The bellhop arrives at the door with the videocassette player I've requested. He hooks it up and tells me to try it out. I take an Ali G videocassette from my bag. It's a compilation of the funny interview segments that made Ali G a household name in England starting in 1998. The opening seconds show the interior of a strip club. Pulsating music, women on poles. And there's Ali G, a white, dimwitted, would-be gangsta rapper played by comedian-actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Although the character is supposedly from the bland London suburb of Staines, in his own mind he is Tupac Shakur. He wears a garish tracksuit, fake gold, and a trim goatee. The strippers surround him and start to caress him. The bellhop shoots me a look, then moves quickly to the door while I search my pockets for tip money, insisting, "It's not porn—it's parody!"

The strip-club intro gives way to clips of Ali G doing what he does best: making fools of people in positions of authority, who have been led to believe they're appearing on an educational cable program for British youth. They have no idea their interlocutor is a hoaxster, not some hip-hop Ted Koppel. On-screen with Harvard zoologist James Hanken, Ali G asks, "Why is all giraffes gay?" The professor, slightly irritated, replies, "Who says they are?" Ali G says, "Well, they look it." The zoologist appears befuddled.

The stupid question is one of Ali G's specialties. On the American version of Da Ali G Show, soon to begin its second season on HBO, he asked Boutros Boutros-Ghali (whom he introduced as "Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali"), "Wot is da funniest language?" The former secretary-general of the U.N. was flustered. Ali G pressed on: "It's French, innit?" Boutros-Ghali laughed and momentarily agreed that French was indeed an amusing language. Ali G's other victims have included Newt Gingrich, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, James Woolsey, Ralph Nader, Donald Trump, Naomi Wolf, C. Everett Koop, and Buzz Aldrin ("Is the moon real?" Ali G asked, after addressing the astronaut as Buzz Lightyear).

As he did in a segment with former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, Ali G always hits his subjects with one inane or offensive question after another in a slanguage comprising hip-hop buzzwords, Jamaican patois, and crazy talk.

ALI G: 'Cause of your jobs, you must know a lot of secrets dat 'appened back then.

FITZWATER: Well, it's been 10 years. I don't remember very many of them.

ALI G: What about Hillary Clinton? Does she drink from the furry cup?

FITZWATER: I don't know Hillary, I don't know anything about her.

ALI G: But does she eat from the bushy bowl?

FITZWATER: I don't know anything about her.

ALI G: If she does, just cough. 

FITZWATER: I don't know anything about her.

A long silence.

FITZWATER: So what's the deal? Is this your interview technique?

ALI G: No, I's just waitin' to see if you coughed or not.

FITZWATER: This interview is over. Let's cut. The guy's an idiot.

Fitzwater didn't guess that the man seated across from him was a Cambridge graduate. The Tommy Hilfiger skullcap and the marijuana-leaf wristwatch are part of the costume Baron Cohen puts on to pull off his gonzo comedy. A team of researchers, producers, executives, lawyers, and writers toil for many weeks to set up something like the Fitzwater interview—just so that Baron Cohen can confound him and others like him with questions about the bushy bowl. Wolf mentioned lawyers—a Nader aide repeatedly made similar noises—once she realized she'd been duped. Trump walked out. James Lipton, the trim-bearded host of the Bravo channel's Inside the Actors Studio, made an enraged phone call to Da Ali G Show's offices the next day, according to one of its producers. Baron Cohen's habit of mixing his fictional characters with real-world human beings can be a tough racket—although it pays the rent.

The performer, who considers Peter Sellers a hero, also messes with people in the guise of Borat Sagdiyev, a naïve reporter from Kazakhstan with an overactive libido and backward views. A third character is Bruno, the campy, shallow fashion correspondent for an idiotically hip Austrian TV show. Baron Cohen, in his combination of dramatic skills and devotion to comedy, has a lot in common with Sellers—a gift for playing foreigners for laughs being the most obvious thing. Also, they're both British Jews who bury themselves in character, for whatever that's worth. But there's one major difference: Sellers was good in front of the camera and, famously, a shit when he was away from it. Baron Cohen is the converse: a shit in front of the camera and, by all accounts, a decent person in real life.

