Sacha Baron Cohen's "Dictator" on SNL

Sadly, last night's episode of Saturday Night Live did not feature the return of Shy Ronnie.  However, we did get  a surprise appearance by Sacha Baron Cohen as Admiral General Aldeen, the star of his upcoming film The Dictator (which comes out on Friday!).  British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen started out on the HBO comedy series Da Ali G Show, before breaking out as a huge comedy star after his mega hit film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  And typically, when a comedian makes a huge breakout comedy, the next step is to host SNL.  So why hasn't Sacha hosted SNL you ask?  Well, Sacha doesn't like to appear as himself.  He doesn't do impressions or silly little characters.  He completely immerses himself into one crazy character for his film, and then pretty much does all public appearances in character.  He tries to make you believe that it's a real character, and not just Sacha Baron Cohen acting.  Therefore, having him host SNL as himself wouldn't really fit with his style of comedy.  Instead, Sacha Baron Cohen prefers to make surprise appearances in character to promote his films.  He first appeared on SNL back in 2006 in character as Borat:

And now, here's Sacha Baron Cohen from last night's SNL as Admiral General Aldeen, aka The Dictator.

 

And for those of you who didn't get the inside joke, Sacha Baron Cohen appeared in Martin Scorsese's (Kristen Wiig takes as a drink) recent film Hugo as the Station Inspector.

Bruno!

As you probably know, one of the biggest movies to open this weekend, was the film Bruno! The film, from the comedy mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat: Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Khazakstan, was hilarious and we both enjoyed it very much.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Bruno is a film, not a TV show, so why am I writing about it on a TV-themed blog. Well, the character of Bruno (as well as the character of Borat) is originally from the HBO TV series Da Ali G Show, a show where Sacha Baron Cohen disguised himself as either Ali G, Borat, or Bruno, and as he does in the films, he interviews real people who don't realize that he's in character, and films their reactions to his crazy questions. After watching the Borat film, I ordered the complete series on DVD (or "Compleet Seereez" as it's written on the cover) see what the original show was like. We watched a few episodes, and we loved the Borat segments, as well as the Bruno segments, however we didn't really care for the Ali G character too much, and unfortunately, each episode has about 2 or 3 Ali G segments, and only 1 or 2 Borat/Bruno segments. So after watching the first few episodes, we put stopped watching, and kind of forgot about it, until now, after enjoying the Bruno film so much, we decided to give the show another shot. This time, we decided to just skip the Ali G scenes, and watch the Borat and Bruno scenes, and we enjoyed them very much. Although we noticed, that Bruno from the TV show, looked very different from Bruno in the film! In the movie, he has a full head of bleached blond hair, whereas on the show, he kind of has a buzz cut, with a bleached Mohawk. Regardless, it's still the same Bruno, acting flamboyantly gay and making Conservative southerners feel very uncomfortable, while exposing the homophobia that still exists in our country. Enjoy!