Recipeloading34

(Ali G interviews Sir Rhodes Boyson) Boyson: 'I think overall.' Boyson: 'Single sex schools work better than mixed schools.' Ali G: 'But don't you think single sex girl's schools. They just breed you know, people who drink from the furry cup!?' Boyson: 'Well never having drunk from the fairy cup (sic) I don't know what the. 02:40 / News / Ali G, Betty Harvie Anderson, Gilberthorpe, Highbury Grove, homophobe, Islington, Kincora, Monday Club, Rhodes Boyson, Some years ago we were visited in our humble home by Betty Harvie Anderson, deputy speaker of the House of Commons. The gag wasn’t just Ali G throwing gang signs: it was him coaxing the Tory grandee Rhodes Boyson into agreeing that kids should get “caned” in school, or hearing the Unionist politician Sammy Wilson call himself British in his Belfast office and be asked: “Is you here on holiday, then?”.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ali G is a satirical comic character invented and played by the EnglishcomedianSacha Baron Cohen. Originally appearing on Channel 4's Eleven O'Clock show, Ali G is the title character of Channel 4's Da Ali G Show, which now appears on HBO.

[edit]History

Ali G is a cousin of Robert Graham Ali G first appeared on Channel 4's The Eleven O'Clock Show as the 'voice of da yoof' in 1998.^[1] He interviewed various public figures in the United Kingdom.

Rhodes Boyson Ali G

An early interview occurred with fashion designer Tomasz Starzewski. Ali G suggested that the Wonderbra should be banned, as it misleads men into thinking that a girl's breasts are larger than they are. He tells an anecdote of being disappointed when a girl he had 'pulled' was wearing a Wonderbra. He also asked Starzewski if he was pleased Gianni Versace was slain because it meant less competition, and suggested that he heard a rumour that Calvin Klein did it.

Other examples of his bold interviewing style include getting the Bishop of Horsham to admit that God created the Universe, and then asked him, 'And since then, He's [God's] just chilled?' Ali G asked the Bishop about God's appearance, to which the Bishop replied, 'Well, he's sort of Jesus-shaped.' During an interview with James Ferman (former director of the British Board of Film Classification), Ali G asks whether his made-up vulgarities would restrict a film to an over-18 audience, and suggests that film censorship be performed by younger persons who understand contemporary slang. Ali G begins an interview with the Chairman of the Arts Council of England Gerryl Robinson with the question, 'Why is it that everything you fund is so crap?'

Ali G was featured as a limousinedriver in Madonna's video, 'Music,'[1] and subsequently recorded his own record with reggae/pop performer Shaggy.[2] In 2001, Ali G hosted MTV Europe Music Awards in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2002, he was the central character in the feature film Ali G Indahouse, in which he is elected to the British Parliament, and foils a plot to bulldoze a community centre in his home town of Staines. Ali G is presently the title character of HBO'sDa Ali G Show, which features two other characters played by Cohen: Borat Sagdiyev, a foreign correspondent from Kazakhstan, and Bruno, a fashion reporter for Austria's fictional 'Gay TV'.

Ali G was featured in a series of ads for the 2005-06 NBA season, in which he used his brand of off-kilter journalism to interview various NBA stars. The spots were directed by Spike Lee.

[edit]Background

Ali G (Alistair Graham)(brother of Robert Graham) is a [fictional] gang member of the 'West Staines Massiv', and lives with his grandmother in a semidetached house at 36 Cherry Blossom Close, in the heart of the 'Staines Ghetto'. He was educated at what he calls 'da Matthew Arnold Skool' which is a real secondary school in Staines. Staines is a middle-class town to the west of London that has been the butt of jokes for many years, and is far different from the inner cityghetto that Ali G claims. Just the same, he purports to exemplify gangsta culture.

