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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

I'm normally pretty well versed in dry humour, being a near native speaker of such. But I'm failing to comprehend whether you're being satirical or serious... perhaps I need more tea. Can you clarify?

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Well, you're either employing tactical nihilism or you truly do need more tea. Cohen has shown himself to enjoy manipulating rubes in social contexts where the pressure to perform is present, not entirely dissimilar from how hypnotists work in crowd situations. Rather than letting it be all in good fun, though, Cohen has made people say offensive things, and then uses it to pretend it's what those people really think rather than admitting it's 99% social pressure.

Is your argument that none of the people Sacha has gotten to say things, actually believe those? Its just pressure to perform, so EVERYONE would say things they dont believe if put in the same position?

Yes. I'm confident that a charismatic person could walk into any bar anywhere in the world, and get some of the people there to sing along with an offensive song. I'm not quite sure how someone who's familiar with bars or alcohol in general could doubt this.

I'm equally confident that most of the people who sang along did not actually want to throw Jews down a well.

Cohen is a great comedian, but I suspect he also has the skills of a con-artist, or a hypnotiser: he manages to get people to "sing along" with him well beyond what is normal and reasonable, and then ridicules them. It's funny, sometimes very interesting, sometimes leaves you a bit suspicious.

That, and he's also arguing that they're all somehow the victims of a hate crime.

One distinction though, the rubes he targets are generally rubes with some level of power or influence. That's kind of the point.

I was being serious. Cohen plays a dangerous game of tricking people into interviews and situations under false pretenses and disguises and then ridicules their responses. This is low blow comedy but can be very funny. When you subsequently reach a point of publicly deliberately mischaracterizing and misrepresenting the tricked people it becomes defamation. You'd think the ADL would not want Cohen as a spokesperson.

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