Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen was in the news recently defending the veracity of Jason Arday. And now his kinsman Sacha Baron Cohen will be back with another Ali G movie.
Judging from the trailer, Ali G: Who Is I doesn’t look very good.
But that’s not surprising. People usually get pretty sick of even the funniest movie comedians after maybe a half dozen years.
For example, Buster Keaton was indisputably a comic genius. But the peak of his career lasted from 1923-1928.
Charlie Chaplin extended his career by slowing down to a snail’s pace, making The Gold Rush in 1925, The Circus in 1928, his masterpiece City Lights in 1931 (for which he filmed an excruciating 342 takes of the Tramp meeting the blind flower girl), Modern Times in 1936, and The Great Dictator in 1940.
But the Jewish comic actor, who spent part of most years growing up in Israel with his grandmother, is especially out of fashion these days for his Jewishness/Zionism. From Variety:
Aug 28, 2026 5:46am PT
Ali G Movie Backlash Intensifies in the U.K. as Campaigners Try to Get Film Pulled From Cinemas
However, claims that one major chain has already agreed not to screen “Ali G: Who Iz I?” are inaccurate
By Alex Ritman
Ali G’s grand return has not exactly been met with widespread celebration.
That’s at least the case from various corners of his home soil in the U.K., where the first big screen outing for Sacha Baron Cohen‘s famed faux rude boy in more than two decades has been hit with a campaign aimed stopping it from reaching cinema screens.
Following the release earlier this week of the trailer for Amazon MGM‘s “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” a new mockumentary following the satirical character and due for release on Oct. 23, backlash against the film has steadily intensified. Many have taken to social media to accuse Ali G, who in clips is seen wearing fake dreadlocks and a Rastafarian hat and discussing his desire to be an “absent” father, of being an “outdated” and “racist” caricature.
On Wednesday, NewsCord — a news comparison and media monitoring platform — started a campaign urging cinemas around the world to refuse to screen the film, emailing major chains with the request on behalf of those who register. As of Friday, it claims to have been instructed to send more than 36,000 emails.
The campaign accuses Cohen of using satire as a “cover for enforcing racist stereotypes,” citing a newspaper report from 2000, just two years after Ali G first landed on British TV screens, in which Black British comedians claimed the character was an “alibi for racism.”
Originally launched by Cohen in 1998 as part of Channel 4’s “11 O’Clock Show,” Ali G was created as a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture, the joke being that his deliberately offensive nature poked fun at his own ignorance and cultural appropriation in general.
No, Ali G in 2000 was a dim-witted Pakistani wigger, an early example of what Drukpa Kunley calls YooKay culture. Ali had an Uncle Jamal who owns the Taj Mahal curry restaurant.
As Muslim terrorism was becoming a bigger worry, for the obscure 2002 movie Ali G Indahouse, the character was retconned into a white Englishman named Alistair Graham. Uncle Jamal was phased out.
He became an instant hit, soon landing his own show and launching Cohen’s career in the process.
But in the 2000 article, the comedian Felix Dexter argued that the character “allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness” — views now echoed by many 26 years on and repeated as part of the NewsCord campaign. Meanwhile, Jeanette Winterson added: “I don’t know what the difference is between him and the Black and White Minstrels.”
Other than he’s Pakistani?
In a new Substack post, British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch asserted that, as offensive as she found Ali G in her youth — “I just knew he was mocking us,” she wrote — the character was now widely out of sync with today’s times.
“Black people don’t dress like that anymore. Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. Sexualizing black women and casually mocking working class women is not accepted anymore,” she wrote. “Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.” …
While it’s unknown whether Cohen expected the level of backlash to “Ali G: Who Iz I?” that has arisen, it’s clear he at least anticipated some negative retaliation. In a tweet linked to the trailer for “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” he wrote: “In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”
It’s not terribly complicated to understand the roots of Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor:
Paywall here.
