Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America? characters are a detriment to his comedy

The Ringer

"His characters are purely functional," says Justin Charity of Cohen's new batch of characters for his Showtime series. "They’re not breakout personae, such as the earlier Cohen characters, Ali G, Borat, and Brüno. In Who Is America?, Cohen doesn’t endear his new characters to the viewer through catchy sound bites and hyperdistinct characteristics. Here, Cohen’s characters are dispensable. They’re fodder, constructed primarily to guarantee the subject’s unwitting participation in his segments. If anything, Cohen’s cover stories confound Who Is America? by obscuring the logic of its segments and the significance of its guests. It’s a show that often humiliates its subjects for unclear reasons and toward arbitrary ends." He adds: "It wouldn’t be a Sacha Baron Cohen project if it didn’t bewilder its guests and its viewers alike; but most Who Is America? segments aren’t bewildering in the exhilarating sense so much as they’re out of focus. The show hangs in an awkward half-phase between comedy and insight, the two modes only sporadically fusing to form the ideal byproduct: satire." ALSO: Who Is America? is unfunny because it's true.