He was the star of the Cambridge Footlights acting troupe in his student days, playing the leads in My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cyrano de Bergerac. After graduation Baron Cohen worked the London comedy clubs. In one routine he played a Hasid who gets so hot in the shvitz that he ends up converting to Christianity. After some sketch work on a couple of obscure British cable shows, he was called up to the big leagues in 1998 when producer Harry Thompson hired him for Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show, a British equivalent of The Daily Show. That's when Ali G started hectoring public officials and other pompous windbags to great controversy and acclaim. Thompson is the one who came up with the character's name, explaining, "If he had a whiff of Islam about him, we thought people would be afraid to challenge him." When Ali G was spun off to his own series, ratings for The 11 O'Clock Show took a dive.

"Ali G is totally ignorant but totally arrogant as well. He is an overconfident ignoramus."

Most of England embraced Ali G without having any idea of the brain beneath the skullcap. Baron Cohen won best newcomer at the 1999 British Comedy Awards. Ali G accepted the trophy. The reserved Baron Cohen, now a Clark Kent figure, faded into the background as his id-driven, rude-boy counterpart made a run for fame. It was Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy all over again. It was Paul Reubens and Pee-wee Herman. Bob Keeshan and Captain Kangaroo. It was another show-business case of the fictional construct eclipsing the original man. Maybe there was even a touch of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to it. Ali G said things, did things, that Baron Cohen, a mild-mannered, politically liberal, religiously observant man, would never consider. In winning another award in 2000, he said in his acceptance speech (again as Ali G) that he was especially touched, since this day marked the fifth anniversary of the night he "took me Julie up the wrong'un" outside the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. As Ali G continued to frolic beyond the bounds of acceptable social norms—talking "black," deceiving interview subjects, crossing into the sacrosanct comedy territory of September 11 by referring, with perfect mock solemnity, to "the terrible events of 7-Eleven"—he was making his creator a rich, sought-after man.

Cue Madonna's 2000 hit "Music." There's Ali G, in the video. Cut to a Fleet Street reporter filing a story: KABBALAH-KRAZY MADONNA HAS SABBATH SUPPER AT KOSHER HOUSEHOLD OF PRESS-SHY ALI G CREATOR! Now too well known in Great Britain to put anything over on anyone, Baron Cohen starts doing a conventional talk show, with a studio audience, in the Ali G persona. The celebrity guests who sit beside him are in on the joke: David Beckham and Posh Spice genially laugh off anal-sex jokes as they promote a clothing line. This house-pet Ali G is popular but nowhere near as interesting or funny as the Ali G who tricked people. (Baron Cohen agrees.) Next stop, America. Stays in the home of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston while filming in Los Angeles. Mixed critical reaction greets his HBO show ("Now go home. Please"—Associated Press; "Hilarious"— Time) as thousands of scruffy college kids laugh their asses off along with countless Sopranos fans who can't be bothered to change the channel. In May 2003, New York Times op-ed writer Maureen Dowd devotes an entire column to Ali G. She dubs Baron Cohen "brilliant," arguing that he "sends up the vacuity of the culture." Hollywood calls. He risks making the Martin Short mistake by agreeing to star in a remake of the great French comedy Le Diner de Cons. Signs with Fox Searchlight to develop a movie built around his Borat character.