[edit]Notable people interviewed by Ali G

• Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin, astronaut, and the second man to walk on the moon. (Ali G also called him 'Buzz Lightyear').
• Football player David Beckham and wife Victoria Beckham, a former singer
• Tony Benn, former British Labour MP, chairman and cabinet minister
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former Secretary General of the United Nations
• Rhodes Boyson, former British Conservative cabinet minister
• Professional basketball players Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Ben Wallace, Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan,Dwyane Wade, Richard Jefferson, Vince Carter, Steve Kerr, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith
• Pat Buchanan, political commentator
• Noam Chomsky, MIT Professor
• Jarvis Cocker, Pulp singer
• Gaz Coombes, Supergrass singer
• Paul Daniels, magician
• Sam Donaldson, veteran journalist
• Mohamed Al-Fayed, owner of Harrods and Fulham FC
• Daryl Gates, former LAPD Chief
• Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives
• Neil Hamilton, former Conservative politician
• Kent Hovind, evangelist and Young Earth creationist
• Jenna Jameson, Adult film star
• C. Everett Koop, former US Surgeon General
• James Lipton, host of Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio
• John McCain, United States Senator from Arizona
• Ralph Nader, consumer activist and former US presidential candidate for the Green Party
• Thomas J. Pickard, former FBI Director
• Gail Porter, television presenter
• Sally Jessy Raphaël, former talk show host
• Andy Rooney, of the CBS program 60 Minutes
• Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor and Air Force General
• Dick Thornburgh, former U.S. Attorney General
• Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and EPA administrator
• Donald Trump, real estate developer
• Gore Vidal, author and essayist
• Sammy Wilson, northern Irish politician Democratic Unionist Party

[edit]References

1. ^'He becomes the character, certainly with Ali G and Borat. He has a mix of Sellers's acting and Rod Hull's bottle' by Kirsty Scott, The Guardian, September 29, 2006.

[edit]External links

• Ali G, Borat and Bruno.,
• IndexTube List of Ali G movies from Youtube and Google-Video

Empathizing with Simon Baron-Cohen's cousin

In an earlier post, I mentioned British neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, recently famous for his theory that autism is a symptom of an 'extreme male brain', where male 'systematising' takes over at the expense of female 'empathising'.

This 4/2004 weblog entry says that Simon Baron-Cohen is the brother of Sacha Baron Cohen, who performs as the hiphop journalist Ali G (the hyphens come and go in both Baron-Cohens' names). Ali G's HBO TV show is starting its second season, specializing in comically outrageous interviews with subjects who are not in on the joke. This 2001 article in the London Review of Books says that Simon 'is also rumoured to be Ali G's cousin'. An article in the August Vanity Fair, which seems to be authoritative, confirms that Sacha and Simon are cousins.

The sociolinguistic theory of accommodation'starts from the premise that speech accommodation takes place when people modify their speech so that it conforms more with the way their conversational partner speaks'. This can involve echoing particular words, adopting features of pronunciation, using similar syntactic structures, and so on. Accomodation might be blind adaptation to experience, or it might be a more complex negotiation of identities. Some ideas about accommodation suggest that a form of empathy plays a role, at least in some aspects of the phenomenon. I don't know whether anyone has checked to see whether sufferers from autism exhibit the usual phenomena of sociolinguistic accommodation or not.

In any case, Ali G's act often involves contrasts of identities, speech registers, and sometimes simply word usage. He often gets his victims to accomodate to his choices in ways that make them seem a bit ridiculous, as in this conversation with Sir Rhodes Boyson from his British show:

His greatest triumph, as far as I've seen, was his success in getting Pat Buchanan to accomodate to the malapropism of BLT for WMD. Here's the transcript, courtesy of the Chris Matthews Show:

There's some evidence that Pat Robertson might be another empathetic, linguistically accomodating kind of interview subject, though by now it would be very surprising for a public figure (and his handlers) to be unaware of the Ali G act.

Ali G Rhodes Boyson

Besides Ali G, Sacha's current alter egos include Borat the Kazakh TV reporter and Bruno the Austrian fashion writer. He apparently moved to the U.S. because Ali G had become too familiar for interview subjects to be fooled, but the U.S. remained a fertile field for this particular kind of con, as his success with Buchanan showed. According to the Vanity Fair article:

On the American version of Da Ali G Show ... he asked Boutros Boutros-Ghali (whom he introduced as 'Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali'), 'Wot is da funniest language?' The former secretary-general of the U.N. was flustered. Ali G pressed on: 'It's French, innit?' Boutros-Ghali laughed and momentarily agreed that French was indeed an amusing language.

In dealing with people like Ali G, honesty and consistency seem to be the most effective policies, as in this interview with Tony Benn, where Ali G more or less fails to accomplish his goals. I've never seen his show, and probably wouldn't like it, but that's not the point here.