- You might think the opposite. You’d be wrong.
- “On camera” was key there.
For those who would like to see Mr. Spencer’s greatness for themselves: Official Clip ft. Jason Spencer | Ep.2 | Who Is America? | SHOWTIME - YouTube
OK, now why am I demonstrating a suppository on camera?
(Hidden cameras don’t count, BTW.)
Cohen trolled an entire city: East Barstow (aka Kingman, Arizona)
[quote=“asahi, post:44, topic:818485”]
Cohen trolled an entire city: East Barstow (aka Kingman, Arizona)
[/QUOTE]That is hilarious. Best part was the artist’s rendering of the project.
In Africa this drug could save countless lives but getting medical personnel and equipment to administer it is difficult. This suppository can be self administered but many people there are superstitious about sticking Kit Kat bars up their bum. Getting a great man like you on camera doing it would go a long way in showing it’s safe. Maybe even fun!
The thing that’s so fantastic about people like Spencer is just that: how they go along with stuff that from the POV of most normal people we’d expect that at some point it would elicit the *“oh, get out, this is just a put-on!” * response.
This particular SBC troll operation is, of course, based on something that is real and true: Political figures know, from direct experience, that every so often there will be a gap in the screening and in through the door will walk some “interviewer”, who after 10 minutes you’ll realize is a complete wackaloon who wants you on record about his/her pet issue from the peculiar parallell universe s/he inhabits, or some would-be Next Breitbart attempting an ambush or gotcha. Tossing them out of the office at that point would be awkward, so if you are a normally competent politician you try to suffer through the interview while hopefully minimizing any answer or reaction that could trigger the wackaloon or that the muckrakers may use against you when they edit the tape.
Now, if you’re a subnormal politician… well… It should not need mentioning how exposing your arse and shouting out “n*****” are such obvious no-brainer examples of that last category of things, that it multiplies the laughs at how damn gullible and easily manipulated is this person.
OK, just to short-circuit this: The process of trying to get me to stick candy up my ass fails because I can do basic research and I know that no such medicine exists. No, you won’t be able to convince me that it’s secret, because this kind of stuff isn’t secret. No, you won’t be able to convince me that no news exists in English, because this kind of stuff always makes it into English-language press releases. Heck, the PI probably spoke English.
That lack of research, and lack of impulse to do research, is why the people who got fooled by Cohen are so laughable, and deserve to be laughed at.
Plus there’s just the healthy suspicion for why I of all people would be chosen. I’d just be an American politician. Either they can have anyone do it, and would pick someone lower down, or they’d have someone from the actual area in question do it. Or a celebrity they’ve actually heard of.
Simply being asked to be involved in anything like this should throw up red flags for most people, let alone any politician who knows their opposition would like to discredit them. This is going to be on camera, for goodness sake.
I think it was in AZ that as Borat he went to a bar and started singing “throw the jews down the well” and some of the crowd sang along with him.
I’ve watched the first two episodes and…it’s funny. Those that come off badly are absolutely deserving of all they get.
That couple who were polite over dinner while SBC was horrific? I came away thinking that SBC had not skewered them at all. He looked like the boorish knob. And that’s fine. I’m sure SBC thinks that’s fine as well and that’s why he left it in. Same with Bernie Sanders, same with the guy that up and left because it was nonsense, same with the polite and obliging art gallery owner.
Their images suffered not one jot from SBC’s sillyness but the real power of showing those “misses” is that it hammers home the astonishing “hits”. It shows that normal decent people can be normal and decent on camera in the face of pressure from SBC and so those that cannot, really have no excuse and nowhere to hide.
I’ve only seen the Sanders and Spencer ones. And this is not to excuse Spencer at all, but SBC’s approach to Sanders was completely different than to Spencer, and - unlike with Spencer - was not designed to ensnare and ridicule Sanders.
In the case of Spencer, he posed as an ostensible expert who would be expected to know a lot more than Spencer about the subject at hand. In the case of Sanders, he was talking about things that Sanders would be expected to know much more than him, and there was zero reason for Sanders to defer to him at all even if he wasn’t saying anything ridiculous.
Further, the character who approached Sanders was from the opposite side of the ideological fence as Sanders, and there was no reason for Sanders to go along in the interests of harmony with his “ally”.
