Showtime tonight is debuting a new series starring famed punkster/prankster Sacha Baron Cohen. In it, he goes about in a variety of guises interviewing people — some of them very famous — and getting them to say embarrassing things. I will not be watching and not just because I don't subscribe to Showtime.
I don't like pranks. I don't like them so much that I don't even like them when they expose and exploit people I think are very bad human beings. Some folks, I know, find Mr. Baron hilarious but I sat through Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and laughed less than I do during root canals. Here's some of what I wrote back then…
I laughed a few times…but only a few and not with much vigor. Why? Hard to say. It wasn't because of the frequent lapses into low comedy. I usually love low comedy. What I don't usually love is the kind of Candid Camera humor where we're expected to laugh at the humiliation of people who are being ambushed and filmed for our alleged amusement. It always feels like a rigged game to me…like the situations that are arranged make it impossible for the victims not to look at least a little foolish. And if by some miracle they don't, that footage gets tossed.
This may sound like a leap in topics but it's not: There's a trend in magic on TV that I don't much like. It's Street Magic where the magician goes out to some public place with a video crew and they stop people who look like decent sports and the performer does tricks for them. It's really great for the magician because if he fails, they can just throw that video away. I could go out, give someone a totally free choice to pick a card and then — employing no magic techniques whatsoever, say "It's the nine of spades!" And if we do this enough times, we'll get footage of me being right which we can broadcast and make me look like I did an impossible feat.
I'm not going to watch Mr. Cohen's new show because to begin with, I think most pranking is dickish, even without putting a camera on it. I also think being able to control the editing gives the producers the opportunity to be even more dickish…and on a "prank" show, they figure the more dickish, the better. And I really, really don't want to sit there and feel someone has been grossly unfair to Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin.