The backlash over the Ali G movie, and the Raygun documentary

0:00Candidus in Diginestore ay just being told. They're being reclaimed. Journey through the history of words and telling out twisted histories. Drawing the vibrant weekly conversations on UNRESERVE. Uvalonid uko a uni-dunikangit to saksaunikuvenit inuid unikangit di-gutu-saksa-okatta lamyun. Plus, experience investigations that refuse to be forgotten. Like Cooper Island and Missing and Murdered. Listen to the full collection now. Wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. So, Sasha Baron Cohen is going back to one of his earliest characters. He's making a new allergy movie. It's called Alley G. Who Is I? And I can't imagine the news is landing how he expected because there's a petition with more than 30,000 supporters hoping to ban the movie from UK theaters. I'm Elimin, I'm the Mahmoud. This is commotion.

1:00El Jones is here. Marlon Palmer is here. Rad, Simon Place here. Good morning. All of you. Nice to see you. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, everybody. Listen, we got a lot to talk about. This Alley G story. We're also going to talk about this new Netflix talk about the Reagan story. But let us begin if you don't mind right here. Yo, it's me, Alley G. I've been gone for 20 years, chilling. And in that time, the world went to crap. There was COVID, wars, and it's cheering. Five is going to get back on top with a brand new thing called a documentary. Oh, yeah, gotcha! Oh, okay. That is a bit of the trailer for the film Alley G. Who Is I and Rad? I pose that question to you, sir. Who is Alley G? Remind us if you don't mind. So Alley G is one of the characters that Sasha Baron Cohen puts on. And when I say puts on, I mean, he puts on a full on costume. Very bright, baggy tracksuit, du-reg,

2:05like the sunglasses, definitely. And putting on this really heavily caricatured British Jamaican accent. And the whole persona is this caricature that he uses to go stealth. Ready goes stealth in interviews. He goes stealth in situations of the wild, trying to disarm people whenever he's in their presence before he hits them with a real question, which is, and the people we're talking about are sometimes politicians, sometimes activists. And that's this whole stick. It's the trap that he sets up to get these gotcha moments with people as he does with his other characters, like Bruno and Borat. And then, of course, this character he created on this sketch comedy show called The 11 O'clock News before getting the Alley G show. And this is all like late 90s, early 2000s. When not all of us were really questioning these kinds of antics. But here we are 20 years later. And he's bringing these characters back. We got a wonder why. Well, I'll ask you this.

3:06Say, because I don't remember a petition about the Borat movie. I don't remember a petition about the Bruno movie. There's a petition that you came with more than 30,000 people who signed this thing saying they want to ban this from theaters. Why is Alley G game that reaction grab? Well, I mean, I think, of course, in the 20 years since, black voices are being heard just a bit more, right? And the idea of putting on a sort of black face, putting on these racial characters, we're not embracing it the way we did before. I mean, in the past, people thought that, I've seen him being celebrated so much for putting on these antics because he's not mocking these cultures so much as he's skewing apparently the white people and the privileged people that he's interviewing and stuff, right? So we gave him a lot of passes for the political points he was scoring, I think. Especially when you look at Borat, where it's coming out in the middle of the war on terror and stuff, and he's using this extreme Muslim character

4:07who has seven wives and all that stuff to send up what America was in that state. The guy who won an Oscar was nominated for an Oscar for that. Wanna go with the quote? For Borat. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, he's built all of this cred where he seemed to show how he could use this type of comedy as a prop to take on the kind of the political situation in the US, but then what about the prop, right? What about what he's weaponizing, right? Like where, but this is a defensive gag that doesn't necessarily consider who it's hurting and how many people are laughing at that instead of the people that they should be laughing at. That's a good point. I think maybe we should explain that a little bit more. Marlonal will come to you on this. Like the backlash to alleges is not a new thing. It's something that goes all the way back to the 2000s when this character first came out. Most of the criticisms come from black comedians and culture critics in the UK. What are their main issues with the allergy character? Well, he's like UK sick to my stomachs. I mean, it's like back in the day that might have been funny,

