Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing back Ali G for his directorial debut, Ali G: Who Iz I?, ending a retirement he announced in 2007. Baron Cohen said the return comes from the same instinct that drove his undercover comedy from the start: get real reactions, then make the audience laugh and think.
1998 and 2007
Ali G debuted in 1998 on a satirical late-night show, then moved into Da Ali G Show, which led to an HBO series and a feature film. Baron Cohen said the character had become too well known to fool people, which is why he shut the act down in 2007.
That history gives the new project a business-like problem to solve. If the persona was retired because strangers could spot the setup, then Ali G: Who Iz I? has to rebuild the surprise that made the character work in the first place.
London and 5 minutes
Baron Cohen said the prototype began as MC Jocelyn Cheadle-Hume, an upper-class figure with many of the same catchphrases as Ali G. He tested it with skateboarders of London for a youth culture show he was hosting on cable, and after about 5 minutes he dropped the act, told them he was pretending, and said they were shocked.
“And then I knew I was onto something,” he said of that reaction. He also said, “The core idea of Ali G was, I thought, ‘Would it be funny to have the world expert in something with the biggest idiot in the world, you know? Would that juxtaposition be really funny, if the world expert takes it seriously?’”
Trump and C. Everett Koop
Baron Cohen has long used Ali G to push public figures into awkward exchanges, including C. Everett Koop and Donald Trump. In one example, he said he pitched Trump a business idea involving special gloves to keep ice cream from getting your hands sticky; Trump later posted, “I never fall for scams. I am the only person who immediately walked out of my 'Ali G' interview.”
That same method is being stretched into three characters for the new project, which Baron Cohen said is designed to expose extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. He said he wants viewers to laugh hard, but also to examine conspiracies and lies, including whether people who believed in the theory of race replacement could be turned into murderers in a matter of hours.
He said the career path still feels improbable: “It's just a bizarre journey that I ended up doing this.” He added, “My dream was 'Could I make one classic comedy?' And I felt like with Borat, I was like, 'I did it.' You know, so anything else is really gravy. And yeah, I feel very, very lucky.”
