Television - Andrew Billen on how Ali G stays funny
It's a rule of thumb that if a joke needs to be explained, it is not funny - but Ali G's comedy seemed to demand explanations. Well-intentioned social commentators wrestled with the paradox of how an act that seemed to sneer at black youth culture could make blacks laugh. Since practically none of us middle-aged whites had a clue about working-class street life in any case, working out the ways in which Sacha Baron Cohen's creation guyed it was a labour that must have had half London gagging.
Most of us have got it now, although I was amused to see that Polly Toynbee in last week's Radio Times still hadn't. "He is not essentially making fun of black rappers," she wrote patiently, "but of the pathetic white kids who mimic them these days." Actually, Ali G - the clue's in the name, Polly - is a pathetic Asian kid who pretends he is black and misses.That Baron Cohen, who plays him, is actually white, Jewish and educated is as relevant as Edna Everage being really a man and Mrs Merton a much younger woman.
Nevertheless, having been lifted from Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show, where his talents soared so far above everyone else's that it became embarrassing, Ali G risks looking exposed in Da Ali G Show (10.30pm, Fridays, C4). Two options were open to take the character on. The more ambitious, but perhaps unworkable one, would have been to place him in a sitcom, which is where the Al Murray, the Pub Landlord, is heading with Sky and where Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge ended up. Instead, Ali G finds himself immersed not in the real world, but in TV-land, a variety show with Dame Edna-level production values. The rapper superstar even has his own line-up of chorus girls, leather-clad black lovelies from a Shaft fantasy, an old-fashioned telly- convention that connects him all the way back to The Two Ronnies and Benny Hill.
After such a preamble, Ali gets his first laugh easily by just saying he intends to tackle serious issues on his new show: "We know there is killing and bloodshed out there in the ghetto. I've seen it on the streets of Chertsey. I've seen it on the streets of Eton Wick. And if we don't start changing the way we think, Langley village will be next." Mentally replace Deptford with any of those place names and, of course, there would be no joke, but the underlining is now all about emphasising that Ali G hales from Staines, a very safe hood indeed. To emphasise his inauthenticity, Ali becomes foxed whenever he talks to a genuine practioner of street argot, a scratch DJ on the corner of the set.
With the Ali G "problem" solved, we can relax and enjoy others being taken in. The pleasure of his famous spoof interviews is seeing middle-aged whites too terrified of the great unknowns of inner-city life even to notice that Ali is white, let alone tell him he is an idiot. There's now a problem here, however. There can be few left who do not know about Ali G, which means no one is spoofed and everyone is in on the joke. I'd judge the interviews with Neil Hamilton and Mohammed Al Fayed failures on that count alone, while the discussion on animal rights with three earnest pressure group members was, in contrast, funny because you could see their unworldly frustration mounting at Ali's obtuseness.
Increasingly, however, we shall see Ali G having to leave Britain to find victims. Last week, he went to Cannes pitching terrible film ideas, such as a thriller about terrorists who stick a grenade up the Queen's "vag". Not a single producer told him to get lost. ("I'd like to see the full script before I commit to it," said one.) This week, he visits the FBI in America and gets a PR man talking interrogation techniques to some effect. "Would you consider guffin' over someone's head?" "I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as the movies would make you think." Baron Cohen's sensible additional tactic is to invent new, ancillary characters such as Borat, the earthy TV personality from Kazakhstan, who infiltrated the home of Lady Chelsea in a hopeless quest to be taught English manners.
Otherwise, as TV comedians have for ages, Ali G rests on his laurels by spoofing the rest of television. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? becomes Who Wants To Win An Ounce? ("Here's you first question for a sixteenf . . .") and the programme ends with a Jerry Springer-style final thought: "I have a dream of little black girls and little white girls, playing with each other. Let's make it happen." The quality of writing ensures Ali G survives his new format. You just wish that such a free spirit did not need to be pinned to one at all.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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