Da Class Day Show

What can top seeing Will Ferrell funnel a beer on the stage of Tercentenary Theatre the day before you graduate from Harvard College?

For this year’s Class Day attendees, the answer might be seeing a British performer who specializes in skewering high society in a sweatsuit, mocking you mercilessly with phrases drawn from decades of hip-hop.

Of course, no one can be sure what Sacha Baron Cohen will do when he takes the stage today. Perhaps he will talk about his own career as an academic at another Cambridge (the English university, where he studied history) or use his international background (half Israeli, half Welsh) as a springboard for thoughts on foreign policy.

But it will come as a great surprise if Baron Cohen appears on stage without the diamonds—er, “ice”—urban trackwear and scathing wit that distinguish him as Ali G, the fictional character who has taken Europe and the United States by storm in recent years.

As Ali G himself might say, “wicked!”

Last year, comedian Ferrell’s Class Day speech on the announced topic of “Straight Talk” soon bloomed into an Old School laughfest, complete with an inspirational falsetto lyric performed over the strummed acoustic chords of “Dust in the Wind.” So those filing into the space between Memorial Church and Widener Library today should expect plenty of fun-poking and slang-slinging if Ali G, indeed, comes out to play.

In the televised Ali G persona, Baron Cohen has driven scores of celebrities up the wall by conducting irreverent, anarchic interviews packed with as many improprieties as non sequiturs.

Posing as a British youth of indeterminate ethnic background, Baron Cohen has played on culture barriers, generation gaps and unsuspecting subjects’ trust to create a spectacle that resembles a talk show gone entirely mad. The Ali G experiment has played out in popular series on British and American television and a feature film.

Guests on the British program have included at least one Harvard faculty member—Agassiz Professor of Zoology James Hanken, who attempted to explain the theory of Darwinian evolution to Ali G several years ago.

In one of his less profane remarks, Ali took issue with Hanken’s statement that humans evolved from apes.

“So you is basically saying, somewhere down the line, my nan did it with a monkey?” the comedian inquired.

Hanken recalls an unexpected phone call from Britain followed by an unnerving visit.

“They showed up in my office with their lights and crew,” Hanken says now, remembering a series of questions touching on the topics of race and relations between the sexes. “As I got into it, I was desperately waiting for it to end...I almost ended it a few times because I was so offended by the things he was asking me.”

True to the comic’s longstanding modus operandi, Hanken says he was entirely unfamiliar with the character at the time of his bizarre interview.

“I couldn’t believe this was real, and subsequently I found it wasn’t,” Hanken says with a laugh. “A couple of years later I read an article on him in The New York Times. They had a photograph of him, and I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the guy—I guess I’ve been taken!’”

In addition to Ali G, Baron Cohen’s repertoire of oddball journalistic characters includes hapless Kazakhstani correspondent Borat and egomaniacal Austrian fashion reporter Bruno.

Though Baron Cohen’s fictional personas make their trade by flinging tough questions at the rich and famous, Baron Cohen himself could not be reached for an interview.

Nina Rosenstein, director of development at HBO, says Baron Cohen’s program on the cable network had defied expectations. Some initially thought that the Ali G character would appeal mostly to a young audience.

“I think older people really dig it,” Rosenstein says. “I think it’s so popular because it works on a lot of levels...it works as broad comedy and then it also works as smart comedy.”

An HBO spokesperson said this week that “Da Ali G Show” would broadcast six new episodes beginning in mid-July.

Class Marshal Zachary A. Corker ’04 said last month that it was very likely that Baron Cohen would appear as Ali G instead of himself today.

In the past four years, audiences at the College’s Class Day festivities have received their share of advice and jokes from larger-than-life characters from the entertainment industry—Ferrell, wry liberal Al Franken ’73, earnest musician Bono and late-night jester Conan C. O’Brien ’85. But if Ali G mounts the stage today, it would appear to mark the first time Class Day has been hosted by a literal character.

Hanken, the Harvard zoologist who chatted with Ali G, says he has “no interest whatsoever” in seeing today’s Class Day speaker.

“I like the other two, Al Franken and Will Ferrell,” Hanken explains. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get a chance to hear either of them. Ali G I could miss forever.”

Booyakasha!

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.