July 15, 2018

Sacha Baron Cohen’s New Show Is So Much Darker Than You Think

With jokes about rape and arming kindergartners, the Borat star hits a nerve.

Sacha Baron Cohen arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday, March 4, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Washington has been buzzing for a week about the upcoming new Showtime series by Sacha Baron Cohen, Who is America? after news leaked that the Borat star had tricked a host of politicos from Dick Cheney to Sarah Palin into appearing on the show. On Sunday, Showtime released an extensive clip from the forthcoming series, and if it’s any indication of what the rest of the series will be like, it’s a lot darker even than advertised.

In the 10-minute clip, Cohen masquerades as an Israeli anti-terrorist expert hoping to convince Congress to embrace a program designed to arm kindergarten students to defend against mass school shooters:

Among those he recruits to support the program is Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, a gun lobby group that’s more extreme even than the National Rifle Association.

On the show, Pratt buys into the idea of arming children, which perhaps isn’t surprising. What is surprising is his belly-laughing response to a joke from Cohen, who tells Pratt that his wife, who has a gun, shot him in bed in the middle of the night because he got “horny.”

“But it’s not rape if it’s your wife, right?” Cohen tells Pratt knowingly, before reaching over and shaking his hand as Pratt laughs hysterically.

“That probably won’t be on the video we send to the Hill, right?” Pratt asks. Once Cohen says no, Pratt busts out laughing some more, red in the face, clearly enjoying the joke. Afterward, he offers to help Cohen make contacts with members of Congress to promote the armed kindergartners program.

The provocative sizzle reel is making the rounds today, and it’s already eliciting strong reactions on Twitter. Here’s Shannon Watts, founder of anti-gun-violence group Moms Demand Action:

From the father of a victim of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida:

And this:

https://twitter.com/katystoll/status/1018515421178179584

The Atlantic‘s David Frum wasn’t laughing:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate