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Wait, where is cancel culture? To say Sacha Baron Cohen's earlier film was racist and inexcusably exploitative is an understatement. It was cruel. He went to a dirt poor village in Romania, paid them a pittance and duped them into this. I'm not over it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7686885.stm
If you ever wonder how the cruelty of white-supremacists is seen as funny in their own groups, look at how the other side of the culture divide lets Cohen remain "funny" as long as he targets the right people in a funny way. He'll keep laughing all the way to the bank, I suppose.
Can you imagine anyone targeting any other group we think about (African-Americans, Jews, Native Americans, etc.) with the nakedly racist, unashamedly exploitative cruelty of Cohen, and getting to make another film and making lots of money and being reviewed seriously?
Now, I believe in redemption and moving forward. But this guy hasn't sought anything of the sort. He shrugs, cashes the check, makes the right noises about cultural issues of the day and goes on with his lucrative life AND IS STILL DEPLOYING THE SAME RACISM. Come on.
If that were the case, he would have chosen his character to be an American or a Brit. Blackface minstrel shows aren't satirizing racism, and neither is Cohen. https://twitter.com/althecat/status/1320383883452518401
Unsurprisingly, this is what many alt-right say when people object to naked racism in their humor. So it spreads across the political spectrum to patrol acceptable racism? I agree humor often flirts with cruelty & there are gray zones. But Cohen is over the cliff by a long mile.
He is being fêted, reviewed positively and is reprising an unambiguously and cruelly racist character without much comment. Look I'm a great fan of satire, including when it's painful. But he takes many big, lucrative and racist swings at easy targets. https://twitter.com/HarmlessReply/status/1320383740732936193
Yes. Cohen duped a dirt-poor Roma village in Romania. Roma are among the biggest victims of the Holocaust and face ongoing deep racism. Cohen paid them a few dollars and depicted them as rapists, abortionists and prostitutes. (Movie made $262.6 million). https://twitter.com/VaultAusir/status/1320390404529938435
As someone who understands the fake accent language Borat speaks in his 2nd movie, it's not remote. Why do we never discuss the Iraq war now? It's always a mess "over there", they're that backward. "Always fighting." That's Trump's line. That's also Cohen. https://twitter.com/EdwardHinchman/status/1320390042460786688
Anyway, there are many comedians who do make fun of powerful people, are hilarious, and don't go around further entrenching already widespread Western racism towards people we either directly victimize or shrug at their suffering. Come on. Who needs SBC in the age of @sarahcpr?
Again: this bugs me because Sacha Baron Cohen's cruel racism is directly related to the way US and the UK—where Cohen's from—imposed enormous suffering in Iraq, and how we *never* talk about it now. Because "those people" are irredeemably backward. It's also Trump's *exact* line.
Come on people. This is terrible, and outright racist and not in some harmless way. Yes, I know what else he does. These countries "over there" are not some past relics. And he doesn't *need* any of this to satire Western anything. https://twitter.com/david_osborn/status/1320396810620424192
