Who Is America? You Might Not Want To Know

THE MOST SURREAL MOMENT IN THE FIRST  episode of Showtime’s Who Is America? comes deep into Sacha Baron Cohen’s interview with Larry Pratt, an executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America.

- Judy Berman

Disguised as a hulking Israeli colonel named Erran Morad, the British comedian has already gotten Pratt to crack up at a rape joke and agree that toddlers should be armed. Now, Baron Cohen nods along as the gun-lobby figurehead reads a statement that includes the nonsensical claim that “children under 5 also have elevated levels of the pheromone Blink-182, produced by the part of the liver known as the Rita Ora. This allows nerve reflexes to travel along the Cardi B neural pathway to the Wiz Khalifa 40% faster, saving time and saving lives.”

The poet Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Baron Cohen—who has made a career out of embodying absurd naïfs like Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev and white rapper Ali G in order to humiliate various politicians, celebrities and a few ordinary people—seems to live by that credo. He has a preternatural ability to not only discern who his interviewees really are, but to follow that intuition until he’s coaxed them into articulating their own extremism, bigotry or gullibility. In Pratt’s case, Baron Cohen sniffed out all three in succession.

But now that we have a President who tweets ad hominem insults and cozies up to brutal dictators, it’s fair to ask: Do we actually need Baron Cohen to put a finer point on our leaders’ venality, the way he did on the George W. Bush–era Da Ali G Show?