Sentience in a seed-pod

Socrates is dead, long live Socrates!

Reading about irony yesterday has led me to an epiphany. There are lots of different types of irony, all bound (I explain to myself) by the notion of someone not knowing what the hell is going on, and someone else having all the answers. Socrates was one of those particularly irritating guys who asks you questions he already knows the answer to. More annoying than that, he pretends to hold some point of view he really does not in order to draw you out to reveal your own prejudices and wrong thought patterns.
So I thought, who else does this? Why does it sound so familiar?
And that was it. Epiphany. Ali G. Sasha Baron Cohen is the new Socrates! And it works too - the misogyny of Cambridge professors, the arbitrariness of pop culture, the vagaries of British law, all out there for us to see. Lovely.