--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, Kainaz. Hi, Sean. Visuals editor here at Vox.
--:-- Kainaz: Hi, Sean. You just got back from like a trip. I did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you got engaged. That's right.
--:-- Kainaz: And I thought it'd be nice if we got you a little gift.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, thank you. Do you see the box in that studio?
--:-- Kainaz: I do. Can you guess what's in there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, I can. What do you think is in there?
--:-- Kainaz: I think it's a toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, don't open it yet. We should have some suspense, you know?
--:-- Kainaz: What do you mean?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The label says Quip.
--:-- Kainaz: Does it say getquip.com slash explained?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, but it says Quip.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right. Remember Sacha Baron Cohen?
--:-- Kainaz: This is my wife. That's a nish nish. Booyakasha!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's back with a new show, Who is America?
--:-- Kainaz: In America, there is big problem of shootings in schools. The NRA want to arm the teachers. This is crazy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You should be arming the children. Yalla!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems like it was done in pretty extreme secrecy, but there's going to be seven episodes unfolding over the next several weeks.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Todd Vanderwerf writes about TV for Vox. He also hosts a podcast called I Think You're Interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's really just kind of a revisit of the format he set up on Oli G's show, where he plays these characters who go out and interview people.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Most of the people he's interviewing are everyday Americans, but the show's getting a ton of attention right out of the gate because some of the people he's interviewing are famous, like Dick Cheney, Bernie Sanders, Sarah Palin famous.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of them are very mad at Sacha Baron Cohen right now.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Various political figures, mostly on the right, were talking about how they had been duped into recording an interview for some sort of program.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most notably, you had Sarah Palin and Roy Moore saying, you know, I was tricked, I was duped.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And that really sort of brought the program to a new level of publicity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in a way, that's a fascinating and shrewd publicity strategy because everybody had heard about this show.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: What were people like Sarah Palin and Roy Moore saying specifically?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Were they getting into how they were duped or just saying, you know, that's Sacha Baron Cohen. I'm going to sue him if I get the chance.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Roy Moore definitely said he was going to sue for defamation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sarah Palin, however, talked a little bit about how she was duped, which was she was told it was a program about veterans, she says.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: She actually flew herself out to be on this program, and then she discovered it was not the case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, this quote-unquote comedian is obviously very good at lying, at duping people, because look at the long list now, since I've come out and described my experience.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: All these other guys, all these men coming out now saying, oh, yeah, me too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It certainly seems like they kind of used the tools of the media and how these things typically work to sort of trick some people into appearing.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And that's to say that he wasn't offering money for these interviews. He was just offering publicity on an issue that might look good for the subject of his interview.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't seem that he was paying anybody off.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Again, this is all sort of shrouded in secrecy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But yeah, it really was like you watch in the first episode, he talks to Bernie Sanders and he's talking about income inequality and the Sacha Baron Cohen character is, you know, being very stupid about it, as you'd expect.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And Bernie Sanders sort of sits there in befuddlement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rather than complain about the 1% or the 0.1%, why not make the rest of America and put them into the 1%?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Well, if you put everybody into the 1%, they wouldn't be the 1%.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, no, it still would be.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: No, it wouldn't be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If I can, the rest of the population, by definition, they're not in the 1% if they're the rest of the population.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But all of the population is 100%.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And like you can imagine that the email to Bernie Sanders was like, we want to have this guy interview you about income inequality.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And that's a thing that Bernie Sanders likes to talk about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he was only too willing to go on television to do so.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Bernie opens the first episode, but the rest of it is basically skewering people on the right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've seen another episode. Who's he targeting here?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I honestly don't know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It does seem like the humor is primarily aimed at sort of making fun of conservatives, but not specifically Trump supporters.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Like Trump is not really brought up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you look at the various Republican figures we know are in the show, it's people like Roy Moore, like Sarah Palin. Dick Cheney is in the trailers that they released.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I hope you tune in next week for an interview with me
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: There a long gap between when these people were most relevant and where they are right now
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that not to say that you can like do humor about them
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But like if you're talking about the modern state of the Republican Party and if you want to do comedy about that, like this is kind of stuck 10 years ago, you know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first episode aired Sunday night.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Did it get people talking? Did it have the intended effect?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the final segment, which features a number of Republican lawmakers and spokespeople and things like that, reading from what seems like a teleprompter or cue cards or something, their support for a program that will arm toddlers and other young children with guns.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good kid with a gun. A good kid with a gun. A good child with a gun. Happy shooting, kids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I saw everyone talking about that segment online on Sunday.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Does this feel new, like something Sacha Baron Cohen hasn't done before?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is very much within his MO.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: He certainly has always tried to get people to follow the logical ends of their political logic to sort of extreme outlying positions and then like seem as if they're defending those positions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So a lot of people I know who are tuned into the pop culture sphere were like, oh, OK, he's doing, you know, Ali G's show for 2018.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And he's invented new characters because his old ones are now so recognizable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He can't very well do Borat anymore, you know, because everybody knows who Borat is.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: So he had to come up with new characters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A friend of mine, like, like texted me and was like, is Sacha Baron Cohen going to bring down the Trump administration?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I was like, no, like, if he had done that, we would know, you know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was this weird confluence of like, it's the same thing he's always done.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And then this wild overhype that was sort of driven by Sarah Palin and Roy Moore being very upset about what had happened to them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That, you know, like just got turned into this over the top sense that this was going to be more than it could ever possibly be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sacha Baron Cohen may not be taking down any politicians anytime soon, but is who is America hurting America?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Do we still need to laugh at trolls?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramas from that's next on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never been able to like not just rip through a gift as a kid.
