Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? ended up being better fodder for online clips and stories than it actually was as a TV show. The simple fact that Dick Cheney signed a “waterboarding kit” was, in a grim way, heaps more fun than actually watching Dick Cheney being fooled into talking to the Borat guy in a prosthetic face.
And even though the show is, according to Cohen, not returning for a second season – “it would be impossible”, he says, to trick anyone significant into an interview with another one of his bizarre characters – he gave a fascinating interview to Deadline where he revealed a number of details about the process of making the show.
He says his Israeli military veteran character, “someone who’d killed with their bare hands”, seemed to inspire admiration in Dick Cheney, “like a virgin sitting next to a womaniser”. He said the famous interview with Sarah Palin, which provided much of the publicity through her unprompted, outraged statements to the press about being fooled, never made it into the show because her “rote” answers left zero room for actual comedy.
not funny mulaney
And he revealed that one interview was too horrifying even for a show where they got two actual Congressmen to endorse giving guns to literal toddlers.
Cohen’s white-ponytailed playboy-turned-fixer character, Gio Monaldo, tried to get a concierge in Las Vegas to help “him” cover up assaulting a little boy.
“We wanted to investigate how does someone like Harvey Weinstein gets away with doing what…get away with criminality, essentially. And the network that surrounds him,” Cohen explained, recalling that when Gio revealed that “he” had molested an eight-year-old child, the man did not, as he expected, get up and leave the room.
“This guy starts advising Gio how to get rid of this issue. We even at one point talk about murdering the boy, and the concierge is just saying, ‘Well, listen, I’m really sorry. In this country, we can’t just drown the boy. This is America, we don’t do that.’
“And then, in the end, he puts me in touch with a lawyer who can silence the boy.”
And then, when Gio asked if he can find him a boy aged “lower than Bar Mitzvah but older than eight” for a “date” that night, the man replied: “Yeah, I can put you in touch with somebody who can get you some boys like that.”
Cohen and his team turned the footage over to the FBI “immediately”.
“It was too dark and wrong. In a journalistic way it was fascinating, but it was so extreme and so dark that it was too unsettling for the audience,” he explains.
It’s important that Cohen uses the word “journalistic” there. As the interview points out, he is often dismissed as a “prankster” – but the people he interviewed for Who Is America are serious people with influence and power, or hidden but very real figures like the concierge above who make some evil s**t far too easy for the powerful people to get away with.
He’s not a journalist, and the revelations he got out of those interviews weren’t exactly obtained by means that any respectable reporter would endorse.
But they were often so appalling or absurd that the fact that they were revealing themselves to a comedian in a costume paled in comparison to the words they were saying, of their own volition, in a situation they believed was real, and knew was being filmed.
The whole interview is here, and it’s a must-read.