The backlash over the Ali G movie, and the Raygun documentary

This week on Two Blocks from the White House. It's been a week since the U.S. midterms, but there are still a lot of swirling questions. What will the Republicans and Democrats do next? What led to the big Democrat gains in the South? And what does the Democratic victory mean for trade with Canada? Find and follow Two Blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. And watch us on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. This is a CBC Podcast. So Sacha Baron Cohen is going back to one of his earliest characters. He's making a new Ali G movie. It's called Ali G, Who Is I? And I can't imagine the news is landing how he expected, because there's a petition with more than 30,000 supporters hoping to ban the movie from UK theaters. I'm Elamin Abdelmahmoud. This is Commotion. Elle Jones is here. Marlon Palmer is here. Rad Simon-Pillay is here. Good morning, all of you. Nice to see you. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, everybody. Listen, we've got a lot to talk about. This Ali G story. We're also going to talk about this new Netflix doc about the Ray Gunn story. But let us begin, if you don't mind, right here. Yo, it's me, Ali G. I've been gone for 20 years, chilling. And in that time, the world went to crap. There was COVID. Wars. And Ed Sheeran. I is going to get back on top with a brand new thing called a documentary. Oh, yeah, gotcha! Oof. Okay, that is a bit of the trailer for the film Ali G, Who Is I? And Rad, I pose that question to you, sir. Who is Ali G? Remind us if you don't mind. So, Ali G is one of the characters that Sacha Baron Cohen puts on. And when I say puts on, I mean he puts on a full-on costume. Very bright baggy. He tracksuit, do-rag, you know, like thick sunglasses. Definitely. And putting on this really heavily caricatured British-Jamaican accent. And the whole persona is this caricature that he uses to go stealth, right? He goes stealth in interviews. He goes stealth in situations of the wild. Trying to disarm people whenever he's in their presence before he hits them with, like, a real question. Which is, and the people we're talking about are sometimes politicians. Sometimes activists. And that's his whole stick. It's the kind of thing, it's a trap that he sets up to get these gotcha moments with people. As he does with his other characters like Bruno and Borat. And then, you know, of course this character he created on this sketch comedy show called The 11 O'Clock News. Before getting the Ali G show. And this is all like late 90s, early 2000s. When not all of us were really questioning these kinds of antics. But here we are 20 years later and he's bringing these characters back. And we gotta wonder, why? Well, I'll ask you this. Because I don't remember a petition about the Borat movie. I don't remember a petition about the Bruno movie. There was a petition in the UK with more than 30,000 people who signed this thing. Saying they want to ban this from theaters. Why is Ali G getting that reaction, Rad? Well, I mean, I think, of course, you know, in the 20 years since, black voices are being heard just a bit more. Right? And then the idea of putting on a sort of blackface. Putting on these racial caricatures. We're not seeing it. We're not embracing it the way we did before. I mean, in the past, people thought that, like, you know, I've seen him being celebrated so much for putting on these antics. Because he's not, you know, mocking these cultures so much as he's like skewing, apparently, the white people and the privileged people that he's interviewing and stuff. Right? So we gave him a lot of passes for the political points he was scoring, I think. Especially when you look at something like Borat. Where, you know, it's coming out in the middle of the war on terror and stuff. And he's using this extreme Muslim caricature who has seven wives and all that stuff to send up what America was in that state. The guy won an Oscar or was nominated for an Oscar for that. Right? Won a Golden Globe for Borat. Yeah, exactly. So it's like he's built all of this cred where he seemed to show how he could use this type of comedy as a prop to take on the kind of the political situation in the U.S. But then what about the prop? Right? What about what he's weaponizing? Right? Like where this is this offensive gag that doesn't necessarily consider who it's hurting. And how many people are laughing at that instead of the people that they should be laughing at? That's a good point. I think maybe we should explain that a little bit more. Marlon, I'll come to you on this. Like the backlash to Ali G is not a new thing. It's something that goes all the way back to the 2000s when this character first came out. Most of the criticisms come from black comedians and culture critics in the U.K. What are their main issues with the Ali G character? Well, he's like U.K. sick to my stomachs. You know what I mean? It's like back in the day that might have been funny, but now it's just like, what are we doing? And I think, like Rad said, a lot of people are more conscious and more socially aware, especially black people. And I think things that we used to find is just entertainment. We see how slippery of a slope that can become. We have more. We have more evidence now that it's not just a joke