The term "cancel culture" had yet to be coined when Ali G made his bow on Channel 4 in 1998, since which time comedy has morphed into something quite different.
Forever under the microscope of both mainstream and social media, some of entertainment's biggest names confront the issues head-on; there are times when both Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais seem to spend half of their stage shows defending the gags in the other half.
Sacha Baron Cohen, Ali G’s creator and the director/co-writer of this film is no different, to the point where Who Iz I? feels like 90 minutes of him having his cake and eating it too.
The character’s return to the big screen is limited to just one weekend in cinemas, while advance promotion and press screenings have been kept to a minimum, although Baron Cohen has penned an article on his satirical intentions for Time magazine.
View Green Video on the source website"I have always designed my characters and comedy as vehicles to expose prejudice, bias, and stupidity," he writes. "Ali G is a white imbecile; the joke is on him, and on the predominantly white male establishment who take him seriously."
To that end, one of the chief plot points of the film is the efforts of a hippy-like academic (also played by Baron Cohen) to have Ali G cancelled on the eve of his return to American soil as a TikTok superstar – but guess what (?!), said academic is himself is something of a bigot.
Parallel to this, cameras follow Ali and his heavily pregnant girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson) as their fortunes rise, fall and rise again in the US, including the ignominy of him discovering that an offer for a new network series expired 20 years previously, and a stint as the host of a dubious far-right show on the fringes of cable television.
The film also addresses past accusations of cultural appropriation and Ali’s oft-spoke mantra "is it because I is black?", when the clearly white man from Staines, Middlesex, receives a text leading him to believe his biological father might actually be black after all.
It’s a lot to pack in, with Baron Cohen attempting to walk a thin line between commentary on how his creation has been viewed over the years, and comic setups where members of the public are the unwitting stooges in outlandish scenarios, the bread-and-butter of Ali in his subsequent guise of Borat.
To be fair, there are some laugh-out-loud moments along the way, and some unsettling ones – none more so than when a group of middle-ranking Texas Republicans are mocked for their hardline views on immigration.
Ultimately, though, the tone is uneven, with Baron Cohen’s determination to justify Ali’s existence as a tool to lampoon others and shine a light on bigotry too heavy-handed to allow the script’s narrative humour to breathe as easily as it might.
For all the toil put into reaffirming that the dreadlocks-sporting misfit in the title of the film is, as Baron Cohen describes him in the Time article, "ridiculous, extremely dumb," it doesn’t alter the fact that he will continue to be misunderstood.
The Little Englander aspects of comedian Al Murray’s Pub Landlord, a persona rooted in caricature, often experienced the same pitfalls as Warren Mitchell’s boorishly racist Alf Garnett in the 1960s TV sitcom ‘Till Death Us Do Part – sections of the audience took him to heart and turned him into a poster boy for their own politics.
It’s a difficulty Tim Robbins was wary of when he played Bob Roberts in the 1992 big screen mockumentary of the same name, opting not to release a soundtrack album of the campaigning politician’s provocative songs in case they were hijacked for heavy rotation on right-wing radio station playlists.
Ali G is still with us and will always be interpreted in different ways by different people; those who find him offensive will not be swayed by this film, and those who think he’s funny will look forward to laughing at him again, but maybe not as much as they used to.
Ali G: Who Iz I? is released in UK cinemas on Friday 23 October.
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