Sacha Baron Cohen: Sarah Palin was cut from Who Is America? because "I looked at the footage and it just wasn’t funny enough"

Deadline

"The upsetting answer is I don’t think you missed much," Cohen tells Deadline. "There was a lot of pressure on me from the channel to put out Palin. And obviously, she did the only publicity for the show because I did zero interviews. There was no other publicity at all for the show. Thanks to her, people knew that the show was coming. But ultimately, I looked at the footage and it just wasn’t funny enough. For the pieces to be good, there has to be a good comic dynamic. She was just delivering these kind of rote answers, as if she was doing a campaign speech. And even though I sat with her I think for about two-and-a-half hours, there was no comedy gold."