How Sacha Baron Cohen is using characters to make real people reveal their beliefs through comedy

From early idea to Ali G

Baron Cohen says his route into undercover comedy was unexpected. He had hoped to make one classic comedy and felt Borat achieved that goal, telling CBS News he felt lucky.

His first iconic character, Ali G, developed from an earlier persona called MC Jocelyn Cheadle-Hume. Baron Cohen tested that version with London skateboarders while hosting a youth culture show on cable.

Ali G became a White hip-hop journalist who wants to be a Black rapper. His 1998 debut on a satirical late-night show led to Da Ali G Show, an HBO series and a feature film.

Comedy built on encounters

Baron Cohen describes Ali G’s premise as putting a supposed expert face to face with someone he sees as an idiot, then watching whether the expert takes the questions seriously. The character’s questions included a challenge to the heart’s rhythm.

The comedy can carry a cost for its subjects. Baron Cohen’s concealed encounters create an ethically complex trade-off: the worse participants appear, the better the result is for him.

Planning and difficult reactions

Baron Cohen said making the characters work required years of preparation, including prosthetic and animatronic teams. He described hundreds of possible problems that each had to be handled correctly.

After Borat, he made Bruno, a flamboyant fashion reporter who wanted to become “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” Baron Cohen said the film was conceived as a gay romantic comedy, but its ending prompted an angry response from people in the crowd, who threw cups and chairs. The piece also notes that Baron Cohen plays three characters who interact with unsuspecting strangers, with the aim of exposing extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. The result can be unsettling as well as funny.

A path into comedy

Baron Cohen discovered the stage while studying history at Cambridge University. His mother, a fitness instructor, and father, an accountant, hoped he would become a lawyer and considered entertainment an absurd pursuit. For his latest film, Baron Cohen said the primary goal was to make people laugh hard, with satire woven in so viewers might leave the theater thinking.