Who’s Sacha Baron Cohen Laughing At?

CULTURE

Spiritual mutilation, not performance art

By Titus Techera · October 19, 2026 · 8 min read

Sacha Baron Cohen is back with another Ali G movie, straight-to-Amazon trash for an increasingly debased audience that can’t summon the contempt to look away from the slop. That’s the marketing bet, at least, rehashing the last generation's sad attempts at comedy. A retired IP meant to remind you of the trash that predated woke trash, which in turn can now be replaced by AI trash. But what’s Ali G doing in your Amazon Prime recommendations? He’s here to remind you that you can take self-hatred too far as a Jew. He’s here to give self-hatred a bad name in the eternal quest for belonging.

But how could it be otherwise? It’s very hard to tell stories if you have no motive to do so, and comedy only has two major motives. One is sex and the other is anger: you’re either trying to get laid or you’re fighting. Retards might call anger your hypothalamic fight-or-flight response, but anyone who’s done enough drinking knows better. The world makes more sense if you’re not sober. Comedy builds on that kind of enthusiasm. If you don’t get it, you’re what comedians make fun of, and that’s another reason to have a drink, so it all comes to the same thing in the end.

So we don’t have comedies anymore. Why is that? One way of looking at it is, we don’t have comedians anymore: We ran out of funny Jews. America had a long love-contempt affair with funny Jews starting in the mid-century. I have honest admiration for their chutzpah and talent for irony. In the clearest refutation of Freudian theory of the psyche, the WASPs turned out to have little ego and less id. The horrible, nameless secret at the core of white-shoe law firms and philanthropy galas turned out to be Woody Allen. That’s the unspeakable thing that rears its ugly head when you stop with repression and get rid of Victorian morality. When did we run out of Jews and why then? Woody is still alive, though barely—he’s 90. But he’s been canceled. Was it #MeToo then? No, it was before that. It was Muslim-flavored Ivy League Jew-hatred, for example. Jews have been kicked out of elite liberalism over the last two decades and they’ve done nothing about it—nothing but try out fantasies like the five stages of grief.

Jews got old, soft, and sentimental, like all Boomers. They thought they were cooking up progress, but they found themselves on the menu. That’s another way of “feeling seen.” Tough, but here’s something to make it go down easier. The world was turning to trash as early as 2004, when Ali G gave the Harvard Class Day speech. Harvard used to produce funny Jews who wrote for The Simpsons by the dozen. Not anymore, so perhaps it made sense to import them.

Back to Ali G, who is a Muslim rap teaser trailer from 2000 for what we in 2026 call Yookay, the dysfunctional multi-cultural great replacement hellscape so rife with crime, corruption, and an incompetent overbearing government that only mass arrests over tweets can keep a lid on the brewing populist revolt. How did this become glamorous? He has three Oscar nominations among a slew of other awards, Globes, BAFTAs, Emmys, whatever you can think of—remember MTV awards? Evidence of an industry setting itself on fire. Evidence, too, of the self-loathing of a Cambridge student brought up to play the cello (remember musical Jews?) who prostitutes his talent in showbiz.

But what if rap was the necessary consequence of liberal Jewish pieties? Baron Cohen studied history at Cambridge and all of his career is about finding ways to mock Jew-haters. That’s the real anger that drives him. But studying history in order to write about antisemitism is suicide-by-liberalism for any talented artist. Worse, he wrote a dissertation on civil rights (he did research at the MLK Center) about how Jews identified with blacks. Isn’t that self-loathing, too? Then there’s the problem of escapism. It seemed cool then to play a wannabe Muslim rapper mocking respectability. But today only poor people fly the English flag. Mission accomplished! Slavishness to every liberal media fad in America is government policy in Britain. After the Ali G media invasion, they got a real Muslim invasion. It’s not just bad taste; it’s mass rape. Ali G turns out to have been prophetic, a kind of Progressive version of Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell. Needless to say, in the Progressive version, the horror is the attraction. Baron Cohen is as much to blame as any other Progressive. How funny is that?

