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" Published in the May 2012 issue The first time I saw Sacha Baron Cohen work, I was lying in a hotel room in London watching a Channel 4 production called The 11 O&amp;#039;Clock Show. He was doing Ali G, and I was utterly convinced \u2014 the tracksuit, the skullcap, the tightly spun goatee \u2014 that the guy was a moron. I could not take my eyes off him, stumbling through an interview with some unwitting professor. Boldness or naivete, a tinge of courage. Something worked about this kid using television itself to mock people who clearly felt they ought to be on television. I asked a British friend, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s with the kid with the tracksuit?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, that&amp;#039;s Ali G. It&amp;#039;s a put-on.&amp;quot; He explained Baron Cohen&amp;#039;s background, son of a London businessman, and his charade as a hip-hop beat reporter. &amp;quot;Quite good at first. But the jig&amp;#039;s up a bit, don&amp;#039;t you think?&amp;quot;  Three years later, on a subway platform in New York, I saw an early promotional poster for HBO&amp;#039;s Da Ali GShow and thought, Well, there goes that. People will sniff this out in a week. With popularity, Baron Cohen would lose anonymity for Ali G. Jig&amp;#039;s up, I figured. Just like the UK. This is the confounding problem of SBC: He shouldn&amp;#039;t last. He can&amp;#039;t last, not once he&amp;#039;s been discovered. And yet he does. Before that, when no one knew his game, he was free to unscroll Ali G and the early version of Borat as performance pieces that revealed the stunning arrogance of interview subjects greedily stumbling in front of television cameras. Sam Donaldson, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Naomi Wolf, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich. And for two of the show&amp;#039;s three seasons, Baron Cohen pulled it off beautifully \u2014 knocking off interviews with politicians and academics in which Ali G, Borat, or Br\u00FCno agitated, confused, and riled the sensibilities of the powerful simply by offering up a microphone, improvising within the skin of his various characters. I loved it.  But every day that Ali G existed in the HBO watercooler zeitgeist was just one less day Ali G could exist at all. Same with Borat, same with Br\u00FCno, when they hit the big screen. Yes, Baron Cohen raised the stakes slightly, placing himself in socially or politically dangerous positions while in the guise of character. But soon, people knew. The discovery clock ticked onward. And when everybody was in on the joke, the joke got a whole lot uglier. Once American public figures were on to him (remember, please, that Ron Paul was among the last) and the force of his setups \u2014 designed to reveal callowness, cruelty, racism, sexism, blind anger: righteous stuff when slipping from the lips of pious turds like James Baker or Brent Scowcroft \u2014 they turned themselves on an unsuspecting, and sometimes undeserving, public.  The ugliness that Baron Cohen gleaned \u2014 the xenophobia he mustered from those who met Borat, or the legendary though hardly surprising moments of homophobia revealed in Br\u00FCno \u2014 seemed timely, and potent. They hardly seemed legendary in retrospect \u2014 more like moments purposefully induced, planned, hunted down for effect. The larger and more comic the Disneyesque head of his characters became, the more social insight was replaced by social stunt. I think dumber film critics call this a kind of evolution or growth. But the jig&amp;#039;s up once again. We lose him before we really got to have him. The more people recognize him, the bigger his act is forced to be, and the less he can do (that which he did best in the earliest moments of Ali G) \u2014 show a little vulnerability, a little heart, and a lot less cunning.  Only now, with The Dictator, is Baron Cohen clearly stunt-starved, aiming his work smack-dab into the solar plexus of American preconceptions about the Middle East. Dumping ashes on Seacrest. Sure, there&amp;#039;s something brave in that. Yes, Arabs need to learn to laugh at themselves as well as we do. True, SBC is a Jew. Assemble your own semiphilosophical junior-college communication-class wisdom from those very facts. But note, too, that from the very moment The Dictator&amp;#039;s trailer appeared with its litany of lousy bits \u2014 fixing the footrace, buying American actresses for sex, the trite fascination with America itself, all of it reconstituted from the DNA of cheap banana-dictator films \u2014 it has been clear that Sacha Baron Cohen is on-script now. Once it was fun to be in on his secret, to give a night of movie watching over to seeing how far Sacha Baron Cohen might go. There was a time you never wanted the power of his satiric insight to go broadly public. Now it&amp;#039;d just be nice to know where it went to die. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/a13523/sacha-baron-cohen-the-dictator-0512/>