--:-- Kainaz: And you're still young at heart.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, my birthday is July 4th. It's perfect.
--:-- Kainaz: Tell the people what you're experiencing right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so I just ripped open a box and in it is a silver bag with a Ziploc on top.
--:-- Kainaz: It feels very spacey. Very sort of modern.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It looks very spacey. It's beautiful. I love the color.
--:-- Kainaz: Oh, yeah. It's like a toothbrush in a vial. It's of the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. The design is really gorgeous. It's really easy to sort of open up. You're like unscrewing it.
--:-- Kainaz: Unscrewing it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you want to see some of the ones I didn't get you, there's more at getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Kainaz: It looks, hey, I'm a sucker for design, so this is great.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Happy birthday. Happy marriage. Happy wedding. Happy engagement. Happy Quip toothbrush.
--:-- Kainaz: You're so kind. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Todd, Sacha Baron Cohen built this wildly successful brand of comedy partly on making powerful people look stupid, on tricking them.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Does that still make sense in 2018 when Donald Trump is president?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't want to say there's no longer room for comedy like that.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But comedy like that has to be cognizant of the fact that it's in a world where trolling as comedy not only is everywhere on the internet, but also arguably helped get a president elected in 2016.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who is America? In some ways is just more interested in upping the ante and being bigger and brassier than anything that Sacha Baron Cohen has done before.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Now, I look at a program like the Comedy Central show, Nathan for You, that show is very specifically constructed in a way that makes Nathan Fielder as much a butt of the joke as anybody he interviews.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I feel like Who is America does that sometimes, but it varies from segment to segment.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And also it doesn't really have a point beyond people are stupid and will do things to be on television.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yeah great But that joke has been made so many times before that I don't know what I'm getting out of it seeing it again
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Was there a time where this actually worked Where we trolling someone the way Sacha Baron Cohen doing now and has in the past accomplished something other than an easy laugh
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I feel like Borat is a really smart dissection of American civility culture, which is the thing we're talking about a lot in this day and age, as a matter of fact.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: That movie is about how many Americans, and especially white Americans, are interested in being polite to the detriment sometimes of doing what's right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Borat, of course, places that in a comedic context.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But I think it's an interesting way to look at what happens when you have this guy standing up in front of you who says that in his country they sing a song called Throw the Jew Down the Well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of people sing along.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Oh, my country can be free. Oh, my country can be free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You must grab me by his arms.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: You must grab me by his arms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me have a big party.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like that is a dissection of a fundamental American thing that we like to be polite above all else.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And it sort of points out comedically where that can fail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have problems with that movie.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I don't always like the way that Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy like takes people who have so much less power than him and then like makes fun of them endlessly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think Borat had a message that so far who is America just doesn't.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Yeah, it's like it doesn't have a thesis statement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think so.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I think that they're trying to answer the question posed in the title.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But so far, they've mostly just come up with we're angry and we're a little bit stupid.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: That's fine, I guess.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that would probably be like revolutionary in 2003.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But there are so many people on YouTube who just do his thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm using a lot of air quotes around this, journalists, especially on the right, who do like, they put on a disguise and try to like get various people on the left to admit to something unsavory.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: James O'Keefe is kind of the famous example of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We posed as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and we said we wanted to make a $5 million donation to National Public Radio.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: We used hidden cameras and met with their senior vice president for fundraising, Ron Schiller.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were caught on tape ingratiating themselves to our fictitious Muslims, calling the Tea Party racist.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: We really just like live in this world that Sacha Baron Cohen created in some regards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't know how you cope with that when you're the guy who sort of started this movement.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And of course, he was building off plenty of other people in the past and the most famous one being like Candid Camera.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he really upped the ante for wetting that with a performance with playing a character and now it's everywhere and I feel like who is america just doesn't have what it takes to to exceed so far beyond them that you watch it without thinking i guess this is okay
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Is there something here about the limits of this kind of comedy
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I remember back when john stewart and stephen colbert held the rally to restore sanity here in dc