to a lot of people, that there are many people outside of the culture who just take this as a monolith. And this is what black people are now. And so I think it's just a changing of the times. Right. He's also like he looks 75 in a Rasta hat in these trailers. It's kind of like, you know, that that one gift for the guy saying, hi, can I buy one weeds? If he was younger, maybe. He could pull this off. But you just look like an old white man that's just making fun of black people. OK, I think that that's a large part of where it comes from. Generally speaking, that sentence you just said, that's a bad look. An old white man making fun of black people. That sounds awful. I should also note, like, it is rare, Marlon, for comedians to come out and say, oh, that comedian is doing a thing that is bad. But so the idea that you would have comedians come out and say, you know what? We really do not approve of this allergy character. Do you want to talk about how rare that is for comedians? Critique? To critique their peers? You. Yeah, you have to be. It either has to be extremely offensive or extremely bad. And in this case, it's both. If it was pulled off more talented and like Rad said, that that political element before meant a lot more. It was a saving grace for the whole thing because it was almost presenting as, OK, yeah, I'm this hood guy, but I am still educated. I still do know what's going on. And I can challenge and push back. And with this trailer, at least, it's not looking the same at all. OK, I just want to just play a little bit more of Sacha Baron Cohen as Allergy just to remind people again of the types of things that this character would do. So this is from an episode of the Allergy show that aired in 2003. It's Allergy trying to convince at the time business tycoon Donald Trump to invest in a new product. What is the most popular thing in the world? Tell me. Ice cream. OK. Everyone has it. And what is it? What is the problem with ice cream? I have no idea. It drips. OK. Well, my idea is to come out with just like these ice cream gloves that make the ice cream not go on your hands and make it all well sticky. And also keep your hands warm. OK. When when you is eating the ice cream. OK. Is you win or is you win? You know, I just hear that and go, I don't I struggle to find the joke because the entire humor is just here's Allergy. Here's Sacha Baron Cohen. Trying to just do this accent. And that's the thing that is supposed to be funny. I'll come to you on this. Like over the years, the argument that we've heard from Sacha Baron Cohen and I guess the folks who defend him, they say that particularly, I should say, mostly non-black fans of Allergy. The character is not meant to mock black men. It's meant to mock white men who are trying to be black. What are your thoughts on that distinction? Yeah, I think in many ways it becomes a distinction without a difference. So the question we have to ask is, what is the role that blackness plays in this particular process? The portrayal. And I think we can't, for example, ignore that in twenty twenty six in black Britain, what we recently had was, of course, the story of Jason Arday, a black British academic who was hounded first out of his job and then by suicide because we had a rhetoric around saying black people are not qualified for the job. So not simply the question wasn't simply whether or not he plagiarized. It became that black people are not worthy to be in these institutions. So this is the conversation that's taking place in black. And then you have this character that uses, you know, so-called broken English that plays stupid, that is literally put on to be like, I am stupid. So therefore it disarms people. And so the question becomes, is the object of mockery white people who pretend to be black or does blackness still become this tool, as was said, in which one can project all kinds of narratives around not belonging around the inadequacy of blackness? I don't think you can separate that. So I think at this particular time, when it's such a fraught time. For black people in Britain in particular, having this conversation around their worthiness, their humanness, their qualifications and their right to life. How can you then say, OK, well, the mockery is white people. You cannot separate that from the way that he uses black stereotype and caricature to do that. I can imagine somebody listening to this conversation, Marlon, and their thoughts would be, well, can anybody sort of do satire based around race? And of course they can. There is a long history of that being done, that being done relatively well. The most prominent reason. an example is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Topic Thunder. In it, he plays a fictional white actor named Kirk Lazarus. He uses blackface to portray an African-American soldier, which in turn, that's the thing that gave us this moment. I know who I am. I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. What? You're a dude who don't know what dude he is. Or are you a dude who has no idea what dude he is and claims to know what dude he is? What the f*** are you guys talking about? I'm playing other dudes. I know what dude I am. Marlon, I've been a black man my entire life. I've searched my deep black heart for offense at this particular portrayal. I've looked at the screen