Class Consciousness and Cringe Comedy in Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Brothers Grimsby
(from March 2016)
There’s plenty to criticize in Sacha Baron Cohen’s most recent movie, The Brother’s Grimsby: dopey scatological humor, cruelty to and by children, gross out gags, obsessive and crude references to genitalia, graphic depictions of elephant genitalia, more genitalia, AIDs jokes, fat jokes, and the repeated violent abuse of the disabled.
In the film’s abundant negative reviews, all these transgressions are repeatedly cited. But perhaps the most heavily criticized and controversial element of the film is its portrayal of the white working class. The inhabitants of Cohen’s Grimsby — sister city to Chernobyl according to its fictitious welcome sign — are portrayed as louts, hooligans, drunks, welfare cheats, out of control breeders, and generally ugly fat immoral people.
Which means that Cohen and Grimsby, according to reviewers like Kyle Smith of the New York Post and John Patterson of The Guardian, Stephen Whitty of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, also Alistair Ryder of Film Inquiry, as well as former British Labor MP John Prescott and many many others, are “punching down” against the poor. A feature they didn’t find the least bit funny.
For those not in the know, “punching down” or its directional opposite, “punching up,” is a phrase often employed to determine whether a piece of comedy is morally just. “Punching up” implies a comic using humor to rib or ridicule someone more powerful than said comic. Punching up is therefore “good,” and the viewer should feel free to laugh. Jokes that punch down result from a comic using humor to exploit, insult, or injure individuals or groups less powerful than said comic. Punching down is “bad,” and the viewer is advised to stifle his or her guffaw — should said viewer experience a guffaw, I’m not sure I ever have — before taking to social media to report the comic’s wrongdoing.
Perhaps I’m being crass. There are plenty of vile jokes worth pointing out or protesting online. But notions of good or bad have nothing really to do with funny, and morality is sometimes subjective in even the clearest of cases. In the right scenario there is nothing funnier than kicking a man when he’s down — weak or powerful. And repeatedly. The more you kick him, the funnier it can get. It’s admittedly less funny to kick a woman. Or maybe it’s less funny for a man to kick a woman. Still funny if a woman kicks a woman. Or a child. Kicks a woman. Could be funny if the woman kicks a child, like off a bridge, or over a field goal. Morality may influence when or how we laugh, but it has less bearing on if a joke is funny. The funniest is thing is usually the thing you are not supposed to laugh at, the thing you try so very hard to not laugh at, because laughing at it would be morally wrong. But then you catch somebody else’s eye who’s also trying not to laugh, and you lose it and you almost die of laughter.
Jokes aimed at the expense of Donald Trump would be considered punching up. Using AIDS as a punchline is clearly punching down. The Brothers Grimsby combines the two, giving a CGI Donald Trump AIDS as the convoluted result of a stray AIDS-tainted bullet hitting him during a shoot out at a championship soccer match. This scene received hoots and cheers in many theaters, especially in England. I cringed. More than anything else, the joke just seemed wrong. Wrongheaded. I don’t know. It’s too hard for me not to remember the prejudice, fear and hate directed at people infected with AIDS in the 80s and 90s to laugh at Grimsby’s AIDS jokes. But that’s not to say that there couldn’t be a Trump gets AIDS joke I find funny. Maybe if Trump got AIDS from a hot dog. Hot dogs are always funny. Do they even eat hot dogs in England? What if it was gonorrhea? Are gonorrhea jokes punching down?
In The Brothers Grimsby, Cohen’s character Nobby, his family, and friends, are mocked but they are also heroes. They may be uncouth, and their methods shady — Nobby and his wife, played by Rebel Wilson, shave one of their 11 children bald and call him Luke, after Leukemia, so they can scam the government out of extra benefits — but the despite their scamming, cheating, and out of control breeding, the Grimsby-folk are the only characters in the film who demonstrate anything close to love, loyalty, or compassion. The upper class in the film are just arseholes. Does that sound like a clear case of “punching down?”
British author Martin Amis ran into a similar charges of “punching down” a few years back when he published his novel Lionel Asbo: State of England, a novel I 85% loved. Many British (Americans didn’t much care about the book one way or the other) critics objected strongly to upper class, Oxford-educated Amis’s unflattering depiction of the down and out. The book is set in the fictional “Diston Town,” a poor section of East London. It’s bleak. And vulgar. In the opening pages a teenage boy despairs over his incestuous relations with his 39 year old grandmother. The boy’s uncle and guardian, Lionel Asbo, chastises his nephew for studying instead of stealing cars or busting out windows. Lionel has a pair of pitbulls he trains/tortures for fighting. Lionel is maybe mob-connected, and a street level debt collector, beating people up for money. He is a vocal aficionado of porn — women not so much. Uplifting, right? A respectful portrayal of the struggles of disadvantaged people, right? Punching up? Not so much. But the book is quite (75%funny.
