Before screening Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America?,” Showtime flacks handed me a nondisclosure agreement. They locked up my phone. Guards roamed the aisles with night-vision goggles. The implication was clear: this show, heralded by panicky press releases from politicians, was incendiary stuff. Then, three days later, the network tiptoed backward like Trump after Helsinki. “At its core WHO IS AMERICA? is a comedy show,” a pre-airing e-mail insisted. “This is not a statement on the state of the country, but Baron Cohen experimenting in the playground of 2018 America.”

Please. Better for Showtime to own what it’s doling out: an ugly response to an ugly age. Baron Cohen is a skilled troll, whose work is fuelled by contempt—though he’d probably prefer to be described as a bouffon, the rule-breaking clown who exposes hypocrisy. (Baron Cohen studied with the French clown Philippe Gaulier, an expert on the tradition.) When his sketches get laughs, they’re barks of disgust, as when I found myself yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me?” during the now famous montage of prominent N.R.A. shills, including the former congressmen Trent Lott and Joe Walsh, plugging a program to train toddlers to shoot guns. The show uses nihilism as a stripping agent, sort of the way the Cat in the Hat touted Voom as the proper method to clean up the stain he’d helped create. During its weaker segments, it’s juvenile—and, in maddening, unexamined ways, misogynist. But during that Kinderguardian segment, which manages to nail the G.O.P., the N.R.A., and right-wing support for Israel, Baron Cohen’s method is like radiation: sickening, but better than cancer, unless it kills you first. He’s Tocqueville by way of Willy Wonka, a sadist who’s certain he can separate bad eggs from good ones.

The basic technique is identical to that of Baron Cohen’s earlier prank TV series, “Da Ali G Show,” and the movie “Borat,” in which he plays bigoted idiots who cajole targets into doing dumb things. (Work that has aged poorly: these days, you could get people to sing “throw the Jew down the well” without having to fake a Kazakh accent.) Because Baron Cohen is famous, he now disguises himself using prosthetics that could pass for real only in a culture in which we accept that some men resemble steroidal, nipped-and-tucked Frankensteins. The new characters are all straight white men; for all his heralded edginess, Baron Cohen clearly knows that cross-identity disguises won’t fly—and, as a result, his show is, by default, but without much self-awareness, about white masculinity. Baron Cohen plays Rick Sherman, an ex-con; the liberal cuck Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello; Billy Wayne Ruddick, Jr., a MAGA type who runs a Web site called TRUTHbrary; Colonel Erran Morad, an Israeli strongman (who, with his Munster virility, is the best realized); and Gio Monaldo, an Italian philanthropist. The more striking fact is that all of his writers are also white men, including Nathan Fielder, of “Nathan for You,” and the “Inside Amy Schumer” writer Kurt Metzger. That’s a choice, one that warps the show’s vision both of what’s funny and who America is.

There are two kinds of bad sketches here. The first are anodyne demonstrations of the fact that most people are polite when talking to crazy people, because who needs trouble. Some feature big shots, like Ted Koppel; others ordinary human beings, like a Republican couple who never take the bait. These sketches rise and fall on the gags, which are hit and miss. (Cain-N’Degeocello tells the couple that he encourages his adolescent daughter Malala to “free-bleed.” Ba-dum-bump.) The second kind takes cheap shots, often at women. In one sketch, a gallery consultant encourages the ex-con’s artistic aspirations—and somehow, because she’s cool with him using shit and ejaculate as his medium (gross, but not that outrageous in the art world), we are meant to sneer, rather than see her as the sketch’s hidden hero. In another, the reality star Corinne Olympios tells insane lies about charitable work. The power dynamics are all wrong here, too: Baron Cohen is in disguise as an expert on philanthropy, a subject that Olympios knows nothing about. Why wouldn’t a reality star believe that false narratives were the norm?

The political sketches are more pungent. In the second episode, Baron Cohen goads the Georgia Republican state lawmaker Jason Spencer into a series of acts so unhinged—among other things, Spencer chases a “terrorist” backward, while quite literally showing his ass—that he was forced to resign. That’s impressive, although the message is somewhat unclear: in 2018, you can use the N-word, if your pants stay up. The episode’s best sketch is more controlled. In it, Baron Cohen visits a depressed town in Arizona. As Cain-N’Degeocello, he offers to revitalize the downtown area. The crowd cheers. Then he reveals that the investment will go toward building the largest mosque outside the Middle East—and the townspeople turn on him. (“That would probably look good in a fire,” one man mutters. “Don’t worry,” Baron Cohen reassures him, as if the man were concerned about the safety of the Muslims praying. “It would be made of stone.”) The prank is sadistic, but, like Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, its aim is true: there are no jizz jokes, no fat gags. Baron Cohen simply builds a Vegas act from studies showing that, for white voters, bigotry trumps economic anxiety.

It’s a smart sketch that will convince no one and change nothing. That’s the problem with contempt. If Baron Cohen’s act, even its cleverest bits, feels sour, that’s because it’s just one shard in a kaleidoscope of modern gotchas and just-kiddings, of heart-hardening stunts. His show feels existentially linked to every kid on 4Chan, hunting Lulz; to TMZ, shoving cameras into faces to create an outburst; to reality-show producers, goading drunk girls to fight; to revenge porn and kompromat and James O’Keefe’s deceptively edited right-wing hoax videos. Every troll has a moral rationale, after all—even shit-posters harassing grieving families believe that they’re exposing sentimentality. When chaos rises, such techniques converge: just open the Overton window and shove.

Baron Cohen’s Trumpish relish for humiliation places him at the nastier end of a tradition that runs from “Candid Camera” through “Punk’d.” At their best, these are game shows about human nature, revealing moments of spontaneity and even beauty. The question of whether they punch up or down depends on whom you see as powerful. (Does every star deserve to get Punk’d? Maybe so.)

It’s not odd that these shows were hosted by white guys: most TV comedy was, until recently. But it is worth noting that two recent series about a black or female comedian meeting strangers—W. Kamau Bell’s “United Shades of America” and Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You, America”—were paeans to empathy. The opposite is risky: try to imagine an undercover Latino comic pulling a prank on an ICE agent. Or an all-female #MeToo show, exposing misogynists. I’m imagining it right now! So far, outsider comics aren’t out punking the N.R.A., unless you count Maria Butina.