Strib Guy

Obviously this is dumb because Cohen’s entire routine is caricature, and if you enjoyed it in the past there’s no reason to get all precious about it now. But that’s not actually what bothers me about him. If you watch his movies, the main butt of the joke is rarely the person or group he’s impersonating—it’s not Kazakhs in Borat or gay people in Brüno, for example, except incidentally. His real target is the normal people he fools in his interviews. This is actually what makes Cohen’s work more interesting than straight caricature, and also more genuinely disturbing to me. If you really wanted to mount an interesting critique of him, instead of this bargain-bin automated stock chatter belched up semi-consciously by social media drones, it would be this: The real nature of Cohen’s comedy, the thing that gives it its lingering bite, is inverse caricature. The people who really end up depicted as a childish finger-paint cartoon of their worst selves are the chuds and the rubes whom he proposes to fool and expose. Some of them are public figures behaving in truly abominable ways. Fair enough. But often they’re normal decent people who don’t spend their whole lives inhaling media commentary and don’t have anything like Cohen’s knowing sophistication to protect themselves from looking foolish. Often they’re very nice to what they think is an odd stranger. Often they reach out with enormous grace. You get the impression that in 99 per cent of the actual interactions they’re called upon to perform, these people are vastly superior morally to Cohen, and probably to you or me. Some of them are probably better people than us. But Cohen’s huge wealth and fame depends on catching them out in their blind spots and limitations, which are more vulnerable than the ones we in the know have learned to hide with our faddish affectations. We all have such limitations, and yes, they’re always funny, but is it a little petty and small of Cohen to constantly ridicule them in others while making himself the knowing hero, the genius of comedy? I don’t know, I laugh too. But it makes me a little queasy. That is the sort of thing we could have an interesting conversation about if we had a culture instead of a pre-fabricated set of modal stock outrages prepared for us via algorithm.