What it’s not is simple. The relationship between Lionel and his nephew, Des, is certainly not conventional, but it is loving, and even respectful. Des graduates high school, goes to college, gets married, leads a largely straight life, but continues his relationship with his criminally inclined uncle. Actually Des and then his wife, and baby, never leave the apartment Des was raised in. Raised, lovingly, by Lionel.
I don’t know if Cohen read Lionel Asbo before conceiving The Brothers Grimsby, but Diston Town and Grimbsy town have an awful lot in common. Amis extracts a lot of gallows humor out of repeated jokes about the town’s life expectancy rate. “In Dusty Diston Town… nothing — and no one — was over sixty years old. On an international chart for life expectancy, Diston would appear between Benin and Djibouti (fifty-four for men and fifty-seven for women) On an international chart for fertility rates, Diston would appear between Malawi and Yemen (six children per couple — or per single mother).”
In actual, nonfictional London there is currently a 25-year gap in life expectancy between the affluent and poor. In the US life expectancy rates for middle aged whites have been in steady decline since 1998. Numerous reports have recently surfaced of epidemic level depression, suicide, and drug abuse among the white working, or not working, or under or “poorly” educated, class. Not exactly a laughing matter.
But just because times are tough for working class (and lower) whites doesn’t mean that every depiction of their lives has to be grim and solemn (and self-serious) like Winter’s Bone, or upbeat and inspiring (if maudlin) like Billy Eliot. Would critics who lambasted both Amis and Cohen for being out of touch, upper class snobs — Cohen also comes from the English upper middle class and was educated at Cambridge — prefer these creators “stay in their lane,” and write only the male equivalencies of a show like Girls, make only uncomfortable gross-out comedies about upper middle class relationships and trivialities (not really meaning to diss Girls, a show I’ve only barely seen and only really know about from social media snippets and Tina Fey’s hilarious SNL parody. I’ve never seen Game of Thrones either. I’m broke. No cable or HBO). Or instead Richard Curtis movies like Knotting Hill and Love, Actually? Or even Judd Apatow’s This is 40, a film I couldn’t even get through because of its near complete lack of awareness of its characters’ massive wealth. For all the mockery and insult Amis and Cohen heap upon their down and out characters, at least they acknowledge that the working poor exist, put them in the spotlight — in starring roles even — and attempt, however bluntly, to portray them honestly. Warts and all. Or mostly warts. But we don’t see enough warts in Hollywood, and we get plenty of Paul Rudd.
Speaking of warts, perpetual butt of the joke/bully Donald Trump has in his unique way, done more to acknowledge the plight of the (white) working class than nearly any other candidate in the race for President. Bernie Sanders may be the Lorax personified, speaking for the last of the progressive-proletariat trees, but Trump is the only candidate who knows how to speak to the (white) working and not working classes, the “poorly educated” (whites), and the politically dispossessed (still whites).
Now Trump is connecting with Republican voters for a number of well-known and troubling reasons, but he is also gaining followers, in part, because, like Cohen and Amis, Trump has refused to “stay in his lane.” He may (or may not, according to John Oliver and others) be a billionaire but as Thomas Frank, the author of What’s The Matter with Kansas, pointed out recently in The Guardian, Trump spends more time (as in actual quantifiable minutes) than any other candidate talking about the devastation international trade deals have dealt to the working class. Not only do his supporters appreciate him talking about trade, they love the way he talks about it: emotionally. Trump is angry and threatening, retaliatory and slightly irrational, and absolutely clear on where he stands (even if he changes his mind later). He says he’ll put China in its place and demand Apple make iPhones in the US. He’s not kidding. He’s even punching up!
On paper, Trump’s candidacy, his whole being, should be repellant to the working class. He is a slimy, trust fund-inheriting, frequently-failed real estate developer and con man from, as Ted Cruz tried to point out, New York City! the bane of all Pace Picante Sauce fans and “real Americans.” Everything Trump does boasts of his wealth in big and flashy and tacky and loud, gold-plated, name-on-everything-in-giant-letters, style. Trump is vulgar.
But in being vulgar, Trump is also relatable. Trump exhibits none of the Byzantine customs of Old Money wealth and culture that keep the uncouth unaccustomed at bay. He may very well know all the rules of formal place settings, but he still likes to eat KFC from a bucket on his private jet. He may summer with the blue bloods on some exclusive private island but he still speaks like a commoner from Queens. Trump abandoned all the code-speak of the Republican party establishment and instead declared that Mexican immigrants, who most of the R’s already wanted to keep out regardless, are “rapists” and “murderers.” Muslims, as we all know, Trump wants to ban in total from entering our country, rather than just racially profile and legislate back to where they came from quietly like the average Republican. It would be hard to know, hearing him speak publicly in polite yet ornery tones, just how bigoted Orrin Hatch is, or squeaky clean and shiny happy person Paul Ryan, whose life mission seems to be to make the poor suffer, though he only speaks of compassion and dignity. It’s hard for the politically un-astute to get excited about men like these. Though they too want want to legislate the lyrics of Randy Newman’s song “Rednecks,” they like me don’t want to quote the chorus directly. They’d prefer to infer. From afar. But if Trump makes an inference there’s no missing it. “Blood coming out of her… wherever.” Vulgarity eschews politeness for impact. And those who are impacted feel moved. Finally someone from up on high is speaking their language.
