Ali G's Power Died When We Stopped Trusting Authority

Sacha Baron Cohen is making a film called Who Iz I. The cultural response tells you something true about what satire can no longer do.

Prince William, David Cameron, and JD Vance are reportedly bracing for ambush. The prospect of being caught out by Ali G—the delusional teenage character from Cohen's 1990s sketch show—has become newsworthy enough that their teams are taking precautions.

This is the measured reaction to a man whose entire career was built on dismantling people's certainty in real time. Ali G's power in the early 2000s came from targeting figures whose authority was institutionally insulated and widely accepted as legitimate.

When Cohen interviewed Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's communications director, in 2002, the comedy worked because Campbell's confidence in his own authority was unshakeable—his credibility was official. The joke was watching that confidence exposed as hollow under scrutiny. The target didn't know he was being satirized because the culture hadn't yet decided to distrust him. Compare that to JD Vance in 2024—half the country already considers him an illegitimate interloper in high politics.

Targeting him is not discovery, it's confirmation. The satire arrives at a subject whose authority is already contested, already fractured. The mechanism that made Ali G revolutionary was the ability to create doubt in figures we'd agreed to trust. When a figure enters the interview already coated in skepticism, there's nothing revelatory left to expose. Satire becomes performance for an audience that's already made up its mind.

The Simpsons followed this exact trajectory after 2000. Its early seasons made sense of political absurdity that felt invisible to the mainstream. By 2015, the show was commenting on absurdity everyone already named. The urgency evaporated. What matters now is whether Cohen recognizes this shift or mistakes audience anticipation for the old power.