Doing what Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to do in this fraught climate is really tricky, and my instinct tells me it won’t work more often than it does. Still, a I’m intrigued to watch how he navigates this minefield. ... When Who Is America? is on point, as it is in the “Kill or Be Killed” segment, it doesn’t just remind us that some of our emperors have no clothes. It exposes them for walking around naked with no sense of shame whatsoever.
There are some laughs in Who Is America?, but the most profound feeling you get from the show is weariness. Cohen’s haphazard comedy instincts feel topical in the worst way.
The show is a mixed bag; some of it successful, some of it irritating, some of it funny when it is also irritating, some of it not irritating but not particularly funny either.
There are instances when Cohen exposes moments of genuine American racism or Republican gun love that feel like they’re coalescing toward a point. But a lot of the humor is cruel and cynical, for the sake of being cruel and cynical, and even more of it points and laughs at the rubes, provoking them simply to provoke them.
Shame is the missing ingredient in Cohen's Who Is America? and, unfortunately, it's not an ingredient that proves merely incidental. It's the difference between shocking and not shocking, between hilarious and simply fleetingly funny.
A mediocre black comedy in which most jokes are so flat that they 'll only seem funny to teenagers. Most important issues are not raised for discussion, but are only derided, and rather mediocre. Looked more by inertia, from all issues, the best first 2, then jokes arrive.