5:10but now it's just like, what are we doing? You know what I mean? And I think like Red said, a lot of people are more conscious and more socially aware, especially black people. And I think things that we used to find is just entertainment. We see how slippery of a slope that can become. We have more evidence now that it's not just a joke to a lot of people that there are many people outside of the culture who just take this as a monolith. And this is what black people are now. And so I think it's just a changing of the times, right? He's also like, he looks 75 in a roster hat in these trailers. It's kind of like, you know that one gift for the guy is saying, hi, can I buy one weed? Like, if he was younger, maybe he could pull this off, but you just look like an old white man that's just making fun of black people. Okay, I think that's what large firework comes from. And I don't really speaking, that sentence you just said,

6:11that's a bad look, an old white man making fun of black people. That sounds awful. I should also note, like, it is rare, Marlon, for comedians to come out and say, oh, that comedian is doing a thing that is bad. But so the idea that you would have comedians come out and say, you know what, we really do not approve of this allergy character. Do you want to talk about how rare that is where comedians critique their peers? You, yeah, you have to be, it either has to be extremely offensive or extremely bad. And in this case, it's both. If it was pulled off more talented and like Ratser, that that political element before meant a lot more, it was just saving grace for the whole thing because it was almost presenting as, okay, yeah, I'm this hood guy, but I am still educated. I still do know what's going on. And I can't challenge and push back. And with this trailer, at least, it's not looking the same at all. Okay, I just wanted to play a little bit more of Sasha Baron Cohen as allergy just to remind people again, or look the types of things that this character would do.

7:12So this is from an episode of the allergy show that aired in 2003. It's allergy trying to convince at the time business tycoon Donald Trump to invest in a new product. What is the most popular thing in the world? Tell me. Ice cream. Okay. Everyone has it. And what is the problem with ice cream? I have no idea. It drips. Okay. The bad thing is to come out with just like these ice cream gloves that make the ice cream not go on your hands and make it a well sticky. And also keep your hands warm when you are in the ice cream. Okay. Is your winner? Is your winner? You know, I just hear that and go, I don't, I struggle to find the joke because the entire humor is just, here's Allie G. Here's Sasha Baron Cohen trying to just do this accident. That's the thing that is supposed to be funny. Hello, I'll come to you on this like over the years the argument that we've heard from Sasha Baron Cohen and I guess the folks who defend him, they say like, particularly I should say, mostly non-black fans of allergy.

8:13The character is not meant to mock black men. It's meant to mock white men who are trying to be black. What are your thoughts on that distinction L? Yeah, I think in many ways it becomes a distinction without a difference. So the question we have to ask is, what is the role the blackness plays in this particular portrayal? And I think we can't, for example, ignore that in 2026, in black Britain. What we recently had was, of course, the story of Jason Arde, a black British academic who was hounded first out of his job and then, I'd buy suicide, because we had a rhetoric around saying black people are not qualified for the job job. So not simply, the question wasn't simply whether or not he plagiarized, it became that black people are not worthy to be in these institutions. So this is the conversation that's taking place in black Britain and then you have this character that uses, so-called broken English, that plays stupid, that is literally put on to be like, I am stupid, so therefore it disarms people. And so the question becomes, is the object of mockery who are people

9:14who pretend to be black? Or does blackness still become this tool, as was said, in which one can project all kinds of narratives around not belonging around the inadequacy of blackness? I don't think you can separate that. So I think at this particular time, when it's such a fraught time for black people in Britain in particular having this conversation around their worthiness, their humanistic qualifications, and their right to life, how can you then say, okay, well, the mockery is white people? You cannot separate that from the way that he uses black stereotype and caricature to do that. I can imagine somebody listening to this conversation, Marlon, and their thoughts would be, well, can anybody sort of do satire base around race? And of course they can. There is a long history of that being done, relatively well. The most prominent recent example is probably Robert Downey Jr. and Typac Thunder. In it, he plays a fictional white actor named Kirk Lazarus. He uses blackface to portray an African-American soldier, which in turn, that's the thing that gave us this moment. I know who I am.