and I thought, Robert Downey Jr. is in front of me in blackface. Shouldn't I be a little bit offended? But that is one of those rare examples that land pretty well with a lot of black audiences. Why do you think that character seems to work really well with black audiences while something like the Ali G character does not? Well, he's the Dr. Umar in blackface. Let's just do that. He was holding the black guy accountable for how he was portraying himself on screen. So it's like, how can we be mad at that? This is black excellence. There's a degree to that portrayal that says there's like a deep awareness, right? There's a deep sort of awareness of, oh, the thing that is sending up is these method actors, the method actors who go too hard and too, intensely. And then at a certain point, literally begin to lose themselves. And then as they begin to lose themselves, then that's the thing that you're seeing, right? It's like that specific conflict. Hollywood obviously has this long history of doing this type of thing with black and brown characters. I'm thinking, of course, of one of the most famous examples is Hank Azaria voices, for a long time, voiced the Simpsons character Apu. Apu is a fictional Indian person in the show. Hank eventually stops playing Apu in 2017 after a lot of criticism, uh, Ashton Kutcher, Don Brownface for like some ad at a certain point that was pulled after some public backlash. Why do you think Hollywood still struggles to get this kind of thing right, Rat? Well, you know, what I think is interesting is Hank Azaria apologizing for playing Apu around 2017. I mean, this is right around the same time that Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Hasan Minhaj, they're all coming out. They're all coming out as comedians. They're all telling stories about how, how hard it was for them to live in the same world. As Apu, right? As this, this racial caricature that has really like kind of limited how people perceive them, right? And so like, I think having all of those, that new generation of brown voices come up and be able to say, this was not okay, this is not cool. That's what people responded to. And we don't necessarily see that anymore. My question is, why don't people listen to black people on the same front? Like, why do we still get it on that front, right? Because I don't see those offensive characters as far as brown people as much anymore, but I'm still seeing Borat right now going off as Ali G. And so why don't we still get it on that front, right? Because I don't see what is it about this situation that still makes it okay, that still reinforces, that still has a studio behind it, supporting a whole movie where he gets to do the, is I not black, or is it because I black situation? And, and, you know, I don't know if there's a, there's the, again, once again, it's that political cover where he, in the trailer himself, as Ali G says, a lot has happened since then. And I feel like he, he plans on, he plans on addressing all the awarenesses we have still in this character. Like, I don't get it. I don't get that, right? And then, and then the other part of it is, like, Sacha Baron Cohen, like, this guy has nothing else. Like, what does he do? What does Sacha Baron Cohen do besides this caricature of Muslim people in Borat, besides his caricature of gay people with Bruno, and then this caricature of black people with Ali G? Like, he's got nothing else. So that, that tells you everything about the kind of punch-up versus punch-down comedian, comedian, comedy that he's got, that he's got in his arsenal, like, where this is, these are the straws that he's clutching at. Yeah. And then the idea that, like, over time, we haven't found another gear, right? Like, we have over time, like, he's not found, as a comedian, as a creator, he hasn't, he's done specific, like, acting roles in other movies. And I was like, oh, he's fine in this role. But in terms of his own stuff, there's really just that sort of impersonator gear. That seems to be the gear that he seems to fall into. And also, like, yeah, for this, for this whole political, if, again, the main reason that their, their ostensible argument is that he, he does this to get, to go stealth, to be able to get people, uh, unpopular. To get, to be able to get, to be able to get, to be able to get, to be able to get, to be able to say the things that they don't want to be caught on camera and say, how come there's no room for black people to do that? Yeah. Black comedians to go into those spaces. How come Ali G or Bora or whatever, what is his name? Sasha Baron Cohen. How come, how come he can get into these spaces to set, to put on his character and get these, get these gotcha moments with these political figures that others cannot? So that, I think, is, like, still the remaining question. It's worth noting that as we've been having this conversation, uh, Elle Jones was on video and it was over the phone, Elle. Um, and Elle, I want to ask you about this because Canada has its own. Can we point out my computer always explodes when we have black topics? I'm not here for this. Yeah. A computer said, uh, this is too much blackness for me this morning. I will not be happy with it. I just completely, just kind of shuts down. I, listen, I want to, I want to ask you about Canada's contributions to this debate because