Blunt Tools

Pranks and masculinity on “Who Is America?” and “Nathan for You.”

- Emily Nussbaum

Before screening Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America?,” Showtime flacks handed me a nondisclosure agreement. They locked up my phone. Guards roamed the aisles with night-vision goggles. The implication was clear: this show, heralded by panicky press releases from politicians, was incendiary stuff. Then, three days later, the network tiptoed backward like Trump after Helsinki. “At its core WHO IS AMERICA? is a comedy show,” a pre-airing e-mail insisted. “This is not a statement on the state of the country, but Baron Cohen experimenting in the playground of 2018 America.”

Please. Better for Showtime to own what it’s doling out: an ugly response to an ugly age. Baron Cohen is a skilled troll, whose work is fuelled by contempt—though he’d probably prefer to be described as a bouffon, the rule-breaking clown who exposes hypocrisy. (Baron Cohen studied with the French clown Philippe Gaulier, an expert on the tradition.) When his sketches get laughs, they’re barks of disgust, as when I found myself yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me?” during the now famous montage of prominent N.R.A. shills, including the former congressmen Trent Lott and Joe Walsh, plugging a program to train toddlers to shoot guns. The show uses nihilism as a stripping agent, sort of the way the Cat in the Hat touted Voom as the proper method to clean up the stain he’d helped create. During its weaker segments, it’s juvenile—and, in maddening, unexamined ways, misogynist. But during that Kinderguardian segment, which manages to nail the G.O.P., the N.R.A., and right-wing support for Israel, Baron Cohen’s method is like radiation: sickening, but better than cancer, unless it kills you first. He’s Tocqueville by way of Willy Wonka, a sadist who’s certain he can separate bad eggs from good ones.