10:15I'm a dude flaying the dude, disguises another dude. What? You a dude who don't know what to do here. Or are you a dude who has no idea what dude he is? It claims to know what dude he is. You guys talking about? I playing other dudes. I know what dude I am. Marlon, I've been a black man my entire life. I've searched my deep black heart for offense at this particular portrayal. I've looked at the screen and I thought, Robert Downey Jr. is in front of me in blackface. Shouldn't I be a little bit offended? But that is one of those rare examples that land pretty well with a lot of black audiences. Like, why do you think that character seems to work really well with black audiences? Wow, something like the allergy character does not. Well, he's the Doctor Umar in blackface. Let's just do that. He was holding the black guy accountable for how you portraying himself on screen. But you know what I mean? So it's like, how can we do that? There's black excellence.

11:16Right. There's a degree to that portrayal. There's like a deep awareness, right? There's a deep sort of awareness of, oh, the thing that is sending up is these method actors. Like the method actors who go too hard and too intensely and then at a certain point literally begin to lose themselves and then as they begin to lose themselves, then that's the thing that you're seeing, right? Is like that specific conflict. Rad Hollywood obviously has this like long history of doing this type of thing with black and brown characters. I'm thinking of course of one of the most famous examples is Hank Azaria voices for a long time voice the Simpson's character, Apooh. Apooh is a fictional Indian person in the show. Hank eventually stops playing Apooh in 2017 after a lot of criticism, Ashen Kutcher, Dawn Brownface for like some adders at a certain point that was pulled after some public backlash. Why do you think Hollywood still struggles to get this kind of thing right, Rad? Well, you know, what I think is interesting is Hank Azaria apologizing for playing a Pooh around 2017.

12:17I mean, this is right around the same time that Aziz Ansari, Kamel Nayan Giani, Hassan Manaj, they're all coming out, they're all coming out as comedians. They're all telling stories about how hard it was for them to live in the same world as Apooh, right? As this racial caricature that has really like kind of limited how people perceive them, right? And so like I think having all of those that a new generation of brown voices come up and be able to say this was not okay, this is not cool, that's what people responded to and we don't necessarily see that anymore. My question is why don't people listen to Black people on the same front? Like why do we still get it on that front, right? Because I don't see those offensive characters as far as brown people as much anymore, but I'm still seeing Borat no right now going off as Ali G. And so what is it about this situation that still makes it okay, that's still reinforces, that still has a studio behind it, supporting a whole movie where he gets to do the Isai not Black situation or is it because I black people in the situation? And you know, I don't know if there's a, that gets once again, it's that political cover

13:18where he in the trailer himself, as Ali G says, a lot has happened since then and I feel like he plans on addressing all the awarenesses we have still in this character, like I don't get that, right? And then the other part of it is like Sasha Bering-Coin, like this guy has nothing else. Like what does he do? What does Sasha Bering-Coin do besides this caricature of Muslim people in Borat, besides his caricature of gay people with Bruno and then this caricature of black people with Ali G, like he's got nothing else. So that tells you everything about the kind of punch up versus punch down comedian, comedian comedy that he's got, that he's got in his arms and all like, where these are the straws that he's clutching at. I mean, the idea that like over time, we haven't found another gear, right? We have over time, like he's not found as a comedian, as a creative, he's done specifically acting roles in other movies and I was like, oh, he's fine in this role. But in terms of his own stuff, there's really just that sort of impersonator gear. That seems to be the gear that he seems to fall into.

14:19Where you get your asses. And also like, yeah, for this whole political, if again, the main reason that there are sensible arguments is that he does this to go stealth, to be able to get people in politicians to say the things that they don't want to be caught on camera and say, how come there's no room for black people to do that? Black comedians to go into those spaces. How come Ali G or Borat, or what is his name? Sasha Bering-Coin. How come he can get into these spaces to put on his character and get these gotcha moments with these political figures that others cannot? So that I think is still the remaining question. It's worth noting that as we've been having this conversation, L-Jones was on video and it was on her computer and now we have you over the phone, L. And L, I want to ask you about this because Canada has its own... Can we point it out in my computer all as it explodes when we have black clothics? You're going to get it in the early end by black. I'm not here for this. Yeah, your computer said, this is too much blackness for me. This morning, I will not be happy that I just completely shut this down. Listen, I want to ask you about Canada's contributions

