Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen (born 13 October, 1971) is a British comedian, notable for his highly successful comedy character Ali G.

He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, the second of three sons of Gerald Baron Cohen and his wife Daniella. His father, who owns a menswear shop in Piccadilly, is originally from Wales, while his mother is from Israel.

Cohen attended Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, a public school in Elstree, and went on to study history at Christ's College, Cambridge.

He shot to fame when his character Ali G started appearing on The Eleven O'Clock Show on Channel 4. He has now taken Ali G to the United States, where his show, Da Ali G Show, airs on HBO. The characters Sasha plays have had some troubles because of the racist or prejudice comments they make. This causes some offence among some people, but Sasha's ultimate goal is to use the prejudices and racism of people to elicit funny reactions. He has had trouble in the past because of his 9-11 comment, "'nuff sadness 'bout da tragic events of 7-11", a reference to the convenience store. He also, as Borat, went to a bar in Arizona, and sang a song about hanging jews, in which he said, "Throw the jew down the well/so my country can be free/you must grab him by his horns/then we have a big party," to which the bar responded gleefully, and joined in. This caused much disruption in the jewish community, to which HBO spokesman Quentin Schaffer replied, "Through his alter-egos, he delivers an obvious satire that exposes people’s ignorance and prejudice in much the way ‘All in the Family’ did years ago."

Other characters by Cohen include Borat, a television reporter from Kazakhstan with a fervent hatred of jews and a misogynist attitude, and Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion show presenter with a Nazi streak, advocating that ugly people be put on a train and sent to a camp. The Borat character caused some annoyance to Kazakhstan's ambassador to the UK, who complained that he neither looked or sounded Kazakh. The segments featuring Borat have titles in Cyrillic script, which are complete gibberish.

External links

• "Mutha of invention" – an article about Sacha Baron Cohen by Jay Rayner in The Observer, Sun 24 Feb 2002
• The unofficial Sacha Baron Cohen homepage
• Da Ali G Show on HBO

[[Category:Cambridge Footlights|Baron Cohen, Sacha