Sacha Baron Cohen Pulls Noel Gallagher Into Ali G Promo

The punchline has been sitting there for over a decade. Noel Gallagher once explained his parenting choices by saying he did not want his kids “coming home talking like Ali G.” Sacha Baron Cohen has now collected.

In a clip posted to promote Ali G: Who Iz I?, Baron Cohen walks into a screening in character and tries to throw Gallagher out. “You look like, what’s his name, one of them Oasis twins, innit,” he says, ordering the musician to stand in front of the audience before landing the actual joke: “It’s Nigel Gallagher, innit? 50-year-old white man trying to make a comeback after 20 years, so sad.” Gallagher stands up as instructed and lets it run.

The timing is not accidental. Amazon MGM has scaled back the film’s rollout, which leaves staged chaos like this doing the promotional work. It also is not Gallagher’s only comic appearance of the week. A day earlier he turned up on Chicken Shop Date, dismissing vegetarians and treating the meaning of “Champagne Supernova” as a question barely worth answering.

None of it requires him to be funny, and that is the point. Gallagher works best as a straight man to his own reputation, and the Ali G bit functions because it is built from something he actually said rather than something invented for him. The comeback line is the giveaway. He has been doing this for considerably longer than twenty years.