Cohen, whose entire career involves donning deliberately provocative caricatures like Ali G, Borat and Bruno, has long claimed that the joke is always on both the buffoonish characters themselves and those unwitting dupes invariably drawn into their orbit. And now Who Iz I? co-writer Colton Dunn is backing the 54-year-old star, as reported by Deadline.
“From my point of view, Ali G is not a racist character,” noted Dunn, “Ali G is a tool to expose racists.” The writer and actor, perhaps best known as Superstore‘s wheelchair-using store announcer Garrett, certainly has no small amount of credibility in the edgy comedy sphere. A longtime writer for both Key & Peele and The Eric Andre Show (and, it should be noted, a Black man), Dunn continued, “[Cohen] puts himself in the most ridiculous situations, and he doesn’t do that because he’s racist. He goes into these crazy-ass places, places where people would kill him if they knew what was going down. I don’t think he’s doing that from a racist point of view. That’s why I signed on. I wouldn’t sign on to work with somebody that I thought was racist, that’s against everything that I’ve done.”
Dunn, most recently a writer and supervising producer on the Emmy-reaping Widow’s Bay, says this aging version of Cohen’s character has been updated to take on current racially sensitive issues like immigration and the very “cancel culture” currently under debate, but will also be, “ridiculous, silly-ass fun.”
For other Black comics, however, Ali G’s time has long passed its expiration date, with Dane Baptiste (creator of shows like Sunny D and Bamous) calling Ali G’s comeback akin to “microwaving a relic from a generation ago.” Cohen himself is notoriously closed-mouthed about reaction to his deliberately controversial comedy, but has always maintained, as he said in a 2016 interview with Marc Maron, that he is “vehemently against any form of racism.”
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