THE MANY FACES OF SACHA BARON COHEN
Borat
Sacha Baron Cohen's character of Borat Sagdiyev first appeared on British television in the late 1990s, when he was known as Alexi Krickler of Moldova and then Kristo Shqiptari from Albania. He hit it big in 2006 with the release of Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Ali G
Cohen made 18 episodes of Da Ali G Show between 2000 and 2004, starring as the self-proclaimed “voice of da yoof,” a loutish suburban Brit with an affinity for hip-hop culture. In 2003 he interviewed Donald Trump, asking: “How long has there been businesses?” Trump's scholarly reply: “Hundreds of millions of years ago people were doing business, and they were trading in rocks and stones and other things. To the logical followup — “Who would want to buy rocks?” Trump replied: “I don't know, man, you gotta ask them.”
Brüno
Another Ali G offshoot was Brüno Gehard, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter whose own eponymous movie in 2009 was less well received than Borat's. I wrote at the time that “Borat was a thunderclap of comedy; Brüno merely the rolling echo.” He did achieve notoriety at the 2009 MTV Movie Awards by descending on a cable from a the ceiling and landing, butt-first, on Eminem. We later learned Eminem was in on the joke.
Admiral General Aladeen
In 2012, Cohen starred as the leader of the fictional North African nation of Wadiya. Unlike his earlier films, The Dictator was a scripted comedy and did not fare as well with critics. Aladeen was escorted off the red carpet at the Oscars that year after dumping what he said were the ashes of Korean leader Kim Jong Il on both the carpet and attendee Ryan Seacrest. This again earned the ire of Trump, who tweeted that Cohen (not Aladeen?) “should have been pummeled by the weak and pathetic security person who stood watching as he poured ashes over … a wonderful guy.”
Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD, Erran Morad, etc.
In his 2018 series Who Is America?, Cohen plays a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a former Mossad agent and others as he pranked and lampooned right-wing figures. One of his encounters was with former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, who agreed to sign Morad's waterboarding kit.