This is what makes his mockumentaries detestable. His clownprotagonists, from Ali G to Borat to Bruno, don’t learn anything about the United States, they simply rubber-stamp familiar snark.When Baron Cohen exhausts staged-and-scripted routines, he targets/betrays real-life civilians who have welcomed him into their confidence.

The fallacy that Baron Cohen’s comedy is politically pertinent derives from its pandering to Lefty biases.This insults genuinely thoughtful political humor, as in Dusan Makavejev’s 1971 absurdist collage, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Makavejev’s stated objective was to create, “A zone of liberation, an ensemble of explosive ideas, images, relations, associations.” He revealed the human contradictions within totalitarianism and the struggle for democracy; today’s political rivals can’t abide contradictions. Baron Cohen (and his odious collaborator-director Larry Charles, who excreted the ridiculous Religulous) merely seek to polarize and capitalize.