The Man Behind The Mustache

"He always just had chutzpah — no fear in whatever scenario," says Mazer, who went on to write and produce with Baron Cohen. "He's more unwilling to take no for an answer than anyone I've ever met. In New York, he'd never consider the option of not getting into a club in the same way he'll never consider the option of not getting an interview with the FBI as Ali G. His great skill is his unbelievable tenacity. And he's frustratingly always right."

After college, Baron Cohen decided to make it in entertainment. "I gave myself five years to start earning money from being an actor, a comedian," he says. "If it didn't work out, I was going to move onto something else, become a barrister [lawyer] or something."

At twenty-four, he found his first television work as a mediocre host on a mediocre pop-culture show called Pump TV on a small satellite station. "The budget was about forty pounds a week, and we had a viewership of about fifty to sixty people. But it gave me access to a crew and an editing room, so we started experimenting with making these little short films, which generally never got broadcast. One time, on Valentine's night, two of the guys who were working with me broke in to the studio and transmitted all the sketches that never made it to air. They got fired. Not long after that, they shut the channel down."

Baron Cohen drifted to a show called Talk TV on London Weekend Television, where he found a mentor in Mike Toppin, a director in his fifties who used to edit classic Ealing Studios comedies. Toppin pushed Baron Cohen to develop and expand his characters.

Baron Cohen shakes his head, muttering something about how all his embarrassing early videos are probably going to end up on YouTube after this story. "The idea was that I would host the show, and then we would play some prerecorded segments of me appearing as these different characters, who would comment on myself as a host. And one of those characters was an early form of Ali G."

One of the inspirations for the character was a white BBC Radio One hip-hop DJ named Tim Westwood. "We used go to these hip-hop happenings, and even then he was kind of laughable. Once I found out that he was actually the son of a bishop, it became even more absurd. He was so keen to be presented as a gangsta."

At the time, the proto-Ali G was a slightly more upper-class character who delivered wack monologues and went by various monikers, among them MC Jocelyn Cheadle-Hume (named after an area of Chesire). But one day, everything changed: Baron Cohen, while filming an MC Jocelyn Cheadle-Hume segment, saw a group of white skateboarders who were also dressed like wanna-be gangstas. Baron Cohen and Toppin decided it might be fun to interact with them.

"Afterward," he recalls, "me and Mike looked at each other and suddenly had this realization that people believe this character. And at that point, a tourist bus turned up at a bus stop right next to us. I looked at Mike and he looked at me, and I said, 'All right, follow me.' So we jumped on and essentially commandeered the bus. I took the microphone and I was like, 'Yo, check it out. I is here, and this is me bus. Booyakasha.' "

High from their high jinks, Baron Cohen and crew marauded on to a pub, where he started break-dancing until the police were called and they were thrown out. "Then we saw this building, which was a home of a multinational company. I went into the lobby and said, 'I'm here to see my dad; he works on the sixth floor.' So we went up and essentially we were thrown out by security after about twenty minutes. We were walking over the Waterloo Bridge, back to the London Weekend Television studio, and the adrenaline was pumping and we were just so excited, because here was this new form of comedy that we discovered. Probably it existed, and other people had done it, but we'd never discovered it before — this idea of taking a comic character into a real situation."

The giddy pair arrived at the studio just in time to film the show. And midway through airing the second segment of the new and improved poseur MC, the head of the channel called the studio and demanded they pull the material.

"He said, 'What do you think you're doing? We're gonna get sued!' It was at that point that I knew that we were doing something that might be good."

Years later the character was given the name Ali G by a Channel 4 producer, Harry Thompson, who thought that an ethnic name would make interview subjects less likely to challenge him for fear of appearing racist.

Around the same time, Baron Cohen began playing with another archetype: a reporter named Alexi Krickler from Moldova, who wore a tie emblazoned with musical notes and was patently unable to understand British expressions and concepts. For example, when interviewing someone about the rugby team British Lions, he'd go back and forth with the interviewee for ten minutes, seemingly unable to comprehend that they don't have actual lions playing rugby.

"I was struck by the patience of some of these members of the upper class, who were so keen to appear polite — particularly on camera — that they would never walk away," Baron Cohen says. It was a tiny epiphany that would eventually fuel his career.

The forefather of Borat, Alexi Krickler, was based on a doctor Baron Cohen had met when he was invited by a friend to a free beach getaway in Astrakhan in southern Russia. Baron Cohen arrived to find one of the most depressing places he'd ever seen. "But there was a guy there who was a doctor, and the moment I met him, I started laughing," Baron Cohen remembers. "I remember meeting him, and him saying, 'You're English, yes, you're English — you say cock, but Americans, they say a cack. Yes, they say a cack. You say a cock and they say a cack.' Within seconds, me and my friends were crying with laughter. He had some elements of Borat, but he had none of the racism or the misogyny or the anti-Semitism. He was Jewish, actually."