15:22to this debate because I actually think it's really important to talk about this. Canada's contribution to this debate is of course the character of J-Rock from Trailer Park Boys. J-Rock is of course played by Jonathan Torrance. He's a white rapper. He genuinely thinks he's black. I just want to play you guys this clip. Seems like me one of us ain't black. Are you black? Yeah, I'm black. It's... It's... It's crazy. No, J-Rock's not crazy. He just genuinely believes he's black, you know? We don't give him a hard time about if he's always been like that. I don't think most of us even notice anymore. It's just weird when new folks come along and they take a look at him. But as soon as they talk to him, figure out what his stick is. Yeah, he's black. Uh, Trailer Park Boys said how effects. Uh, you are our Halifax representatives. I'll come to you on this. Where does the J-Rock character sort of land in this broader debate? Yeah, I think what's important is to look at when you're looking at satire, like what is the context and what is direction? So we've thought about punching up versus punching down. And perhaps also turning inwards versus turning outwards. And so what the context of Trailer Park Boys is,

16:23in the province where we're often portrayed as just like lighthouses and bad pipes, Trailer Park Boys came in and provided this portrait of contemporary working class, Nova Scotia Life, that really resonated with people here. You don't hear those accents. You don't... So even though what satire was also very affectionate by Nova Scotia's, and you saw a kind of Nova Scotia you never see. Some people have described the aesthetic of Trailer Park Boys as white trash. And so part of the show is also thinking about that. Like what happens when white people are sort of discarded from whiteness as such, when you are living in poverty, when you live in a Trailer Park, when you're considered to be the underclass, and part of that is the relationship to race. So in that case, it's not hooking fun at black people. And again, you have the self awareness of the black people being like, what are you doing? And then this kind of joking around that. So in a way it reaches what Ali G is reaching for, the character of white people that think they're black, but done with, and I think, a different context of power, and a different context of what the object to the joke ultimately is. You might even say, actually accomplishing satire, right? That's actually like the thing you're supposed to do when you develop a satire

17:25because then you actually bring to the surface. How do you know what it is? Yeah, how do I... Yeah, how do I... Completely agreed. Marlon, I should note, we've had this entire conversation and the pegged to it is that there's a petition to ban this movie from theaters. We haven't seen this movie. The movie has not actually been released. I do expect that we're going to actually talk about the movie itself when it comes out in October, but do you expect any type of evolution in Sasha Baron Cohen's portrayal of Ali G 20 years later? First of all, I'd like to say, I never seen that J-Rock clip before. I checked that episode out. That was my barber talking to him. That was crazy to see him with hair. I don't expect any evolution because just from the trailer alone, like you can tell, just with Sasha Baron Cohen, just like Radar Singh, there hasn't been much evolution. Right. So I don't expect to see any evolution, especially now when I see him getting a prostitute pregnant

18:27and then tasting the pregnancy test. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we do it here. So the signals are not positive. Yeah, you know what I mean? And I think if he was going to evolve the character at all, it would be socially conscious. It would be socially aware. And you would see that in the trailer. And I think that there's something to that as well, where there is a new type of white person aspiring to be black. That is overly socially aware. That does a little bit too much where that could have been explored. But oh well. Hey, listen, maybe we'll actually see the movie and Allie G is actually a modern-day Dr. Umar. We'll find out. It's hard to say how far they're going to take that character. We'll be revisiting obviously the Allie G saga at some point, probably next month at some point. In the meantime, right now we got to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a moment. Hi, I'm Jamie Puesong.

19:28And every weekday, I host a news podcast called Frontburner. We do one story a day and try to give you a deep but not overwhelming amount of information in context. Think of us as a show that pulls lots of story threads together so you don't lose the plot. We're here to help you learn how all of these threads fit together. Follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts. All right, I'm Elimine Abdul Mahmoud. And this is commotion and L. Jones is here and Rad7 plays here. And I've got one more story that I want to talk to you guys about. Have a listen to this. Right before the Olympics, I went to my therapist, Panich. She was like, what's the worst that could happen? The whole world could laugh at me. She's like, do you think that's reasonable? Ah! I was like, oh no. Just in case you need a reminder. So that was a trailer for the new Netflix documentary called Untold Raygun Breaking Badly.

