Sacha Baron Cohens Ali G: Who Iz I? is exactly what the stuffy world of comedy needs

Behind the absurd outfits, garish bling, imbecilic interactions and Caribbean-cockney slang of Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Ali G: Who Iz I?” lies an unsettling indictment of how extreme the extremists have become on both ends of the spectrum since the last Ali G film in 2002.The premise of the mockumentary is straightforward.

Twenty-four years after the first film, an aging Ali G and his pregnant partner Julie (Morgana Robinson) jet off to America after discovering a long-lost fax from HBO inviting him back, only to learn it dates from 2004 and has since expired.Out of options, Ali G agrees to host a racist television show for Dirk Visser, a South African former arms dealer and producer, featuring cameos from Kari Lake, Newt Gingrich and George Santos.As in earlier films, the real action is what Cohen, in his directorial debut, gets unsuspecting people to do.

He dupes fanatics on both the radical left and the fringe right into behavior that is hard to watch and hard to stop watching.Much of the shocking behavior onscreen echoes an infamously disturbing study of obedience from the 1960s known as the Milgram Experiment — a demented test in which everyday people could be easily convinced to deliver what they believed to be deadly shocks to innocent strangers.The test became a notorious example of ordinary people’s willingness to carry out immoral orders when instructed by authority figures.That unsettling psychology was instructive while sitting through “Ali G: Who Iz I?” in a packed AMC movie theater in Times Square as Cohen exposed the dangers of extreme prejudices across the spectrum.On the far left, Cohen reprises his role as Dr.

Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, a professor of “Afro diasporic ethnomusicology,” who sets out to debunk Ali G’s claim to be black and the son of rapper A$AP Rocky.Cain-N’Degeocello presents himself as a moral authority on racial equity.

When he introduces his obviously mistreated, unpaid black intern from Gambia to his progres...