All the while he has not broken character in public. He has given interviews only as Ali G—a shame, because the Ali G stuff is better on-screen than on the page. But now he's ready. It's time, apparently, for the original man to nudge aside his alter egos, if only for a moment, and however reluctantly. And boy is he reluctant! Baron Cohen has the publicist muscle typical of someone making $20 million a picture, as opposed to someone whose HBO show has around 1.7 million households tuning in (which is a few hundred thousand shy of the number for the first season of HBO's other recent comedy success, Curb Your Enthusiasm). The time and place of the interview are set only after a series of farcical phone calls. And now he's coming to meet me here, at this Beverly Hills hotel room. And there he is at the door.

He's tall and lanky. Thirty-three years old. Clean-shaven, with a fluff of dyed blond hair on top of his head, evidence he has lately been filming segments as his Bruno character. I shake hands with the man I've been researching. (The Cambridge school he attended was Christ's College, where he majored in history. His secondary school was Haberdashers' Aske's, a place not for aristocrats, a British friend has informed me, but for the "clever boys" of London's upper middle class. Father: Gerald Baron Cohen, an accountant originally from Cardiff, Wales. Mother: Daniella, a second-generation aerobics instructor originally from Israel. Cousin of renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen, now of Cambridge's Trinity College. Brother of computer-chip designer Amnon Baron Cohen. Brother, also, of musician Erran Baron Cohen, member of the trance band Zohar, which is popular with critics and in London clubs. His fiancee is Australian actress Isla Fisher, who was born in Oman, made her name in the Australian soap opera Home and Away, had a small part in Scooby-Doo, and will appear in the upcoming David O. Russell comedy I Heart Huckabees; she was recently quoted in Hello! magazine saying, "I'll definitely have a Jewish wedding just to be with Sacha.") Baron Cohen's grip is firm, but he's not overdoing it. His hand isn't huge, despite Ali G's boasts concerning the size of a certain extremity, which, as he told former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop, contains a "dong bone." An angry Koop shot back, "It's not a bone, it's not a bone." The interview ended with Ali G insisting that some people, himself included, will live forever. Trying not to blow his stack, Koop replied, "You will eventually find you're wrong." It was riveting TV. That's why I'm here—to meet the man capable of creating such a hideous spectacle.

"How would you describe Ali G?"

"He's totally ignorant but totally arrogant as well. He's an overconfident ignoramus."

"Where did he come from?"

"It was a voice I used to make my brother laugh. It was a voice I heard in England from people who were real-life Ali G's. They were kind of ambiguous, ethnically. They wanted to be gangstas, even though they were living very dull, provincial lives, and it was a way of them appearing more exotic than they actually were. I mean, I remember, I was 12 years old, I was originally very into break dancing. I used to go to perform on the street just to have a little bit more money, because I was involved in the hip-hop scene. There was a very famous D.J. at the time who's still around now called Tim Westwood, who, if you heard him on the radio, you'd think he was a black rapper. But in fact he is a white son of a bishop. He's a provincial, middle-class guy who would love to be Tupac Shakur. And, you know, me and my brother—my brother would start talking to me like that. And it was very funny."

In 1996, Baron Cohen was playing different characters on an obscure cable comedy show in London when he first went out into the streets dressed like the character who would become Ali G. He was just looking to improvise something for one evening's telecast when he had a Eureka! moment: "I remember going out with the director. We passed a group of skater kids, and I thought, All right, it'd be quite interesting to try this with real people. I went over there and started skating, and I was obviously terrible, and I remember being totally surprised, because they were saying, 'You is wack, man, you is totally crap.' Started really insulting me. I remember at the end dropping to my normal voice and saying, 'I'm only joking,' and they were surprised. I realized, Oh, my God, I can do this with real people, and I was so excited."

Even now he's excited. His voice booms. His eyes take on a crazed glow.

"A double-decker tourist bus pulled up by these skater kids. I jumped on with the camera and kind of commandeered the tourist bus. Then I went off the other side and started break dancing in the park! Literally, within half an hour, then, I went into a big business building, and I said I had to see my dad, and eventually we were thrown out. The show went on two hours later. We'd cut up these little snippets, and I remember throwing to one of these snippets during the live show—and there wasn't anything. I didn't understand it. Basically, what had happened was the head of the channel had said, 'We're pulling all of this.' Because he was scared of getting sued. At that point I knew I'd hit on, chanced upon, a very interesting style of comedy."