20:28It centers on the, I think now infamous story, right? Of the Australian B-girl Raygun, the controversy around hers. Shall we say subpar performance at the 2024 Olympics? That's when breaking is making its debut at the Olympics. And then you get this documentary, Rad, what else should people know about this duck? I mean, like a lot of this documentary is you get to hear what happened in Raygun's own works. Right? She gets to walk you through who she is, how she sees this opportunity to compete at the Olympics, the hoops that she went through, how she cleared the competition and kind of got into, competing the Olympics to represent Australia. To represent Australia. To represent Australia. And then of course, the backlash and all of that. Or were her performance and the backlash and all of that. And like, what's hilarious about this documentary to me is there's still like, you know, a happy ending for Raygun, like, you know, some acknowledgement for her feelings and the, some acknowledgement for her accomplishments and how it's not all like, so all dreary.

21:28But in terms of acknowledging kind of the all the social political impact of her performance. Yeah. You have other voices sounding off about her as a white woman in the space, a white professor in the space who should have properly known better than to be competing and taking up space in this competition. So I mean, you know, somewhat like, you know, filling in a lot or shading in a lot of the edges that we weren't so familiar with. And then ultimately getting getting Raygun a tour with Richard Branson on one of his boats. I mean, listen, none of the four of us on this panel are Olympians. So I feel like there's a limited amount of space for me to speak here. But let me ask you about this because there's no question obviously that the online backlash to Raygun's Olympic run got pretty big and got pretty toxic and rude. But it's also worth noting Raygun was not just simply like a naive be girl who just like walked up and said, I'm going to give him my best shot and then got that spot. She has a PhD in cultural studies. Her thesis centered on the local breaking scene in Sydney, Australia until not that long ago.

22:31She was a full-time lecturer in Macquarie University in Australia. You're an academic yourself. What was going on in your mind as you were watching this doc? I think I'm perhaps having a bit more empathy in this moment that I'm like publicly failing. I think it's actually kind of funny as an academic because, you know, at the most normally you get a few grants off entering a community and perhaps appropriating it and you've got all the way to the Olympics. In some ways it's a biblical story and the documentary doesn't really address that. In some ways you could see it as a story of temptation. What does it gain a woman if she gained the whole world that lose her soul? That you have in front of you the temptation of qualifying for the Olympics but not being qualified. And then sort of being like, but it's the Olympics and not turning back even at the point where you know that you're not ready to be there. And it doesn't really look at that question like, what could she have done? And so it becomes really about censoring her again over the voices again of other breakers over the whole culture of breaking. So re sort of constituting the sin of her being the center of everything.

23:33And then not really exploring like what seems central to me, which is this story where she knew she wasn't ready. She was having panic attacks and she did it anyway. And then when the backlash is inevitable, we now get a documentary that is very much about redeeming her but perhaps not about holding her accountable to that decision and what she did with inside that culture. And more broadly, what has happened to breaking as a result of this mockery, which is not just a verb, but has extended to the art form itself. My name is going to say, maybe with a couple of minutes left here, we can close on this. But let me ask you how much of this story is about her and how much of it is about the larger sort of governing bodies that are responsible for both the integrity and the safety of the competitive sports and all the participants in them. Yeah, they brushed by that. But one of the things that is, I think, left out a bit, like there could be more on is this idea of what happens when you Spotify a culture. Ironically, something she herself wrote about. So you have here a culture in art, one of the elements of hip hop, something that grew on the streets of New York and spread globally and is very much an art form.

24:35And then because the world, that's a social federation, whatever they're called, wants to be part of the Olympics and they can't get involved themselves. So they get in breaking. And you see this lack of structure around that. So from the lack of support in Australia, the lack of, for example, a qualifying score to assure that everybody has the quality to go to the Olympics. It's really sort of just, in a sense, breaking was used for this other agenda and the IOC, Australian sports, all these things didn't really care about it and didn't give the proper support or have the proper structures in place to ensure that this art form is respected. And so there's a kind of disrespect of it that Reagan embodies, but was also systemic. And it's the same in a way that the documentary really didn't go back to do more on those historic voices. Because the breakers that created this art form really looking at that issue that what happens when something that belongs to the people is corporatized and why Reagan embodies that. Marlon Palmer, you sat down. You know, you you pour yourself a drink and you say it's time for me to take in this Reagan documentary. You sit down and you take in the glory of this Reagan documentary. What did you make of it?