I actually think it's really important to talk about this. Canada's contribution to this debate is, of course, the character of J-Rock from Trailer Park Boys. Uh, J-Rock is, of course, played by Jonathan Torrens. He's a white rapper. He genuinely thinks he's black. I just want to play you guys this clip. Seems like me and one of us ain't black. Are you black? Yeah, I'm black. This man the f*** is crazy. No, J-Rock's not crazy. He just genuinely believes he's black, you know? We don't give him a hard time about if he's always been like that. I don't think most of us even notice anymore. It's just weird when new folks come along and they take a look at him, but as soon as they talk to him and figure out what his stick is, he's like, yeah, he's black. Uh, well, Trailer Park Boys sit in Halifax. Uh, you are our Halifax representative, so I'll come to you on this. Where does the J-Rock character sort of land in this broader debate? Yeah, I think what's important is to look at when you're looking at satire, like what is the context and what is direction? So we've talked about punching up versus punching down and perhaps also turning inwards versus turning outwards. And so what the context of Trailer Park Boys is, in a province where we're often portrayed as just like lighthouses and bagpipes, Trailer Park Boys came in and provided this portrait of contemporary working class Nova Scotia life that really resonated with people here. You don't hear those accents. You don't. So even though it's satire, it was also very affectionate by Nova Scotians. And you saw a kind of Nova Scotia you never see. Some people have described the aesthetic of Trailer Park Boys as white trash. And so part of the show is also thinking about that. Like what happens when white people are sort of discarded from whiteness as such, when you are living in poverty, when you live in a trailer park, when you're considered to be the underclass. And part of that is the relationship to race. So in that case, it's not poking, fun at black people. And again, you have the self-awareness of the black people being like, what are you doing? And then this kind of joking around that. So in a way, it reaches what Ali G is reaching for, the caricature of white people that think they're black, but done within, I think, a different context of power and a different context of what the object of the joke ultimately is. You might even say actually accomplishing satire, right? That's actually the thing you're supposed to do when you develop a satire, because like then you actually bring to the surface. Completely agreed. Marlon, I should note, we've had this entire conversation and the peg to it is that there is a petition to ban this movie from theaters. We haven't seen this movie. The movie has not actually been released. I do expect that we're going to actually talk about the movie itself when it comes out in October. But do you expect any type of evolution in Sacha Baron Cohen's portrayal of Ali G 20 years later? First of all, I'd like to say I never seen that J-Rock clip before. I have to check that episode out. That was my barber talking to him. That was crazy to see him with hair. That was insane. I don't expect any evolution because just from the trailer alone, like you can tell, just with Sacha Baron Cohen, like just like Brad was saying, there hasn't been much evolution, right? So I don't expect to see any evolution, especially not when I see him getting a prostitute pregnant and then tasting pregnancy tests. Yeah. The signals are not positive. Yeah. And I think if he was going to evolve the character at all, it would be socially conscious. It would be socially aware. And you would see that in the trailer. And I think that there's there's something to that as well, where there is a new type of white person aspiring to be black that is overly socially aware and does a little bit too much where that could have been explored. But. Oh, well, let's. Hey, listen, maybe we'll actually see the movie and Ali G is actually a modern day Dr. Umar. We'll find out. You know, I mean, like it's it's hard. It's hard to say how far they're going to take that character. We'll be revisiting, obviously, the Ali G saga in at some point, probably next month at some point. In the meantime, right now, we've got to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a moment. In a world where the news feels bigger, louder and harder to make sense of, Canadians need more than headlines. Hi, I'm Karen Siolin, news reporter and host of The Big Story podcast. From world shaping events to the everyday stories that spark debate, my team and I will explain what matters and why it matters to you. We're here to help you make sense of the news and give you the context you need for those kitchen table conversations. Trusted, Canadian focused, curious. Listen to The Big Story wherever you get your podcasts. All right. and this is commotion and algebra. Jones is here and Rad Simon plays here. And I've got one more story that I want to talk to you guys about. Have a listen to this. Right before the Olympics, I went to my therapist, panicked. She was like, what's the worst that could happen? The whole world could laugh at me. She's like, do you think that's reasonable? I was like, oh, no. Just in case you need a reminder. So that was a trailer for the new Netflix