Cinema

Sacha Baron Cohen: I Know a Lot of People Hate Me

First published in Arabic in March 2016: Sacha Baron Cohen on his $1m gift to Syrian refugees, the people who hate him, Ali G's critics and the ethics of a joke.

Husam Sam Asi 10 March 2016

Husam Sam Asi with Sacha Baron Cohen during the Grimsby interviews, 3 March 2016. Photo: Magnus Sundholm for the HFPA.

Supporters of Israel recently accused the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen of betrayal after he and his wife, the Australian actress Isla Fisher, announced that they were giving $1 million to Syrian refugees. “Isn’t it his duty as a Jew to support his own people rather than their enemies?” they asked. When I interviewed him a few days ago at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, he told me that, as the father and mother of three children, they felt they had to help when they saw the suffering of Syrian children on their television screens.

“I think this is the biggest humanitarian tragedy since the Second World War, and it is changing the world. Five years of inaction by the international community created the refugee crisis, and that is going to change Europe completely,” says Baron Cohen, who was born in west London to a Jewish father who ran a clothes shop and an Israeli mother who taught dance.

The couple gave half of the money to Save the Children to fund a campaign to vaccinate children in northern Syria against measles, and the other half to the International Rescue Committee to help refugees in Syria and its neighbours, above all women and children, with healthcare, shelter and basic services.

Baron Cohen and his wife give to different charitable projects every year, but this is the first time they have done so publicly. “The truth is that the people running the two charities asked us to announce the donation, because they felt the situation in Syria was terrible and that our announcement would draw the world’s attention to this tragedy,” he adds. Then he switches from seriousness to satire to remind me of what he told me in our interview four years ago, when he turned up in character as General Aladeen from The Dictator, which he co-wrote and starred in. “Remember when I told you: on behalf of my friend President Assad, I want to thank the United Nations for its great laziness on Syria,” he cries, mimicking the dictator’s voice.

The people who hate him

Baron Cohen is no stranger to controversy. Since his career in television comedy began in the late 1990s he has faced scathing criticism and legal threats from people who fell into the trap of his satire and accused him of insulting and defaming them. The traps were his characters: Ali G, the white Briton who imitates black culture; Borat Sagdiyev, the Kazakh journalist; Brüno Gehard, the gay fashion presenter; and General Aladeen, the dictator of Wadiya. These are idiots who respect no social code, professional ethics or human values, and through them Baron Cohen has exposed the racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia that run through the United States (Borat), homophobia and the shallowness of the fashion world (Brüno), the ignorance of the white British working-class man (Ali G) and the madness of Arab rulers (General Aladeen).

The Kazakh government threatened legal action, accusing him of presenting a false and distorted picture of the country through Borat’s immoral statements and behaviour. Ali G’s and Brüno’s obscene antics angered black and gay audiences respectively.

“I know a lot of people hate me,” Baron Cohen laughs. “I make my films for myself, for my friends and for my fans. In the end you can’t please everyone. Whenever I tell them that Ali G isn’t black, he wants to be black, they ask me: why didn’t you make that clear? But if you bring comedy down to the lowest common denominator so that nobody can misunderstand it, it stops being art and becomes empty jokes to make people laugh. Over the years my style of comedy has been loved by some people and hated by others. But nobody is forced to watch my films.”

From Life of Brian to Peter Sellers

He took this style from Monty Python, the surreal British comedy troupe that first appeared on the BBC in 1969 with a biting brand of television comedy that crossed the limits of what was then acceptable in style and content. It reached its peak with the controversial film Life of Brian, which mocked religion. “The first film I ever saw was Life of Brian,” says Baron Cohen, who is 44. “I was eight years old and I sneaked into the cinema with my brother, and all I remember is gasping for breath from laughing so hard and watching the audience shaking with laughter. That’s what drew me to physical comedy, the kind that shakes a whole audience.”

The method of delivering comedy by inhabiting fictional characters came from the British comedian Peter Sellers, who created Inspector Clouseau, Dr Strangelove and Chauncey Gardiner. “For me Peter Sellers was one of the great wonders, because he created comic characters who were funny but completely believable. You didn’t see the comedian behind these characters, and you believed they were real,” says Baron Cohen, who studied history at Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights, the club that launched members of Monty Python.

A family film, of sorts

These days Baron Cohen is promoting his new comedy Grimsby, in which he plays an idiot named Nobby who lives in an English fishing town with his girlfriend Dawn (Rebel Wilson) and their eleven children. Nobby has spent 28 years searching for his lost brother (Mark Strong), and when he finds him he discovers that he is a secret agent for British intelligence and the victim of a sinister plot that has forced him to go on the run. The idiot Nobby and his seasoned brother fight fierce and funny battles against the villains to save themselves and the world.

As we have come to expect from Baron Cohen’s earlier films, Grimsby is packed with crude satire and revolting sex jokes. What sets it apart are its action scenes, which are as thrilling as anything in a Bond film, and the contrast between its two heroes. Nobby spends his time watching football with his unruly children or drinking beer with his simple mates in the pub, while his loner brother fights bloody battles with arms and drug dealers and crushes them one by one, with his bare hands or his lethal weapons. The joke is that Nobby’s stupidity, spontaneity and recklessness save his brother from certain death several times and do more damage to the villains than all his brother’s skill.

Although the film is full of vulgar and shocking scenes of nudity and sex, Baron Cohen insists that Grimsby is a family film. “But a very strange one,” he admits, laughing. “What I wanted from this film was, first, for it to be an effective action film, second, for it to be funny, and third, for it to be built on the emotional bond between the two brothers. The result was a film about an eccentric family.”

Watching this film and his previous ones suggests that this artist’s comedy has no limits, that he smashes every ethic, social convention and rule of political correctness we know against the wall and ignores his critics. He denies it. He insists that he debates the morality of every joke with his team of writers before it goes into a film, and that a great many of his jokes never saw the light of day because they were unethical or wrong for the moment. “There are things it is impossible to laugh at right now, and you have to make sure your jokes question and weaken negative stereotypes about people. As a comedian you deal with things whose limits you must not cross, otherwise it is irresponsible,” Baron Cohen concludes.