Showtime’s new Sacha Baron Cohen-starring prank show series kicked off with a marital rape joke that has many already condemning the series as tasteless and, worse, unfunny.
Cohen teased his new series with a politically-charged promo featuring a slightly amused former Vice President Dick Cheney signing his “waterboad kit.” Soon after the promo dropped, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin revealed online that Cohen posed as an injured U.S. war veteran to “dupe” her into a fake interview (which she ultimately walked out of), then dropped her and her teenage daughter off at the wrong airport so they’d miss their flight. Amid reports that the whole show was “nothing more than a Hollywood hit job on Trump supporters and the Republican Party,” Cohen’s “Who Is America?” finally premiered Sunday night — and promptly disappointed viewers.
The worst moment of episode one comes when Cohen is posing as an Israeli terrorism expert named Erran Morad. Speaking with lobbyist and executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America Larry Pratt, “Morad” cites an incident that supposedly happened with his wife.
“Women need a gun, you know. My wife, she have [sic] a gun, and she shot me once,” says Cohen. “You know, what can I do? I get horny in the middle of the night. But it’s not rape if it’s your wife.”
Cohen says the final line laughing, drawing a laugh out of Pratt, who was clearly in a jovial mood having just laughed at the interviewer’s tasteless anti-Muslim joke.
In its coverage of the much-maligned rape skit, the Independent notes that “marital rape in America was first criminalised in the 1970s, and has been illegal in all 50 states since 1993, but some exemptions have been made in individual states since then.”
In another sketch, Cohen successfully dupes Virginia gun rights activist Phillip Van Cleave into appearing on a fake video series supposedly designed for kindergartners, “Kinderguardians,” convincing him to sing gun-themed songs and shoot a stuffed-animal gun.
As Esquire puts it, Cohen’s goal for the show appears to be not simply to “humiliate Republicans” but to “end careers.” In a recent Facebook post, Van Cleave described his experience with Cohen back in February as a “well-choreographed psychological manipulation.”
In its coverage of the new series, NPR has mostly bad things to say. The only one of the four skits that NPR’s Linda Holmes spends some time praising is the one that most shamelessly targets pro-gun activists and conservatives. Here’s Holmes’ coverage of the Israeli-mocking, anti-gun segment starring Pratt and others which she found particularly “effective”:
In his tough-guy drag that features a walk so unlikely you’d only see it in a Monty Python sketch, Cohen meets up with gun enthusiasts Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and Larry Pratt, the Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America. Both swallow the bait and then suck up a couple more feet of line. Pratt eventually laughs heartily at Cohen’s stories of marital rape, an innocent Muslim shot while praying, and plenty more. Van Cleave, meanwhile, participates in a children’s instructional video showcasing guns that are disguised as stuffed animals. He even sings a little song. ….
It’s worth noting that what Cohen is doing doesn’t always work. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, looks to be onto Cohen’s “terrorism expert” from the jump, asking whether the guy really thinks he’s going to say on camera that he favors giving guns to three- and four-year-olds. But not all are so skeptical. Former Senator Trent Lott and others at least appear — and the role of editing and story control is always important to keep in mind — to sign on enthusiastically to at least a consideration of giving guns to, in Lott’s words as he seemingly reads from a script, “highly trained preschoolers.” It’s Pratt who gets the most conventionally pranked, though, persuaded to recite a script that says Blink-182 is a pheromone and the rita ora is part of the liver.
That part’s pretty funny.
Related: Sacha Baron Cohen Responds To Sarah Palin Slamming His ‘Sick’ Trick