Somewhere around the bit in which Sacha Baron Cohen recalls being cuckolded by a dolphin while on vacation with his (human) wife, a viewer is liable to be hit with a wave of nostalgia. Sitting through the largely tiresome pilot of Baron Cohen’s latest program Who Is America? inspires longing for a simpler past, when Baron Cohen’s profile was still low enough that he didn’t have to mask his face with nightmare-inducing prosthetics just to go incognito. He plays four characters in the first episode of this new series – an obese quack doctor, an NPR-listening uberliberal, a limey ex-con and a gruff Israeli commando – all of whom evoke fonder memories of sweet Borat, the good-natured traveler in thrall of a “very nice” world full of “great success!” As hardliners on the left and right, gun nuts and bleeding-heart activists, confrontation is baked into the very premise of this new quartet.

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But the real nostalgia is for Borat’s era, the comparatively low-stakes idyll of the Bush administration’s tail end. Baron Cohen is now returning to a form he popularized during a time marked by a different set of notions about how comedy best functions, and a different viewership to receive it. For Borat, wannabe rudeboy Ali G, and flamboyant talk show host Brüno, George W Bush was the perfect bad president, an ideal target. He was just incompetent enough to provide endless fodder for mockery, and yet not so calamitously harmful that there would be no fun in making fun. And the people proud to identify themselves as living in Bush’s America revealed the psychosis under heartland values, as gleefully racist as they were hospitable. Baron Cohen was looked on as a daring subversive for turning politeness against his unwitting victims, feeding them the rope by which they could then happily hang themselves. (His “throw the Jew down the well” segment remains surreal, hysterically funny, and deeply disturbing.)

Much has transpired since then, and Baron Cohen knows it. He’s unabashedly political in his aspirations for this program, attempting to define an American identity by interviewing its wild and woolly citizens. The implication here, as with all comedy that dares to skew political in the year 2018, is that this is urgent work for an urgent moment. Early threats of legal action from such well-known reprobates as Joe Arpaio and Roy Moore promised cathartic comeuppance; after watching these slimy characters take every page of the circumlocution playbook on news programs trying their best to remain decorous, the public would get the chance to watch them go up against someone who didn’t have professional scruples getting in the way of his hate.

And when he does, by god, it works. Baron Cohen saves the clear standout segment of the first episode for last, in which, with minimal difficulty, he convinces a handful of congressmen to support a bill arming four-year-olds with firearms. It will go down as one of the more effective works of Trump-era satire, as damning and chilling and disarmingly strange as the latest tweet from the commander-in-chief. The sight of a geriatric man brandishing a semiautomatic rifle outfitted with cute bunny-rabbit ears will not leave the memory of those who gaze upon it any time soon.

To Baron Cohen’s detriment, that only throws the shortcomings of the other segments into sharper relief. In the first three parts, he ribs Bernie Sanders as a yokel with a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “1%” is, discusses his daughter’s free-bleeding onto an American flag over dinner with small-town staunch conservatives, and pitches his bodily-secretion artworks to a Laguna Beach dealer. While the latter of the three has the distinction of being astonishingly weird (the woman that gladly clips a lock of her pubic hair is, hands down, the most game person Baron Cohen has ever interviewed), they’re all hamstrung by a sense of inconsequentiality.

With Baron Cohen going out of his way to position Who Is America? in a fractious and chaotic nation beset by families torn asunder, militarized forces suppressing protests, and lives lost, he sets the bar extremely high for himself. When he manages to clear it, the results are dazzling (the final segment has already become viral gold on Twitter), but anything less feels like a waste of time. The woods are burning, and he gives us poop jokes? The line on Baron Cohen was initially that he may be too dangerous for the US, a country that loves nothing more than getting worked up over incendiary comedy gunning for that exact reaction. Odd, fascistic twists of fate have reversed the situation, however. After a sojourn in the unforgiving wilds of feature acting, Baron Cohen returns to the American mainstream to find that it has grown too dangerous for him.