There’s a political slant to Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy, The Dictator, for certain. That’s kind of unavoidable when you’re digging around in issues like the recent Arab Spring and Middle American racism to find your jokes. But most everything here is played as broad humor, regardless of any tenuous connection the material may have to serious social issues, so more important than discussing the film’s politics is discussing how funny it is. The Dictator has its moments, it’s got a good handful of laughs; but for every joke that hits there are two or three that fail in spectacular fashion. Succinctly said: it will make you groan more often than it will entertain you.
Also worth mentioning, as far as the film’s humor goes, is the content of the gags. Most of the jokes that are able to produce real laughter are horribly offensive. They feature Cohen’s dictator character saying things that are so profoundly racist or cartoonishly sexist that you can’t help but chuckle at how outlandish the sentiment is. That’s all well and good—but let’s be honest—shock humor is kind of cheating. The rest of the gags mostly stem from gross-out humor that feels dated and lame in 2012, and they’re only offensive in how not funny they are. Parts of The Dictator feel like you’ve somehow mistakenly started watching a teen comedy from 1998, when comically large tufts of pubic hair were all the rage, and the feeling they invoke is disappointment.
When Cohen released Borat he seemed like such an edgy, intelligent comedian who was putting out work that pushed a lot of societal hot buttons and critiqued our darkest characteristics, but still managed to remain hilarious. He committed to maintaining the reality of his characters and the merging of fantasy and reality in his work with an almost Andy Kaufman zeal; sometimes with dangerous results. He really seemed like he was going to be one of the most influential and respected comedic voices of the next decade. But ever since that first feature he’s put out nothing but mediocre material full of stale gags. His public stunts have stopped feeling dangerous and started looking like obvious, corporate, viral marketing. I can’t remember an entertainer having this quick a rise and fall in esteem in quite a while, and that’s a shame.