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I went down there with like 200 000 other people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And they just played peace train.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it transitioned into crazy train.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Like nothing actually happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there just a limit to what satire can do politically?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I think that what we're seeing here is this divide I talked about before, Who Is America debuted, which is those of us who cover culture, who cover entertainment professionally know there are extreme limits to how comedy can reach somebody who doesn't agree with your point of view.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that people who cover politics or cover the news more heavily sort of see someone like a Jon Stewart, someone like a Sacha Baron Cohen and say, you know, he's saying exactly what I'm thinking but in a more entertaining, seemingly less confrontational way.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But comedy relies on a certain set of shared cultural values.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like one of the reasons that fart jokes are always funny is because everybody farts and everybody is embarrassed about farts and like everybody has been in a situation where they farted and didn't want to.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: That's why everybody will laugh at a fart joke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if you start telling political jokes, then you're operating on a shared cultural assumption that increasingly we know not everybody shares.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: You know 50 years ago you could make a joke about how boy the president is kind of a dummy
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And like everybody would laugh because like it was so mild
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: But now increasingly as we have these hyper polarized media landscapes our comedy has gotten hyper as well
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that means that like there's just this very limited ability for it to reach anybody beyond who it's already targeting.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And there is a limited ability for comedy to change minds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did this happen?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And I mean, I think I get how our news became so siloed, but how did this happen to comedy?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think there's two trends that are sort of playing out at this point.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: The first is kind of the death of the irony-drenched political incorrectness culture of the 1990s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shows like South Park, politically incorrect with Bill Maher.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Even Sacha Baron Cohen kind of came out of that world, which is we're going to say the most outrageous things, the most un-PC things in the name of like trying to provoke a reaction and hopefully getting at a deeper truth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That has sort of gone out on the wayside.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And on the flip side of that, you have this kind of absurdist streak that the Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Brunig has written about as millennial humor, which is basically that millennials have been placed in this context where the world seems really stacked against them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the only response to that throughout history has been absurdism.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: So you kind of have these two things that are converging in the same place, which is why somebody like Bill Maher now no longer really seems like, you know, he has a centrality in the culture that he once did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there examples of comedy you've seen within the past two years that deal with Trump in a smarter, better way than Who is America?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: My favorite example is the Comedy Central program, The President Show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very careful not to just be like, Trump is a dummy.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: It is placing him within the context of the country that created him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why can't your party pass a health care bill? Because football players, national anthem, kneeling.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Where's the outrage?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You didn't answer the question.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Excuse me, pointing out that I didn't answer the question is disrespectful to our flag.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Compare it, for instance, not to who is America, but to something that I'm relatively certain
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: And everybody listening to this will have seen, which is Alec Baldwin's impersonation of Trump on Saturday Night Live.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is an impersonation that is designed to flatter you, the left-leaning member of the audience, into thinking, boy, Donald Trump is just an idiot and I can't believe he's president, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: It is not designed to make you question the role that you play in a society that led to his rise and the way that the President's Show is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The President's show, there is a central question to that program that a lot of political humor has lost, which is like, what is our shared cultural value?
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: What has led to the rise of Trump and how are all of us a part of it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that Who is America, while I certainly found bits of it very funny, it is kind of stuck in this old way of looking at political humor, and that ultimately hurts it.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Todd Vanderwerf hosts the podcast I Think You're Interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's from Vox, as is this one.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: My name is Natalie Idron.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I live in Malmö, Sweden.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: My favorite episode of Today Explained would probably be the one about the really expensive ice pack because it's so absurd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And getting a bill after you take an ambulance is crazy.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Oh and here's a brief shout out to your twitter account at today underscore explained since it sounds like you've never been to getquip.com slash explained
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder what do you what do you got at home what are you sporting
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I've got a standard toothbrush that sort of vibrates
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh you do yeah
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Oh, like the kind you buy at like a CVS or something?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I won't tell you the brand because that's not kind.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: That's weird.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Okay. So I'll just go with the quip.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Okay. Or like one can become your work toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So like, you know, no one needs to waste things.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Oh, is that a hint?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, no, no, not at all.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Is that what you said?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yo, it's your birthday.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: I'm not going to talk smack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Guess I need a work toothbrush.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: News to me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Congratulations.
--:-- Todd VanDerWerff: Thank you, Sean.
