Baron Cohen buries Borat, resurrects Bruno
But can the successful British comedian make us laugh at the gay Austrian fashionista? Universal hopes so.
On Dec. 21, in an interview with the UK's Daily Telegraph, actor Sacha Baron Cohen announced the retirement of his two most popular alter egos -- hip-hop wannabe Ali G and Kazakh journalist Borat. Not everyone was heartbroken by the news. To begin with, there's the multitude of people pranked by his feature film, 2006's "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"; Baron Cohen has jokingly estimated the number of resulting lawsuits as "about 3,000."
But even his harshest critics would probably admit that no one in the comedy game can match Baron Cohen's chutzpah (who else could have unleashed the "Borat" movie months after Mel Gibson's DUI arrest, making it safe for Americans to laugh at brainless anti-Semites again?). And if "Borat's" $128-million box-office take is any indication, his reckless style of humor has more admirers than detractors these days. One fan is Steven Spielberg, who has reportedly signed Baron Cohen to portray 1960s political trickster Abbie Hoffman in the upcoming "Trial of the Chicago Seven," scripted by Aaron Sorkin.
Before that, Baron Cohen will unleash another feature film starring a character from his now-defunct HBO pro- gram "Da Ali G Show" -- this time, it's Bruno, his gay-fashionista-from-Austria creation. "Bruno's" deal is already the stuff of Hollywood legend: Universal paid a hefty $42.5 million for the project.
To think it all started with a pair of sly idiots, Ali G and Borat.
Ali G first gained a following in the 1990s by duping interviewees on Britain's "11 O' Clock Show," a late-night program that also launched the career of "The Office's" Ricky Gervais. Gervais, Steve Coogan and Baron Cohen's other contemporaries followed in the British comedy tradition of intelligent men doing stupid things.
Ali G, however, had more in common with American humor of the day -- when stupidity is so all-encompassing that it takes on sublime logic. (Think Homer Simpson; every Will Ferrell role; and perhaps Eminem, whose misogyny, homophobia and general cartoonishness made him dangerously close to a real-life Ali G.)
Borat Sagdiyev was an even earlier creation. His primal incarnation was a prankish audition tape that caught the eye of UK television's Channel 4 and landed the young Baron Cohen his first high-profile gigs. At that point, the character was an Albanian reporter named Kristo. Compared with the twisted depths he would eventually plumb, early Borat wasn't that far removed from Andy Kaufman's sweet-natured "Foreign Man."
