8) The Time He Got A Former MP To Smoke A Joint On-Air
If the overly-sensitive British media had gotten its way, Sacha Baron Cohen might never have made it across the pond to find success in America. When it was first aired, Da Ali G Show was groundbreaking, critically acclaimed…and wildly unpopular with the UK’s conservative press. Two common complaints leveled at the show were that it was vulgar, and racist for its depiction of black street culture.
One incident in particular saw the British media attempt to shut Baron Cohen down. It involved Baron Cohen, as Ali G, convincing ex-MP Neil Hamilton to apparently smoke a joint in an interview.
This was then televised, prompting the British media to collectively lose its shit. Unfortunately for the press, Baron Cohen upped sticks to HBO and managed to return with a US-set Ali G Show three years later.
7) The Time He Was Investigated By Both The Police And FBI
Back when Sacha Baron Cohen was still relatively unknown enough to go out into the world as one of his characters without the public getting wise, he went in hard, duping anyone he could in the most outrageous ways possible.
Unsurprisingly, such an approach also left him open to intervention by a law not always realizing Ali G/Borat/Bruno weren’t actually real people. On Borat, the law got involved a lot. A lot a lot.
As he was pranking his way across America as the Kazakh TV host, Baron Cohen didn’t just have the American law on his ass one or two times – the police were called out on 92 separate occasions.
Furthermore, Baron Cohen went to such lengths in playing his giant joke on the USA that the FBI actually opened a file on him. Apparently they heard reports of a “terrorist traveling in an ice cream van” and decided to start keeping track.
6) The Time Kazakhstan Threatened To Sue
The controversy Baron Cohen caused on a national scale with Borat wasn’t just limited to the US. While during the shoot he seemingly had a good chunk of American law enforcement trying to shut him down, it was after the film came out that an entire nation actually officially threatened the comedian with legal action.
Though Kazakhstan has since embraced the movie, Borat‘s release in 2006 prompted the Kazakh government to call the film “a concoction of bad taste and ill manners…incompatible with the ethics and civilized behavior of Kazakhstan’s people.”
Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry threatened Baron Cohen with a lawsuit, but over time the country’s official position changed, to the point where ‘Borat’ was invited to visit.