His Ali G character is “a cover to laugh at Jamaican culture”, said media-monitoring site NewsCord, as it launched a campaign for cinemas not to show Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film. Returning to the screen after 20 years, Ali G “is a white man pretending to be Jamaican”, so he “smokes weed, is a misogynist, and does nothing meaningful in life”. And while “the world laughs at Ali G”, the “real butt of the joke are Black people”.
‘Fun police’
“Ali G: Who Iz I?” is due for release in October and the trailer features “some of the escapades and pranks” in Baron Cohen’s second feature-length comedy “starring the academically challenged west Staines rude boy character”, said The Guardian. “Sporting new dreadlocks”, Ali G says that in the two decades since we last saw him, “the world went to crap: there was Covid, wars and Ed Sheeran”.
Within days of the trailer’s release, activists responding to NewsCord’s urgings had sent more than 40,000 emails to 15 major cinema chains. “The fun police are already out in force” with their efforts “to cancel the leader of Da West Staines Massif”, said The Telegraph’s culture writer, Liam Kelly. The letters of complaint are “AI-generated” and “tweaked” for each cinema chain but “one thing is consistent: Ali G is beyond the pale”.
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It’s the British Board of Film Classification which “ultimately” decides whether a film is “fit to be shown on the UK’s big screens” and “it would be a massive surprise” if this one “were not given a certificate”. So all this outrage is “ludicrous”.
Cinemas are not censors, Phil Clapp of the UK Cinema Association told Variety. “They are there to engage and entertain the widest possible audience”; they are not “arbiters of public taste”.
‘Moribund culture’
“Any sensible person” can “see straight away” that Baron Cohen “does not depict or intend to depict Black men of any description”, said Zimbabwean author Masimba Musodza in The Times of Israel. He’s actually “poking fun at white youth” who have “consumed caricatures” of Black British masculinity in popular culture and “mistaken them for reality”.
There’s something “uncomfortable” in the assumption that “reproducing those stereotypes” in order to ridicule the person reproducing them “constitutes an attack upon Black people themselves”. Besides, “the answer to bad ideas in art” isn’t always censorship; “sometimes, it is simply to watch the bloody thing and understand the joke”.
Baron Cohen himself has acknowledged the censoriousness of today’s culture. “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back”, he said on X.
For others, though, Ali G’s return is less shocking than tedious. It’s “nah, you’re alright thanks” news, said Laura Martin in Esquire. When the vintage comedy character “crashed” Wimbledon fortnight this summer, “claiming to be the tournament’s official weed dealer” and joking that the royal box has nothing to do with the “queen’s punani”, the “three-decade-old gags” had not “aged well”.
The reappearance of the “bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive” is a “disquieting symptom” of a “moribund culture” that’s stifled by the grip of “ultra-progressive cliques” and “the dead hand of Bluesky thinking”, said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. “We just have to go patiently through, however long it takes, and hope that the big film of 2052 is not Ali G in a retirement home.”
