Ali G, a.k.a. Borat a.k.a Bruno a.k.a Sacha Baron Cohen. You either hate him or love him, there is no dancing on the fence. At first glance that is. If you asked someone on the street about Ali G (in England, I don’t know about Switzerland...) you’d probably either get a ridiculously enthusiastic response or none at all. His ‘humour’, after all, crosses boundaries, goes below the belt and at times leaves you downright dumbfounded. It is repetitive, predictable and unsophisticated. That is what an incorrigible ignoramus would say, and I thrive on proving those kind of people wrong:
The man is a comic genius, but that is just my humble opinion. Sure, not everything he does is funny, and I wouldn’t watch an Ali-G marathon, but there are many ‘classic’ moments that you can never forget. As it is with many a genius, his earlier stuff is far better than the most recent shenanigans, but for a linguist such as myself, his use (and abuse) of language is particularly intriguing. To the casual listener it’s a cross-breed between Cockney slang, white-washed ebonics and Jamaican jibing. And while that pretty much hits the nail on the head, it’s not the whole truth, by far. He uses quite a lot of malapropism. A malapropism is the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect. A classic example:
His formulaic ‘mistakes’ and structural, syntactical and grammatical idiosyncrasies lead the pundit into a false sense of security. While the laughs, on a holistic level, are predictable, each individual laugh is in its own way unique. Which is pretty much why you can’t copy him:
He plays with your expectations, undercuts your arguments and then goes in for the killing blow:
He uses your intelligence and turns it against you so that you go down, and he walks away in style. And then there is the Andy Runey interview:
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