No one’s laughing at Sacha Baron Cohen now
Controversial comic Sacha Baron Cohen, famous for exposing prejudice through iconic characters like Bruno and Borat, now finds himself at the centre of a sexual harassment scandal. In the wake of this MeToo development, and his split from his wife, is the joke over?
Pity Sacha Baron Cohen. The 52-year-old Oscar-nominated comedy actor and arch manipulator is suddenly the focus of media hysteria, speculation and scandal that is, perhaps for the first time in his career, beyond his control. The creator of controversial comedy icons Borat, Bruno and Ali G is the subject of a MeToo-style claim by the actress Rebel Wilson, who co-starred opposite Baron Cohen in his 2016 comedy Grimsby. Compounding the crisis, Baron Cohen and his wife, Isla Fisher, recently revealed on Instagram that: “In 2023 we jointly filed to end our marriage.”
The MeToo news has, according to a recent report in The Sun, “sent shockwaves through Hollywood”. And yet, so far, everything seems to hinge on an alleged single, gross, deliberately offensive and deeply puerile gesture. In her memoir, Rebel Rising, Wilson claims that, while filming on the Grimsby set, as well as trying to coerce her into shooting naked sequences, Baron Cohen once requested that she “stick her finger up his a---” because he thought it would make the scene funny. The request, she said, “felt like [he] had sexually harassed me.”
Baron Cohen has said that Wilson’s claims are “demonstrably false” and are “contradicted by extensive detailed evidence”. Nonetheless, that finger claim does not look good on paper. Unless you’ve seen the film. Baron Cohen once joked that half of his comedy had been “absolutely juvenile” while the other half was “completely puerile”. Grimsby is his most juvenile and puerile movie and, indeed, is built entirely around the comedy of, well, “stuff being forcefully inserted into the main character’s back passage”. It begins in a pub where a chunky roman candle is “accidentally” rammed into the rear end of Baron Cohen’s football-mad Nobby Butcher. It then culminates in a third act spectacular that features Butcher stopping a lethal virus attack at a Chilean football stadium by half removing his underwear and allowing himself to be penetrated by an Exocet-sized firework. That’s the gag. That’s what Nobby does. Things penetrate his posterior.
Grimsby, honestly, hasn’t aged terribly well. And perhaps the real truth about Baron Cohen, and more specifically his brand of comedy, is that life is moving on without him. It is perhaps unsurprising that, in July last year, Channel 4’s head of factual entertainment Alf Lawrie famously said that Ali G or Borat could not be made today “because the rules have changed”. He was referring to legal issues surrounding the duping of “contributors” but he also admitted that “the nature of some satire has changed”.
Even Baron Cohen has acknowledged that his comedy is increasingly at odds with the world around him. In a speech to the Anti Defamation League in Washington DC in 2019, he noted that the bigotry and the prejudices revealed by characters such as Bruno and Borat can only be funny if the watching audience does not share that same bigotry. But audiences are changing. Politics is hardening. Nuance is dying. “Democracy, which depends on shared truths,” said Baron Cohen, “is in retreat.”
His Borat sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, had its moments (mostly involving a Rudy Giuliani honey trap), but too often he was left punching down, ridiculing imbecilic conspiracy theorists and clueless beauty-industry lackeys.
Hollywood, too, has always seemed to tolerate Baron Cohen rather than fully embrace him, and he has twice caused consternation at the Oscars. He tipped an urn full of fake remains (“belonging” to Kim Jong-il) over the interviewer Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet in 2012. Then, in 2016, despite being forbidden by Oscar organisers to present his category in character, he smuggled his Ali G disguise into the ceremony and boldly delivered his “bit” on stage, about race and the Academy Awards and how the venerated movie Room was actually just, “a movie about a roomful of white people”.
Baron Cohen’s separation from Fisher has apparently coincided with his return home to London and to family roots. And so, for the immediate future, will this move mean that he can avoid the spotlight of speculation and the ongoing shockwaves of Hollywood? As his fabulous Bruno would probably say, catchphrase at the ready, “Ich don’t think so!”
