the best character for last: Erran Morad is a gruff, Israeli antiterrorism expert waving the flag for a new program he calls “Kinderguardians,” which would train kids ages 3 to 16 how to use guns. That he gets gunrights activists Philip Van Cleave and Larry Pratt to speak out in support of the initiative – and even film a training video for children, with characters such as Puppy Pistol and Gunny Rabbit – is the episode’s funniest bit, if sadly not surprising.
“The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good boy with a gun,” Morad says. Adds Pratt: “Or even a good toddler.”
Morad ultimately recruits former and current congressmen to record publicservice announcements for the fake program. “We should think about putting guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens – good guys – whether they be teachers, talented children or highly trained preschoolers,” former Senate majority leader Trent Lott says, entirely straight-faced.
“America” made headlines last week when former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin criticized Cohen on Facebook, claiming she was “duped” into taping an interview for the show. (She was not in Sunday’s episode.)
However, Twitter had little sympathy for politicians crying that they were fooled by Cohen.
Writer Matt Oswalt made the case that the show didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know about the politicians interviewed in the “Kinderguardians” piece.
@danteestrada_ was simultaneously fascinated and frightened, writing, “Me watching #WhoIsAmerica laughing at how ridiculous it is then realizing that these are the people in positions of power in our country.”
“Seems to me that if you said it, you said it,” @joannamcneal argued. “How can someone agree to something if they don’t agree with it?? They were tricked by who he was; not by what they said.”
David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, suggested that the show could serve as a good litmus test as to who does or doesn’t deserve a security clearance: “Going out on a limb here, but probably safe to say - any elected official who was duped to appear in the new @SachaBaronCohen series #WhoIsAmerica on @Showtime should be permanently disqualified from ever receiving classified information.”
@Kronk987 was on the same page with Jolly, posing the scary question, “If they said it to Sacha Baron Cohen, can you imagine what they would say to Russian intel agents?”