documentary called Untold Regan Breaking Badly. It centers on the, I think, now infamous story, right, of the Australian b-girl Regan. The controversy around her, shall we say, subpar performance at the 2024 Olympics. That's when Breaking is making its debut at the Olympics. And then you get this documentary. Rad, what else should people know about this doc? I mean, like a lot of this documentary is you get to hear what happened in Regan's own words, right? She gets to walk. She gets to talk to you through who she is, how she sees this opportunity to compete at the Olympics, the hoops that she went through, how she cleared the competition and kind of got into competing in the Olympics. To represent Australia. And then, of course, the backlash and all of that, or her performance and the backlash of all of that. And what's hilarious about this documentary to me is there's still like, you know, a happy ending for Regan. You know, some acknowledgement for her feelings. Some acknowledgement for her accomplishments and how it's not all like it's all dreary. But in terms of acknowledging kind of the all the social political impact of her performance. Yeah. You have other voices sounding off about her as a white woman in the space, a white professor in the space who should have probably known better than to be competing and taking up space in this competition. So, I mean, you know, somewhat like, you know, filling in a lot or shading in a lot of the edges that we weren't. So familiar with. And then ultimately give getting getting Regan a tour with Richard Branson on one of his boats. I mean, listen, none of the four of us on this panel are Olympians. So I feel like there's a limited amount of space for me to speak here. But let me ask you about this, because there's no question, obviously, that the online backlash to Regan's Olympic run got pretty big and got pretty toxic and rude. But it's also worth noting Regan was not just simply like a naive b-girl who just like walked up and said, I'm going to give it my best shot and then got that spot. She has a Ph.D. in cultural studies. Her thesis centered on the local breaking scene in Sydney, Australia. Until not that long ago, she was a full time lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia. You're an academic yourself. What was going through your mind as you were watching this doc? I think I'm perhaps having a bit more empathy in this moment that I'm like publicly. I think it's actually kind of funny as an academic, because, you know, at the most, normally you get a few grants off entering a community and perhaps appropriating it. And you should. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got all the way to the Olympics. In some ways, it's a biblical story and the documentary doesn't really address that. And in some ways, you could see it as a story of temptation. You know, what does it gain a woman if she gained the whole world but lose her soul? Right. But you have in front of you the temptation of qualifying for the Olympics, but not being qualified. And then sort of being like, but it's the Olympics and not turning back, even at the point where you know that you're not ready to be there. And it doesn't really look at that question like, what could she have done? And so it becomes really about centering her again over the voices again of other breakers, over the whole culture breaking. So re sort of constituting the sin of her being the center of everything and then not really exploring like what seems central to me, which is this story where she knew she wasn't ready. She was having panic attacks and she did it anyway. And then when the backlash is inevitable, we now get a documentary that is very much about redeeming her, but perhaps not about holding her accountable to that decision and what she did with inside that culture. And more broadly, what has happened to breaking as a result of this mockery, which is not just of her, but has extended to the art form itself. I was going to say, maybe with a couple of minutes left here, we can close on this. But let me ask you, how much of this story is about her and how much of it is about the larger sort of governing bodies are responsible for both the integrity and the safety of the competitive sports and all the participants in them? Yeah, they brush by that. But one of the things that is, I think, left out a bit, like there could be more on is this idea of what happens when you split. Sportify a culture, ironically, something she herself wrote about. So you have here a culture and art, one of the elements of hip hop, something that grew on the streets of New York and has spread globally and is very much an art form. And then because the World Dance Association, whatever they're called, wants to be part of the Olympics and they can't get in ballroom and salsa, they get in breaking. And you see this lack of structure around that. So from the lack of support in Australia, the lack of, for example, a qualifying score to assure that everybody has the quality to. It's really sort of just, in a sense, breaking was used for this other agenda. And the IOC, Australian sports, all these things didn't really care about it and didn't give the proper support or have the proper structures in place to ensure that this art form is respected. And so there's a kind of disrespect of it that Reagan