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The Dictator marches onto our screens this month and will bring another of Sacha Baron Cohen’s tragic clowns to life, an art he has been studying since his days at Cambridge.
After reading History at Christ’s College, the Ali G comic studied for a year under the French clown Philippe Gaulier.
Buffoonery was a style of comedy which thrived in the travelling fairs of medieval Europe, but had long been forgotten.
Buffoons were social outcasts, often deranged or deformed, who turned to street performance to earn a crust.
Clad in gaudy costumes, they drew enormous crowds with their filthy talk and bizarre voices, and by tormenting any members of the ruling classes or the clergy who should pass by.
The Borat star was so impressed with the resurgence of Gaulier’s art of buffoonery that he wrote the preface to his book on the comedic atyle, the aptly-titled Le Gégèneur: The Tormentor.
Sacha said: “Imagine my excitement at the idea that I could escape studying at one of the ‘great’ British drama schools.
“Instead of fencing, practising iambic pentameter and ‘memory recollection’ of painful childhood experiences I could study under a legendary teacher of theatre who was giving courses on how to be a professional idiot.”
He has been acting the buffoon ever since. Think of Ali G’s interview with Tony Benn, in which the Old Labour grandee railed against his suggestion that unions call strikes ’cause they is lazy and wanna chill,’ or Brüno’s trip to Lebanon, where he tells the stunned leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade that al-Qaeda are ‘so 2001.’
Also Borat’s nude wrestling match that spills over into a mortgage brokers’ conference: a none-too-subtle reminder that beneath the surface, we are all naked, hairy, wobbling idiots.
That’s what makes Baron Cohen such an exhilarating comic force: his characters exist in that dangerous space between fact and fiction.
They tap into our most primitive can’t-look-must-look instincts and make us painfully aware of our own absurdity.
We eagerly await the opening of The Dictator to see if it is equal to his earlier work. But we can be sure it will make us feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, so it must be doing something right.
Watch The Dictator trailer in all its glory below…