Sacha Baron Cohen: Who Is ‘Borat’?

NEW YORK (October 31, 2006) — In promoting his new film, Sacha Baron Cohen has not wavered in presenting himself as the backward Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev — be it in interviews, at movie premieres or on his thorough MySpace.com page.

Borat has virtually stepped off the movie screen like Tom Baxter in Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” But Baron Cohen’s immersion in Borat has numerous predecessors. Character-based humor has long been a staple of comedians, some of whom have similarly pushed the boundaries of reality and fiction.

It’s an approach that goes back to Andy Kaufman, Peter Sellers and beyond: Perhaps the tradition’s forefather is Jack Benny, the legendary comedian whose stage character was cheap, vain and easily exasperated.

More recent examples of comedic faux personas include Paul Reuben’s Pee Wee Herman, the Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” and Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick. On Nov. 22, Jack Black and partner Kyle Gass will again transform into the pseudo rock group Tenacious D for the film “Tenacious D in `The Pick of Destiny”’ — itself owing to the classic 1984 mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap.”

Stephen Rosenfield, director of the American Comedy Institute, says it’s fitting that Baron Cohen would use the media as an extension of his character in promoting “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” in which Borat (a TV reporter) interviews real people who aren’t in on the gag.

“It’s a natural other venue for a comedian to go into,” Rosenfield says.

He notes, too, that Borat’s existence has reached an absurd level: “I mean, countries are having to do press conferences on him.” (Kazakhstan’s deputy foreign minister, Rakhat Aliyev, recently extended an invitation to Borat to find out what the country is really like.)

Baron Cohen’s character was first developed for “Da Ali G Show” (carried in the U.S. on HBO) in which Borat was one of three characters along with mock-rapper Ali G and gay Austrian fashion reporter Bruno. The 35-year-old actor is planning to follow “Borat” with “Bruno.”

Though Baron Cohen has appeared in Will Ferrell’s “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and provided a voice for the animated “Madagascar,” he has almost never appeared in public out of character.

On the commentary track to the DVDs for the first season of “Da Ali G Show” Baron Cohen offered insight into the creation of Borat, who he said was influenced by someone he met in Southern Russia.

“I can’t remember his name — he was a doctor,” Baron Cohen said. “The moment I met him, I was totally crying. He was an hysterically funny guy, albeit totally unintentionally.”

That kind of real-life inspiration is familiar to Short, whose Jiminy Glick, an overweight Hollywood reporter, spawned the TV show “Primetime Glick” and the film “Jiminy Glick in Lalawood.” Glick also makes a nightly cameo in Short’s one-man Broadway musical “Fame Becomes Me.”

“I’d meet funny people in life and be shocked at how bizarre they were, whether it was their hair or their behavior or their attitude — and it made me laugh harder than hearing someone talking about dating,” says Short, whose other characters have included Ed Grimley, Irving Cohen and Nathan Thurm.

Just as the name of one of Borat’s sons is Hooeylewis, the fleshed-out biography of Glick includes four sons, including Matthew and Modine. Glick has also occasionally popped up among the press at real red-carpet arrivals, interviewing celebrities who became part of the act.

“The original idea of (Glick) was I wanted to be unrecognizable,” says Short. “There are certain things that I can say as that character that I could never say as myself.”

Short says one of his biggest influences was Sellers, who brilliantly inhabited three characters in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964). Sellers also played six characters in 1974’s “Soft Beds, Hard Battles.” Though Baron Cohen’s methods diverge greatly from Sellers, he’s often been compared to the actor.

It’s widely known that Colbert’s overinflated, conservative TV host was modeled in part after Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. Since Colbert’s character shares his own name (as Benny’s persona did), the comedian has joked that he has considered pronouncing the “T” in his name to differentiate himself from his creation.

Colbert (the character) reached his apotheosis earlier this year when he hosted the White House Correspondents Association dinner with President Bush in attendance.

“It was surreal to be there,” Colbert says. “It was odd because my character pretends to belong there (among politicians and pundits) and to actually be there and to be treated like you belong was really strange.

“From the moment I got there, I was in character because he was so completely comfortable there. It was like being in Oz.”

The balance of self and role was murkier with Kaufman. The convention-breaking comedian took his Foreign Man to “Taxi” in the late ‘70s, and later frequently performed as abusive lounge singer Tony Clifton. The character was even secretly passed on to others, though Kaufman maintained he was a real person.

“With Andy Kaufman, it was debatably schizophrenic,” says Rosenfield. “It was so thoroughly worked-out that one almost had the feeling that it was a different personality within a personality. You don’t know to what degree he was in control of what he was doing.”

Baron Cohen has thus far appeared in total command of both his character and his private life — which he’s successfully kept a mostly blank slate. It’s known, though, that the British comedian is an observant Jew who attended the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his thesis on Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement, and he and his fiancee, actress Isla Fisher from “Wedding Crashers,” are planning a traditional Jewish wedding.

20th Century Fox, which is distributing “Borat,” has accommodated Baron Cohen’s subsuming himself into his character, while others involved (director Larry Charles, producer Jay Roach, actress Pamela Anderson) largely have remained mum on the film, most likely to play along.

Though “Borat” has received a great deal of publicity, Fox confessed last week that market research indicated the film wasn’t catching on. The studio decided to scale down this week’s opening to about 800 theaters, planning to expand to 2,200 theaters next weekend.

Still, Borat appears to be relishing his moment in the sun, angering people in Kazakhstan while he searches for — as his MySpace profile advertises — “Western girlies for chitchat and sexytime.”