Who Is Really Performing Here?

Twenty years after he last slumped into a West Staines leisure centre, Ali G is back, and the joke has curdled in interesting ways. Ali G: Who Iz I? sends Sacha Baron Cohen's original creation to America to reclaim his fame after discovering that Julie is eight months pregnant, which is to say it sends a fictional idiot into a real country and lets the collision do the work. What made the character durable was never the tracksuit or the mangled slang. It was the interview format: a performer playing a fool, sitting opposite people who believe they are the sane ones, and discovering which of them will say something appalling to impress a man they have decided is beneath them. The audience laughs, and then has to decide what it has just been complicit in.

That question is the spine of this programme. Baron Cohen's later work sharpens it into something closer to a weapon, and the British tradition around him has always been drawn to the put-on as a way of testing institutions. Chris Morris built an entire career on the willing dupe, and Peter Watkins made a film in which the media itself is the con. From there the chain moves outward: Orson Welles's late essay on forgery and authorship, Hirokazu Kore-eda's quiet bureaucracy of the afterlife, and Preston Sturges's con artists, who are charming enough that we forget to audit them. Each film asks the same thing in a different register. Who is holding the camera, who believes it is a mirror, and what does the laughter cost?

The ordering matters. Start with Ali G and the joke is broad and televisual; move to Four Lions and the same mechanics turn lethal, with Morris finding bathos inside terror and refusing to let the audience off with a nervous giggle. Watkins's Privilege pushes further, imagining a pop star as a state instrument, which now reads less like satire and more like a forecast. Welles then steps back to interrogate the whole apparatus, reminding us that the forger and the filmmaker share a trade. Kore-eda and Sturges close the loop from opposite ends of the emotional scale: one asks what we choose to remember, the other what we are willing to be sold.

What binds these films is not a shared tone but a shared contract. Every one of them requires the viewer to consent to being fooled, at least for ninety minutes, and then to notice the consent. That is the pleasure and the discomfort. A good put-on does not simply expose its target; it exposes the audience's appetite for the exposure. Watch them in this order and the laughter starts to sound different by the end.