25:40This was Eat, Pray Love for Rick Dancing. This was... This was... This was... Oh, this was... Just watching white people fail upwards will always be so entertaining to me. It's like watching magic really just occur over and over again. Because it's incredible that this is someone that she's trying to convince you that she cares about the soul and the essence of breaking and like... She went to got her PhDs. She learned all about it and yet somehow still didn't see herself being a white woman white womaning. It was incredible. It was honestly. Like, you can't claim to care about something so much and know you know in your heart. You're not ready for this. And still go? I'm not a rock acid yet. It's fine. It's... I like it. I also like the fact that like we got a whole documentary as Marlon put for a white woman white womaning. But we don't have a documentary on like the gold winner at the Olympics.

26:43I don't mean that. Well, like, you know, the gold. We're in the country that we're in right now. One the gold medal and breaking. I was literally on the phone with the team lead. Like, I went to high school with like the team lead of the breaking team. And he's like, yeah, like we're trying. We got these independent stuff. But no, everyone wants to hear about the Ray Gun story. That's the one taken up all the oxygen in this space. Yeah. I think the description of the idea of like, okay, this was Breaking's Big Moment. And it becomes... When you get the documentary about Breaking's Big Moment of the Olympics, it's not a documentary about, hey, here's the journey that it took to get from the streets all the way to the Olympics. It's about how Ray Gun managed to do this, which is to say it's a disappointment is perhaps an understatement. Okay, listen, before I let you guys go, I'm just gonna go around the table and ask each of you for a recommendation. Something that you're enjoying. Maybe you're reading, maybe you're watching, maybe you're listening. Rad time and play. What would you like to recommend today, pal? Listen, because we're talking about breaking and stuff, I just want to once again recommend and re-up.

27:47Step up all in. That is the fifth step up movie. I am telling you. No, I am telling you this movie is cinematic excellence. The last 15 minutes, like, dance off and step up all in. It's like, it was like, this is one of my top three movies of 2014. Inherit vice, gone girl and step up all in. It just blows my mind every time I watch it. If step up five has 10 defenders, rad is one of them. If step up five has one defender, rad is that defender. If step up five is no defenders, rad seven plays underground and dead and gone. That is the thing that I've learned about this man is no matter what. He'll go, hey, have you guys heard the good word about step up five? That's just, that's just how rad rolls in this life. Marlon Palmer shaking his head, but also what would you like to recommend, good sir? Finding your committee genius is a book by Adam Bloom. I think it's a great book for comics, but I also think it's a great book for people who are thinking about getting into comedy because if you think you can handle it, this book will tell you otherwise for most people to tell you.

29:00Because it's a lot of work and a lot of different things you have to consider all at once. I think it's a great deconstruction of like a comedic mind. Brilliant. I am into it, even though I don't know if I want to be discouraged from that, Marlon. I feel like, well, maybe I should. Maybe we should all use a little bit more discouragement. He just went to the table. I want to do this. Nobody discouraged Reagan, for instance. I look where we ended up. L. Jones, last word to you friend. What do you got? Computing for dummies. Since we were talking about Blackface, I want to recommend two books by Black Canadian academics, Cheryl Thompson, staging Blackface in Canada and Philip SS Howard, performing post-racialism for both of those books, really look at Canada's history of race and performance as well. So they're well worth reading. Amazing. I love all these recommendations. I also really appreciate your time. You guys, this has been so great. Thank you for being on the show today. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Rad7 plays a freelance film critic in Toronto. You can find his work at the Global Mail on CTV and right here on commotion.

30:04L. Jones is a poet and associate professor in the Department of Politics and Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax. And Marlon Palmer is a comedian and co-host of the Extra Gravy Podcast. You can catch that documentary. Untold, Reagan, Breaking Badly on Netflix right now. My name is El Amino, I'm the mood. This show is called Promotion. We'll see you on Monday. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcast.