Donald Trump And The Holy Grail

On the latest episode of the HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, after the host’s heated argument with Trump Legal Advisor Jenna Ellis about whether there was fraud in the presidential election, Maher joined his panel to be greeted by author Max Brooks (son of Mel) who said, “What a lovely interview with the black knight from Monty Python’s THE HOLY GRAIL.” 

Following a short burst of laughter from the audience, Brooks continued, “I mean that literally was that scene - ‘Your arm’s off!’ ‘No, it isn’t!’” 

This was a funny, and fitting analogy, but it’s far from original.

For those who haven’t seen MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, the scene Brooks is referring to involves King Arthur (Graham Chapman) being challenged to a duel by the Black Knight (John Cleese). One by one, the King slices off all of his adversary’s limbs, but the Black Knight hilariously still doesn’t surrender.

In a cartoon in the New Yorker just days before Election Day in 2016, Bernard Schwartz was among the first to make the analogy with Trump: 

Sadly though, while the gag was dead on, Trump went on to win so somehow the Black Knight actually was triumphant.

Maybe this more recent cartoon by Tom Chitty in the Weekly Humorist is more apt:

Then there’s this one by Jessica Conley from something called the Scot Scoop from early in the pandemic that reverses the roles: 

There are also numerous memes like this one: 

Another reversal of the premise is featured in this YouTube video that puts Trump in the King Arthur Role and posits CNN as the Black Knight. The video’s description is the funniest thing about it: “Donald Trump POTUS fighting the corrupt fake news doxing media CNN! TRump dismembers CNN in this epic battel of fun.” (I’m not fixing their typos) 

Yeah, that was great. Take that CNN. Sigh. 

These jokes, or variation on one joke, work largely because Trump is much like a Monty Python character. He’s outrageously larger than life like Terry Jones’ disgusting diner Mr. Creosote in THE MEANING OF LIFE, he’s an arrogant vulgarian like Cleese’s French Taunter in HOLY GRAIL, and he would surely win the Upper Class Twit of the Year competition from the Flying Circus series.

Much like the Black Knight, Trump is right now still trying to win despite the odds being overwhelmingly against him. It would be so nice if he would man-up and concede the Presidency to the rightful winner, Joe Biden, but that may never happen.

Trump may even be more of a cartoon than the Black Knight, because at least that character offered as close to a concession as he could when he said, “All right, we’ll call it a draw.”

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BORAT Is Back, But The Joke Is Wearing Thin

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM
(Dir. Jason Woliner, 2020)

Sixteen years ago, Sasha Baron Cohen made quite a splash with his moviefilm BORAT (full title: BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN), and now the offensively oblivious Kazakh journalist returns in the Amazon streaming production (full title) BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM: DELIVERY OF PRODIGIOUS BRIBE TO AMERICAN REGIME FOR MAKE BENEFT ONCE GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (whew, that may be the longest sentence I’ve ever written).

This time Borat once again visits American to mock more unaware citizens, and expose the racism, sexism, and homophobia that lies not far below the surface of society. That’s all well and good, but I cringed more at how cheap, and obvious the humor was more than I laughed. However, that may be Cohen’s intent with the material.

The premise largely involves Borat’s 15-year old daughter Tutar (24-year old Maria Bakalova, who is as fiercely into her character as Cohen) who stows away on her father’s trip in a crate with a monkey that was intended to be a gift to Vice President Pence in order for Kazakhstan to regain the respect it lost due to the previous Borat moviefilm.

But low and behold, Tutar ate the monkey on the long journey (see what I mean by the cheap humor?), and a new plan is formed to give Tutar as a gift to Pence. After getting a makeover including a bottle blonde dye job, Tutar and her father attend a debutant ball in Macon, Georgia, where a disgusting dance scene occurs in which Tutar, on her period, flashes the horrified party members with her blood-stained panties. This is undoubtedly the moviefilm’s lowest point.

Much better is a sequence in which Tutar scarfs down a cupcake with a tiny plastic baby the top this is after a visit to a bakery where Borat gets a cake decorated with the phrase “Jews will not replace us,” and a bunch of smiley faces. 

Tutar accidently swallows the plastic baby, and they go to a Women’s Heath Center, a Christian anti-abortion clinic in South Carolina. Of course, they don’t give the stunned counselor, pastor Jonathan Bright, the proper context with such lines as “I have a baby inside of me, and I want to take it out of me,” and Borat’s admission that “I feel bad because I was the one who put the baby in her.” That’s right, this is what I think is one of the moviefilm’s highlights.

Following that, Borat settles on a new mark: Rudy Giuliani. On their way to find the former NYC mayor, and current Trump attorney, Borat dons a Donald Trump fat suit and mask to crash a Pence event, cosmetic surgery for Tutar is considered, Borat gets a job as a barber, Tutar gets some eye-opening life lessons from her babysitter, Jeanise Jones (maybe the most grounded participant here), and Borat befriends a couple of kindly conspiracy theorists, Qanoners Jerry Holleman and Jim Russell, who he lives with under quarantine for a short time.

Yes, Borat brushes with COVID 19, but jokes about the Clintons being responsible for the virus, and calling the situation a “hoax virus shutdown” don’t land, and a bit where Borat, in redneck disguise, sings a crude country song at a far right rally in Washington is a squalidly lazy segment.

Then we come to the scene you’ve surely heard about: Giuliani’s cameo in which he’s caught in a compromising position with Tutar, who by this point has become a TV reporter. However one interprets what they see in this scene, it’s a creepy experience as Giuliani lies back on the hotel bed and puts his hands in his pants (he claims he was tucking in his shirt). What is shown here doesn’t really prove anything, and doesn’t have to real punch needed to bring all these silly strands together.

Luckily there is a real climax which makes for a more satisfying ending. But despite some funny moments and snatches of intermediate cleverness, I mostly found Cohen’s Borat schtick to grow more and more tiresome. He has targets aplenty in the age of Trump, COVID, and Qanon, but he seems to just want to put them on as fools than really skewer them as his subjects.

Again, that’s all well and good, but it’s not really a joke that keeps on giving.

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New Trump Doc UNFIT: A Good Case For What We Already Know

Debuting today on digital/streaming, VOD platforms, and in select theaters:

UNFIT: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DONALD TRUMP
(Dir. Dan Partland, 2020)

One of the most used statements about Donald J. Trump before and after his Presidency was that he is “unfit for office.” Dan Partland’s (American Race, Going Hollywood) first feature length documentary, UNFIT, examines exactly why with anecdotal commentary by various psychology experts, political analysts, historians, and former Trump cohorts, including the oily yet surprisingly insightful Anthony Scaramucci (The Mooch!).

As can be expected from the title, the film is presented as a thesis that darts around Trump’s history attempting to break down 45’s psyche through segments with such titles as “Malignant Narcissism,” “Gaslighting,” and “Is Democracy Dead?”

The first and one of the most prominent of the interviewees is George Conway, an attorney, and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, but is probably best known as the husband of Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to The President. Conway, most amusingly and accurately tells us that “Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand.”

Agreeing with Conway are such noted Psychologist, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts as John Gartner Ph.D., Lance Dodes M.D., and Justin Frank M.D., but who disagree with “The Goldwater Rule,” which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person.

Former White House Communications Director (for 11 days!) Scaramucci appears to give us his take (s) on Trump and, like I said above, has weighty insights aplenty about his former boss. The slick, quick talking entrepreneur certainly knows his history, and is right on the money, sadly, when he says that Trump “is a reflection of the cultural zeitgeist, and an avatar for that anger.”

One interesting difference of opinion on the topic of Trump’s bigotry occurs when The Mooch says “He’s an asshole, but that’s different from being a racist,” while Conway (again, Kellyanne’s husband) tearfully states, “This man is a racist, he is evil.”

Meanwhile Trump is seen in a clip that’s been shown a bazillion times saying “I am the least racist person that you have ever met.” A truly batshit crazy moment in a career of batshit crazy moments.

Partland then goes further back in time with the help of Ruth Ben Ghiat, who speaks about Trump’s similarities to Mussolini, and Interwar Historian Cheryl Koos, who compares him to Hitler.

Now if those historical comparisons may seem overly familiar, as well as the bulk of the material about the film I’m babbling about, that’s because its themes and theories about Trump are obvious to the Nth degree. So much of the video footage has been aired and re-aired that any insight, whether comedic or psychological, has already been drenched dry.

Nonetheless, UNFIT is a weighty watch and has many smart moments. My favorite of the interview subjects is former Intelligence Officer Malcolm Nance, who once called presidential advisor Stephen Miller “Baby Goebbels” on one of his many appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher. Nance terrifyingly talks about people who are willing to bet their lives on Trump being a bluffer, a strategic thinker, who won’t start a nuclear war, while acknowledging that he’s a pathological liar. “You don’t know what the stakes are,” Nance chillingly concludes.

UNFIT could use more of that urgency, and less of all the obvious overused clips, but it does what it sets out to do. It makes a thorough, well-illustrated case. If only it its diagnosis wasn’t something we already knew everything about going in.

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