Ironically, despite the film’s disdain for Trump, The Brothers Grimsby seems genetically engineered to appeal to the tastes and humor of Trump supporters. It is a film about, and seemingly made for, hooligans. Hooligans — for those of you non-Anglophiles unfamiliar with the English use of the term, who haven’t read Bill Buford’s Amongst the Thugs, either excerpted or whole — are drunken, undereducated, sports(especially soccer)-loving ultra-nationalists prone to violence and racist sentiment. Sound like any group we know in the states?
Speaking of the states: Which presidential primary candidate’s supporters would be more likely to find hilarious the scene where Cohen’s main character Nobby must suck the poison out of his long lost brothers exposed and dangling scrotum? Trump or Sanders? Or when the titular brothers save the world by literally (fictionally) jamming virus filled rockets up their asses? Would that kind of self-sacrifice appeal to Cruz’s religious right? Or how about when Cohen’s onscreen children toss a disabled kid over a sports stadium balcony? Clinton or Kasich?
If The Brothers Grimsby were set in America (as maybe The Brothers Elkhart; or The Brothers Ypsilanti— I’m trying to stay in the rustbelt and avoid simple southern stereotypes like The Brothers Lynchburg, Tennesee) Cohen’s character Nobby Butcher and his many fat and drunken mates would very likely have been Trump supporters. Nobby and co. are exactly the kind of “poorly educated” Trump spoke so fondly of after his Nevada Caucus win in late February 2016, the ones that are coming out of the woodwork, or out of the compound, or the survival bunker, or the ruins of post-industrial wasteland, to fill up his rallies and sucker punch protestors and people of color.
Unlike Trump rallies, the “poorly educated” are not flocking to The Brothers Grimsby. It bombed in its opening weekend in the US. It even bombed in Britain. And despite some of the high-minded criticism, I don’t think theatergoers are avoiding the film because it “punches down.” In Borat, Cohen was savagely, needlessly, yet hilariously cruel to the Kazakhs (Current moral king of fiction George Saunders vehemently disagrees with the hilarious part. He wrote a scathing “Shouts & Murmurs” piece about Borat in the New Yorker back in 2008, but in my mind George Saunders is a conservative prude in avante garde clothing, I am not a fan, and do not understand the hype, George Saunders is like the literary wunderkind lovechild of Donald Barthelme and Ned Flanders, but way more Ned Flanders, his mustache alone is a visual synthesis of the two men). Borat was a huge hit.
The Brothers Grimsby may or may not Sacha Baron Cohen’s most vulgar film, though it might be close. It is certainly his most relatable. The movie pushes the limit of conceivable taste, but never comprehension. The scene where the film’s titular twosome hide out in an ovulating elephant’s vagina, who needs a college degree or even access to clean water to find that funny? Actress Rebel Wilson’s character releasing gas before sex with Nobbby, who hasn’t been there? Elephant semen sprayed from a giant prosthetic elephant penis all over serious actor Mark Strong’s face? Hilarious in any language! Punching up or down? Who cares?
By dropping all the complicated socio-political double or quadruplespeak of his first two films and even the inane and more borderline anti-Muslim political humor of his last film, The Dictator — which was a movie that still required its viewers to read the occasional newspaper to get a number of its jokes — Cohen has with his latest effort made a movie that requires absolutely no cultural or political savvy to enjoy. In fact the less you know the better. The Brothers Grimsby is a film for people who understand the world not from the news or school, but from watching other movies and television. It’s a movie — like the Transformers series, like Donald Trump — that plays best with the people who’ve been educated the least. Is it punching down to say that?
I think The Brothers Grimsby was intentionally designed for a global audience. All of the movie’s so-so spy action bits — directed by the consistently awful Louis Leterrier, and which helped balloon the film’s budget to $60 million (Borat cost less than $20M, made over $100M) — were intentionally crafted to appeal to the global market of know-nothings, or I take that back , need-to-know-nothings. The same viewers who made The Fast and Furious films some of the highest grossing of all time.