In that slavishly imitative Britain, Baron Cohen set about conquering America, the only thing left for the British to do. He made a fortune with Borat 20 years ago, putting on another Jew-hating character, this time to mock Bush’s America in one pathetic stunt after another. He may have been the last Jew to mock the WASP, before that comedic tradition ran out of things to mock and then ran out of time. Borat is supposed to be a Muslim from Central Asia, suitably, safely foreign. Well, Muslims are now running for the Senate in the Midwest, and are already in Congress, talking about how they hate America. These caricatural figures like Abdul El-Sayed and Ilhan Omar might as well be Ali G’s siblings; but they’d maybe murder Baron Cohen, unless they’re as cowardly as he is—think of Hasan Piker. Mocking Muslims made Baron Cohen’s career, but are all the smug Progressives laughing now?

But I started with comedy and its fuel, anger. So what is Baron Cohen angry about? He is angry because he’s a Jew and the Jews have suffered so much—it’s humiliating to keep taking losses; you might want revenge. Revenge on the evil Germans would be to make them gay: Baron Cohen calls that revenge fantasy Bruno. When it’s not Nazis, it’s Muslims, as in Ali G. G stands for gangster, but how about Ali? That was the son-in-law of Muhammad. Reducing Islam to third-world trashy behavior in low comedy is some kind of revenge fantasy, too.

But showbiz is still business. For three generations, mocking the WASPs or white ethnics (Italians especially) has been a Jewish comedy specialty in America, but comic relief only works so long as America is strong. It only works for Jews while other people keep them safe. Nowadays, Jews are getting stabbed in NYC as though it were London. At some point, it isn’t comedy as much as suicidal smugness. The difference is obvious to everyone, because it’s life and death. Liberal Jews now seem oddly willing to sacrifice themselves to progress.

In the past, Jewish comedians might have loved to see WASPs as gluttons for punishment, being mocked while they sip their cocktails in nightclubs thinking about what to do to which mistress, and asking for more. But then Jews ended up simply taking their place as necessary scapegoats in the hysteria-NGO voting machinery of the left. They obviously understand neither politics nor their dangers. What artists understand is that liberals need to be able to feel contempt for America, lest fear or shame overwhelm them. So that’s the service they provide. Baron Cohen is little better than SSRIs chased with a California Chardonnay.

And that’s the other reason Baron Cohen is angry: What made for Jewish success is this is sort of willing half-assimilation. Hence his comedies involve self-annihilation. He has become famous for becoming some kind of savage on screen. He’s the ape of the ape, to be Shakespearean for a moment. He satisfies liberal nostalgie de la boue: Minstrel shows for people with urban elite aspirations who hate learning and good taste. How was that ever going to lead to art?

This reminds us why Jews are proud of themselves, despite all those losses and exterminations. Jews insist on staying Jews because they have divine law on their side. They are, accordingly, civilized. Whereas lots of conquerors are savages. Even in his self-debasing way, the shock success of Ali G was just as much an attack on savages as other shock artists like Andrew Dice Clay and Howard Stern.

What Baron Cohen did to himself is spiritual mutilation, not performance art—but performance art is all that’s left of comedy: Look at Nathan Fielder, who worked on Baron Cohen’s Who is America Showtime series a decade back. This is the death of comedy, a kind of prestidigitation for a small sophisticated audience that has lost any connection to the masses. Humor based on manipulation and preying on the goodwill of the sincere; the worst impulses for Jews to indulge in. I guess glamorizing mutilated souls is a parody of the Romantic idea of the artist, whose very suffering in contact with modernity, science, and the bourgeoisie is proof of his aristocratic superiority, his dedication to beauty. But the results are worthless. We need to see that to give comedy a chance to return. That return would involve artists who have the confidence to judge the elites that have gotten us in this mess instead of flattering them. Because comedy is about anger. In our current “burn it all down” mood, a comic attack on elites might be the moderate option.