embodies, but was also systemic. And it's the same in a way that the documentary really didn't go back to do more on those historic voices, you know, the breakers that created this art form. Really looking at that issue. That what happens when something that belongs to the people is corporatized and why Reagan embodies that. Marlon Palmer, you sit down, you know, you pour yourself a drink and you say, it's time for me to take in this Reagan documentary. You sit down and you take in the glory of this Reagan documentary. What did you make of it? This was Eat, Pray, Love for breakdancing. This was just watching white people fail upwards will always be so entertaining. To me, it's like it's like watching magic really just occur over and over again, because it's it's incredible that this is someone that she's trying to convince you that she cares about the soul and the essence of breaking. And like she went to got her Ph.D., she learned all about it and yet somehow still didn't see herself being a white woman, white woman. It was incredible. It was honestly like you can't claim to care about something so much. And no, you know, in your heart, you're not ready for this and still go cockacity at its finest. I can I also add, like the fact that, like, we got a whole documentary, as Marlon put for a white woman, white woman. But we don't have a documentary on, like, the gold winner. Yeah. The Canadian gold. I don't even know who won. Well, like, you know, we won the gold. This country that we're in right now won the gold medal in breaking. Yes. I was literally on the phone with the. Team lead. Like, I went to high school with the team lead of the breaking team. And he's like, yeah, like, we're trying. We got these independent stuff. But no, everyone wants to hear about the Ray Gunn story. That's the one taking up all the oxygen in this space. So, yeah, I think that sort of the description of the idea of like, OK, this was breaking's big moment. And it becomes when when you get the documentary about breaking's big moment at the Olympics. It's not a documentary about, hey, here's the journey that it took to get from the streets all the way to the Olympics. It's about how Ray Gunn managed. To do this, which is to say it's a disappointment is perhaps an understatement. OK, listen, before I let you guys go, I'm just going to go around the table and ask each of you for a recommendation, something that you're enjoying. Maybe you're reading. Maybe you're watching. Maybe you're listening. Rad time and play. What would you like to recommend today, pal? Listen, because we're talking about breaking and stuff, I just want to once again recommend and re-up Step Up All In. That is the fifth Step Up movie. I am telling. You know, I am telling you, this movie is cinematic excellence. The last 15 minutes like dance off in Step Up All In is like it was like this is one of my top three movies of 2014. Inherent Vice, Gone Girl and Step Up All In. It just blows my mind every time I watch it. If Step Up Five has 10 defenders, Rad is one of them. If Step Up Five has one defender, Rad is that defender. If Step Up Five has no defenders, Rad's having plays underground and dead and dead. That is the thing that I've learned about this man is no matter what, he'll go, hey, have you guys heard the good word about Step Up Five? That's just that's just how Rad rolls in this life. OK, Marlon Palmer shaking his head. But also, what would you like to recommend, good sir? Finding Your Comedic Genius is a book by Adam Bloom. I think it's a great book for comics, but I also think it's a great book for people who are thinking about getting into comedy. Because if you think you can do it, you can do it. If you think you can handle it, this book will tell you otherwise for most people and deter you because it's a lot of work and a lot of different things you have to consider all at once. So I think it's a great deconstruction of like a comedic mind. Brilliant. I am into it, even though I don't know if I want to be discouraged from that, Marlon. I feel like, well, maybe I should. Maybe we should all use a little bit more discouragement. I want to do this. Nobody discouraged Reagan, for instance. And look where we ended up. Elle Jones, last word to you, friend. What do you got? Computing for dummies. Since we're talking about blackface, I want to recommend two books by black Canadian academics, Cheryl Thompson, Staging Blackface in Canada and Philip S.S. Howard, Performing Post-Racialism. So both of those books really look at Canada's history of race and performance as well. So they're well worth reading. Amazing. I love all these recommendations. Also, I really appreciate. your time. You guys, this has been so great. Thank you for being on the show today. thank you thanks everybody Rad Salman plays a freelance film critic in Toronto you can find his work at the Global Mail on CTV and right here on Commotion Elle Jones is a poet and associate professor in the Department of Politics at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax and Marlon Palmer is a comedian and co-host of the Extra Gravy podcast you can catch that documentary Untold Reagan Breaking Badly on Netflix right now my name is Elamin Abdelmahmoud this show is called Commotion we'll see you on Monday for more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts