Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen (born December 1970) 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 Ali G in da USAiii airs on HBO. The character has been mostly met with bemusement, rather than amusement, and caused some offense when he said "'nuff sadness 'bout da tragic events of 7-11", a reference to the convenience store.

Other characters by Cohen include Borat, a television reporter from Kazakhstan, 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 - due to be revamped and updated soon