And, to be fair, that was always part of the defence of his work. We weren’t necessarily supposed to be laughing at Borat, or whichever character he put on that day, but at the people around him. The exaggerated misogyny, antisemitism, racism, and general ignorance were supposedly bait, designed to coax uglier beliefs out of people who might otherwise have known better than to say them out loud.
The problem is that somewhere between exposing a stereotype and endlessly performing one, the distinction can become rather difficult to see. When millions of people leave the cinema quoting the accent, repeating the jokes, and reducing an entire country, ethnicity, or culture to the caricature they’ve just watched for two hours, it becomes worth asking who exactly the joke was about in the first place.
Ali G, arguably the character that first turned Cohen into a household name was a white, comfortable, suburban man from Staines who dressed, spoke, and behaved like an exaggerated caricature of a Black British rapper. Then came Borat, perhaps his most famous creation and arguably one of his most iconic as well. Presented as a journalist from Kazakhstan, Borat was a misogynistic, antisemitic, and unhygienic character baffled by virtually everything he laid his eyes on.
General Aladeen followed the same rulebook, only this time the target shifted towards the Arab world. The fictional dictator of Wadiya was violent, sexually depraved, authoritarian, obsessed with nuclear weapons, and hostile towards the West, with his appearance, accent, and politics pulling from a broad assortment of Arab and Muslim tropes alongside obvious references to figures of the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Then there was Brüno, an Austrian fashion reporter who was essentially every tired stereotype about gay men rolled into one impossibly flamboyant character that allegedly allowed Cohen to expose very real homophobia by pushing unsuspecting people until they revealed it themselves.
Different characters, different targets, but essentially the same trick. Cohen would take a collection of stereotypes, exaggerate them until they became absurd and then use the resulting caricature to expose something ugly about everybody else. For years, the cleverness of that final part seemed to give him permission to do almost anything required to get there. The question is whether exposing prejudice automatically excuses reproducing it along the way.Today, that comedy belongs to the category of things you occasionally revisit for nostalgia’s sake, cringe at a little, maybe even laugh at because it reminds you of being 13, before admitting that a lot of it was actually pretty awful. You don’t have to pretend you never found it funny, you just have to understand why you probably shouldn’t anymore.
Except Baron Cohen apparently didn’t get the memo. On top of becoming an increasingly outspoken defender of a genocidal State (Israel), the 54-year-old has now decided that what the world really needs in 2026 is more Ali G. More than two decades after the character was at the height of his popularity, a new film is reportedly on the way, meaning Cohen is once again stepping into the tracksuit of a white suburban bloke whose entire personality is built around a cartoonish imitation of Black British slang, style, and culture.
And that’s where the nostalgia argument starts to fall apart as Baron Cohen clearly understands that stereotypes, hateful rhetoric, and the images we repeatedly put in front of people can have consequences outside of whatever context they were originally presented in. He’s spent years telling us exactly that. In 2019, while accepting the Anti-Defamation League’s International Leadership Award, Cohen gave a pretty damning speech about the spread of racism, antisemitism, and hate online, describing social media as potentially “the greatest propaganda machine in history.” His argument was basically that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X weren’t simply hosting hateful ideas; they were helping amplify them, normalize them even, and put them in front of millions of people.
So if he understands that circulating racist and antisemitic ideas can normalize them, why does putting those same kinds of stereotypes inside a comedy automatically make their consequences easier to control? Because saying you’re supposed to be laughing at the racist doesn’t necessarily mean everyone watching is laughing at the racist.
Academics have been asking pretty much that exact question for years. In a 2009 paper titled Lighten up?! Humour, Race, and Da off colour joke of Ali G, scholar Tara Atluri examined the racialized humor of Da Ali G Show and questioned what happens when racist stereotypes are repeated in the name of comedy. Drawing on theories of performativity and hate speech, Atluri describes the joke as “a speech act that may help to produce rather than reflect upon subjectivity.” In other words, the joke isn’t necessarily just commenting on racial stereotypes that already exist; in repeating them, it can potentially play a role in producing and reinforcing the very ideas it claims to be making fun of.
Borat is a useful example of how this plays out in practice. Writing in the academic journal Slavic Review, scholar Dickie Wallace argued that Cohen essentially invented a fictional Kazakhstan using a collection of Orientalized Eastern European and Balkan stereotypes. Wallace describes Borat’s Kazakhstan as having “no cultural connections to its actual Central Asian namesake” and argues that, for Western audiences, it “essentially replaces the original.” Elsewhere in the paper, Wallace argues that “Borat’s representation of Kazakhstan has replaced the real Kazakhstan,” creating what he calls a “completely bogus hyperreal Kazakhstan” in the American imagination. And that wasn’t just some theoretical concern academics came up with years later: Kazakhstan actually had to deal with the consequences of it all.
By the time the first Borat film hit cinemas in 2006, the Kazakh government was actively trying to convince the world that its citizens were not the backward, antisemitic, misogynistic, incestuous people Cohen’s fictional version of the country portrayed them as. Officials protested against the character, while Kazakhstan ran four-page advertisements in publications promoting the country’s economy, tolerance, and modern society.
And sure, Cohen did argue that Kazakhstan itself was never really the joke. Borat was deliberately ridiculous, and the point of putting him in America was largely to see how supposedly more enlightened Westerners reacted to him. But that distinction probably meant very little to the millions of people whose first, and perhaps only, introduction to Kazakhstan was a man talking in a ridiculous accent about incest and prostitution.
There’s a quite brilliant twist to the whole thing though. By 2020, when Borat Subsequent Moviefilm arrived, Kazakhstan had apparently decided that if it couldn’t escape the association, it might as well make some money from it. The country’s tourism board adopted Borat’s “Very nice!” catchphrase for an official campaign showing off the Kazakhstan that Cohen’s films never did: its cities, landscapes, food, and people.
Funny? Absolutely. But it also proves the point: Cohen can decide what he intends a joke to mean but he cannot decide what millions of people take away from it nor the real-life consequences they can have. None of this means there was never anything clever, provocative, or genuinely revealing about what he was doing. There clearly was. But over 20 years later, having rinsed the character for pretty much all he was worth, you have to wonder what the point of bringing someone like Ali G back to the forefront actually is, especially at a time when racism and prejudice towards Black British people haven’t exactly disappeared.
And you also have to wonder how Cohen himself would react if the tables were turned. If a wildly successful character built around exaggerated Jewish stereotypes from 25 years ago was suddenly dusted off and brought back to cinemas today, would the argument that it’s satire, you’re not supposed to be laughing at Jewish people be enough for him? Would the intention behind the character outweigh the stereotypes being repeated? Or would he, quite reasonably, ask what purpose resurrecting those tropes actually serves?
Cohen has spent years arguing that antisemitic stereotypes can cause harm regardless of the context in which they appear. With that in mind, it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable to ask that stereotypes about Black people, Arabs, Muslims, Kazakhs, and queer people be treated with the same care, respect, and regard.
© All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Mille World