A key element in the story of Ali G's origin is the rush of energy Baron Cohen felt that day, an elation that allowed him to throw off any Cambridge-man inhibitions he may have had. He now found himself free to do whatever he needed for a laugh, even at the expense of other people. Former U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh was the first high-profile victim of Da Ali G Show's American edition. 

ALI G: What is legal?

THORNBURGH: Well, I think most conduct that all of us engage in on a day-to-day basis is legal.

ALI G: So what is illegal?

THORNBURGH: What is illegal is, what the elected representatives of the people define as crimes.

ALI G: Then what is Barely Legal? 

THORNBURGH: Well, that's when you get into technicalities, and that's why you have trials.

Ali G kindly informs his subject that Barely Legal is the name of a pornography franchise and asks him if he has seen Barely Legal 3. "I will now," answers Thornburgh, "since you recommended it."

Later in the season, a funny but slightly cruel Ali G segment had him leading a roundtable discussion on science and "techmology." After asking his four experts whether certain incredibly long numerals could be multiplied by each other—"Nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine" was one number he mentioned (he's relentless in his comedy, often going to that place where hilarity meets tedium)—Ali G got down to the main issue: Who had left something in the backstage toilet bowl? Dr. Kent Hovind, identified on-screen as a "creationist," emerged as his main target.

ALI G: Would you use a toilet, or does you just drop one in a hole?

DR. HOVIND: Oh, I've been to quite a few countries where they don't have toilets, and I'm very glad to get back to America. 

ALI G: So you would flush? 

DR. HOVIND: Oh, sure. And I think you should have a septic system that's properly designed to handle the waste.

ALI G: YOU say that, but there is evidence backstage to the contrary. Was it—was it you?

DR. HOVIND: I have no idea what you're talking about.

ALI G: The floater. (Dramatic pause.) Coverin' it with paper don't make it all right.

DR. HOVIND: It was not me, if that's what you're saying.

ALI G: But is you the one backstage that didn't flush?

DR. HOVIND: No, sir. 

ALI G: That ain't right. Shame on you. 

DR. HOVIND: Don't say shame on me. I didn't do anything.

Is Dr. Hovind a worthy target? Maybe even Baron Cohen himself doesn't think so, but he has unleashed his Frankenstein's monster and seems powerless to stop it. Or maybe he's not powerless; maybe he's so enamored of his creation that he won't say no, like the doting parent who can't see that little Jason is a brat. Andy Kaufman (1949-1984) used to get laughs by being cruel, too. He'd bring somebody onstage, and that person would end up insulted, maybe with a glass of water poured on his head, and would leave almost in tears. Kaufman would gloat, then try to win back the audience's affection. But the person who got humiliated onstage was always part of the act. Baron Cohen's foils are unwitting. He uses deception to get them to appear on-camera, approaching potential participants with polite letters on fancy letterhead explaining that Ali G is the host of an educational program for youth. This is not exactly a lie, since his show does appeal to youth and it is educational in that it teaches viewers just how idiotic certain intelligent people can be. When the dupes figure it out—usually on the day after the interview— they get on the phone.

"The call to the office the day after, there's a real gamut of reaction," says Dan Mazer, the top producer of Da Ali G Show and Baron Cohen's writing partner. In the worst calls, Mazer says, "it's incandescent rage and that kind of thing. The poor researchers just switch the phones off." So it must be part of Mazer's job to take those calls? "God, no!" he says. "I stay a million miles away from that kind of thing!" Surely someone at the show must calm these people. "I am kind of loath to talk about that," he says. "I'll skip that one." Any twinges of guilt? "You sometimes have moral quandaries where something is very funny but it's a bit cruel and a bit unfair," he says.