The interview with Sanders was of a sort with the Ali G interviews, where the character says ridiculous things and the humor is on the part of the character himself and the awkwardness of the interviewee in trying to deal politely with an ignorant nutcase. In that context, I think Sanders did fine and did not embarrass himself at all, but I don’t think he gets any kudos for not going along with any ridiculous stuff because the interview wasn’t designed to produce that.
Uh, that in itself is kind of reinforcing NoveltyBobble’s point. Does anybody imagine that Cohen wouldn’t have been delighted to entertainingly ridicule Sanders if he’d been able to come up with a scenario and pitch that Sanders would have fallen for? It’s just that fooling a rational and savvy intelligent realist like Sanders at that level of whatthefuckery is a lot harder than similarly fooling a gullible blowhard like Spencer.
The fact that Spencer was dumb enough to take the bait to participate in self-evidently bizarre shit at the behest of an unscreened “ostensible expert who would be expected to know a lot more than Spencer about the subject at hand”, while that sort of bait wasn’t offered to Sanders, doesn’t mean that SBC was deliberately “going easy” on Sanders for some reason. It just means that Spencer is much more of a credulous Dunning-Kruger dillhole than Sanders is, and that SBC was aware of that.
Can you describe what, exactly, might have been an equivalent approach to Sanders that might have ensnared and ridiculed him?
It helps that he’s one of the few foreign actors who can actually pull of an Israeli accent.
The equivalent test to Spencer would have been a guy who had professional expertise in an area Sanders knew nothing about. He would have told Sanders things that seem completely ridiculous to the viewer watching at home who has the benefit of knowing in advance that it’s all a fake, but which might fool the guy who is out there on the spot. Or, some far-left guy, admirer of and sympathizer with Sanders, but with a lot of over-the-top far out leftist nonsense that he would press Sanders to go along with. In that situation, Sanders would have more inclined to say supportive things.
He might not have been fooled anyway. But that would have been the equivalent test.
It reveals a significant difference in how progressives and conservatives think. Progressives live in a fact-based world; conservatives live in a world that is based on perception and imaginary demons, which enables them to suspend reality for a moment and go to the kinds of depths that Spencer and the gun rights fanatics went to. Cohen exposed the fact that conservatives are willing to go to great lengths to embrace an ideology of violence and hostility, because their ideology is grounded in a reality based on perceptions and feelings. The only kind of person who would literally pull down his pants and aim his ass crack at an imaginary Muslim is a guy who imagines himself terrorizing Muslims. It’s hilarious that he could be so stupid, but terrifying at the same time, because it reveals that these nutters are capable of much more than what we know. And that was most likely the point Cohen was trying to make everyone aware of.
Sanders isn’t even remotely in the same category because he lives in a fact-based world. There was no chance he was going to look like a dumb shit because his brain scans for facts and he identified early on that this was nonsense. Remember, Sanders was fooled in one sense: he didn’t immediately recognize it as a prank. Where he differs from the conservatives in the show is that he realized that what was coming out of Cohen’s mouth was fucking stupid. The conservatives did not, and they got pranked because they failed to recognize the stupidity of what was being said to them. And they failed to recognize it because on some level, they really do agree with that level of stupidity, as long as it supports their perception of reality, regardless of how unbelievably far from fact-based reality it happens to be.
Do you actually think that any more than a tiny minority of Americans can recognize a genuine Israeli accent?
Excellent post, asahi.
I don’t think the difference is so much that liberals live in a fact-based world (my Facebook feed will unfortunately disabuse anyone of that notion toot sweet) as that Spencer himself is a goddamned nutcase. He suffers from an extreme version of the Islamophobia that grips the Republican party, and here I’m using the “-phobia” suffix in its original meaning. Note that he’s not a major party candidate, just one particularly odious lunatic with a small chunk of power.
Sanders is way, way savvier than that. So, for that matter, is Romney, or McCain, neither of whom were induced to show their asses on camera.
I bet that if Cohen were to plumb the depths of liberal state senators, he could find someone dumb enough to go along with something stupid. But not Sanders–whatever some of his haters may say, Sanders is canny as hell.