So why did The Brothers Grimsby bomb? I think the explanation harkens back to another oft-tossed around term from the 2016 presidential primaries: Authenticity. Or lack thereof. Cohen, much like Marco Rubio’s candidacy, or to a lesser extant Hillary Clinton’s, has created in Grimsby a product that works too hard to be everything to everyone — or at least everyone who the expensive consultants that financed the film have identified as the target audience, and therefore appeals genuinely to very few. The massive ratings for reality TV (and Trump) prove, the “poorly educated” like it best when their on screen avatars are keeping it real. Unlike Adam Sandler’s recent films, which continue to make lots of money despite being irredeemably dumb and borderline deplorable- at least to the critics who have to review them, not to the fans who can’t wait to see just what kind of comedy Sandler, James, Schneider and Spade are cooking up, Cohen’s films were flops in part not because of how dumb they are, but because Cohen himself is not actually dumb. In that sense, both Dictator and Grimsby are in-genuine, false. Fake. Adam Sandler’s movies are dumb, awful even, but it’s clear that he and his friends seem to enjoy making them. That kind of charm can come through irrespective of quality filmmaking, and it is appreciated by people who are already inclined to like the actors. Cohen has charm obviously, but what Grimsby mostly transmits is effort, striving, striver, upper class effort. He hires an action director because he wants a hit. What comes across more than comedy is desperation.
Cohen out of character, in earnest conversation, with Marc Maron on his WTF podcast recently, and with Terri Gross on Fresh Air years before, comes across as learned and erudite, thoughtful and deep. Still funny, but more intellectual. And he has a keen sense of social justice. None of that, and not much of that side of him, comes through in Grimsby. Maron labored to pin the diagnosis of adrenaline junkie on Cohen, who didn’t deny the charge. He told stories of just how often he put himself in harm’s way, and how close he repeatedly came to not getting away with his filmed pranks. And how thrilling it all was. How alive it made him feel. It’s a great interview.
The daring and the risk Cohen brought to his comedy used to be electric. No one has ever been so adept at making audiences laugh at difficult material. Laughing harder than they’d expect from the shock and discomfort Cohen’s pranks created. I don’t think I’ve never laughed harder than the first time I watched Borat. I literally laughed myself sick during the naked hotel wrestling scene. Never before or since, save maybe the dress fitting scene from Bridesmaids, which also had me on the floor, choking, have so many Super Big Gulp drinking theatergoers found themselves exiting the theater with pants actually pissed.
In his best work, as both Bruno or Borat, and especially as Ali G — the early BBC Ali G — Cohen teased out the hypocrisies and vagaries of prejudice in interesting and revelatory if sometimes uncomfortable, and yes, often slightly bullying, ways. He punched up, he punched down. The thrill was watching how many punches he landed. Cohen’s humor was never morally righteous, though it could be morally interesting. There is no way in which prank comedy can ever be fully considerate of those who are pranked. Even if Cohen was punching up by ambushing Ron Paul, or exposing the vile homophobia of southern MMA fans, or the anti-Semitism of skinheads, it was never fair. Cohen always had the upper hand, via the camera trained on him — the devastating left hook.
He may have had the upper hand in Grimsby too, but it’s a hand that doesn’t seem terribly engaged. Cohen, who is the Daniel Day Lewis of insult comics, the closest to Method of any comedian acting today, fully inhabiting and refusing to break character for most of a film’s shoot and even during the marketing of his movies, has in Nobby created his least realized and consequently least funny character. The film can be funny, but Nobby rarely is. The character participates in the gags, but rarely provokes laughter in his own right.
The character, despite how offensive some reviewers find him, is just never fully fleshed out. Except for the handful of shots where Cohen’s Nobby smiles in close-up, both dumbly and sweetly at his newly-returned, long-lost brother, open mouthed and eyes wet with sentiment and drink, the Nobby character has few genuinely defining features. He drinks and smokes a lot. Most obviously he has a 90s era Oasis-style haircut, the sole purpose of which seems to be as setup for a gag about Liam Gallagher being accused of sexual assaulting Precious star Gadibe Sibourey. Liam Gallagher jokes must be punching down by now, right? Or is it Noel Gallagher? Which one’s no longer famous?
Fame is fleeting, and it changes people, especially comedians, and I think part of the problem with Cohen’s comedy is that because he has been so successful, he now has too much lose. He is constrained more than ever before by studio financial expectations and family obligations (he’s married, with children). He simply can’t be the comedy daredevil he once was. He tried with Grimsby to push the envelope by creating his most raunchy, offensive, uplifting, and accessible action comedy yet. He even gave the film an unambiguously happy sappy ending. It doesn’t matter so much which direction Cohen is punching in Grimsby. The problem with the movie is that most of the punches are pulled.
Donald Trump, love him or hate him, doesn’t pull his punches. Whether he’s punching up against the Bush Family and Fox News, or down against women and people of color, the punches land, and alarmingly, Donald Trump continues to be a hit. He just can’t seem to miss with his audience. His newest show is shaping up to be a potential blockbuster.
May God and/or Queen, save us.