Ali G: Woke is He, and Now Hoisted by His Own Petard!

Gareth Roberts's piece on the forthcoming Ali G: Who Iz I? treats the revival of a 1998 character as evidence that mass culture has simply stopped. A film that once would have been unthinkable as a major release, recycling a television figure from the late nineties, now sits alongside endless Partridge, Have I Got News For You and franchise reboots because, after about 2012, the entertainment industry became so captured by a particular set of political orthodoxies that new comedy capable of lampooning the powerful became professionally dangerous. The boycott already forming around the Ali G film, on grounds of "racism," only underlines the point: the original joke was aimed at a pathetic white man from Staines who had decided he was a gangsta, yet the current climate prefers to treat the character as an attack on the people he was impersonating. Roberts's larger claim is that comedy has lost its old social function as a safety rail and a source of fellow-feeling because the people who would once have been its natural targets now run the institutions that commission, criticise and cancel.

Sacha Baron Cohen is an awkward figure to place inside that story, which is precisely why the observation that he is hoisted by his own petard has force. The early Ali G and Borat material was transgressive in a way that cut across almost everyone: politicians, celebrities, ordinary Americans, the socially ambitious and the socially inept. It was not written as a brief for any contemporary campus consensus. Later Cohen, however, became a prominent advocate of a much narrower idea of permissible speech. In his 2019 Anti-Defamation League address he described social media as "the greatest propaganda machine in history," insisted that "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach." That is not the language of a robust free-speech maximalist. It is the language of someone who believes certain categories of speech should be denied amplification because they are false, hateful or politically corrosive. When the same cultural machinery that he helped legitimise now turns on one of his own oldest characters and labels it racist, the irony is structural rather than accidental.

Calling Cohen's humour "the dregs of woke" overstates the case if it is meant to describe the original Ali G sketches, which predated the present settlement and mocked the very pretensions that later became sacred. It is closer to the mark if it describes the later career in which the same performer used the prestige earned by those sketches to argue for institutional control of "reach," to make a Borat sequel that functioned as an explicit indictment of Trumpism, and to treat platform moderation as a moral duty rather than a threat to comedy itself. The result is a comedian who once specialised in making people reveal themselves by talking to an idiot in a tracksuit now finding that the idiot in a tracksuit is being boycotted by people who have absorbed the very doctrine he promoted: that some jokes, some impersonations and some subjects are no longer available because they fail a test of harm. Roberts is right that the culture has become static and that the big subjects: grooming gangs, the medicalisation of children, the casual antisemitism that has become respectable in parts of the progressive Left, are treated as too hot to touch. Cohen's own trajectory helps explain why. A performer who once relied on the licence to be outrageous later spent considerable energy arguing that licence should be withdrawn from others. The return of Ali G therefore looks less like a daring revival than like a man meeting the rules he helped write. The film may still be mildly funny; the predicament is not.

https://spectator.com/article/ali-g-and-the-death-of-comedy/