"The people he's talking to know they're being filmed, which I think is an important thing," says Dan Friedman, a former Ali G writer, who has just gotten his Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale. "They get drawn into explaining their views, and if those views are objectionable, then in some way they deserve what they get." That sums up the show's ethos: that anyone who fails Baron Cohen's test deserves to be a laughingstock.

With its absurd interviews, Da Ali G Show gives us a grotesque version of the journalistic enterprise. Janet Malcolm's analysis of the journalist-subject relationship applies here: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." These are the much-quoted opening fines of Malcolm's 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer. But Malcolm is too wised-up to see subjects as having a baby-seal-like innocence.

She argues that, "at bottom, no subject is naïve. Every hoodwinked widow ... every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, impelled by something stronger than his reason." If the interviewer is a sadist, the subject is a masochist. Following this conceit, Baron Cohen is like the lion tamer in circuses of old. He's putting on an acceptable sadism show, with an expertly honed stupidity in place of the whip. In the role of fearsome beast, Da Ali G Show casts someone like Newt Gingrich. Each interview makes Baron Cohen work hard, but he always emerges victorious.

So far, the conservatives have been Ali G's feistiest opponents and thus the funniest. White liberals present a more pathetic spectacle. They're so eager to be accepted by Ali G, this supposed creature of the hood, that, at his behest, they will often agree to do the most embarrassing thing a white person can do: they rap. Lipton did it. So did Nader. So did Naomi Wolf, who resisted before caving in and rhyming "don't be a sexist" with "ride in my Lexus." Writing about the experience of falling prey to Ali G, in the May 9, 2003, London Sunday Times, Wolf reported that a producer gave her a martini beforehand and that things were going along pleasantly enough in the interview. "But then," she wrote, "I challenged Ali G, and that's where things got to be not so funny. 'I lived in the U.K. for six years,' I remarked, 'and I never heard an accent like yours. What ethnicity are you?' Ali G looked stricken. Did a flicker of conscience cross his face?"

It may well have, according to Harry Thompson, Baron Cohen's former producer, who wrote, in a Sunday Times piece of his own, that Baron Cohen is troubled by what he does for a living: "Guilt, of course, entered into the equation. Sacha is a genuinely nice person and couldn't bear the fact that some of his victims were, too."

Nancy Geller, a veteran comedy executive who oversees Da Ali G Show for HBO, describes Baron Cohen as "a menschy Jewish boy." She sees strong similarites between his work and Andy Kaufman's, but says the two men are quite different. Kaufman in real fife tortured himself and drove other people crazy, especially television executives—he was the same onstage and off. "I never a hundred and one percent understood Andy," Geller says. "Whereas Sacha, when you sit down with him, you see how thoughtful and funny he is. He's much more approachable than Andy was. Sacha's lovable. I've had lunch, I've had dinner with him. We sent him, on his birthday, for a day at the spa. And he appreciated that and loved it." In other words, unlike Kaufman, who bungled his relationships with executives and whose movie career pretty much began and ended with a 1981 flop entitled Heartbeeps, Baron Cohen seems able to play the Hollywood game.

As Da Ali G Show moves into its second season on HBO, the program's energy is shifting toward Borat. This character has some resonance right now. He's the nightmare version of the Third World foreigner who embraces the West for all the wrong reasons. We want him to love us for our democratic values—he just wants our pom. More important than the character's sociopolitical underpinning is the fact that he allows Baron Cohen to indulge his talent for physical comedy. The way Borat runs after a taxicab—fists high, elbows out—is a wonder. The way he talks, sings, wrestles, and offhandedly mentions that his wife "died in a field"—he's a pure buffoon, a descendant of Steve Martin's wild and crazy guy updated for the age of terrorism.

"When did Borat start?"

"Borat came out of a trip I went on to southern Russia. I met a character who made me laugh a lot. His way of speaking English made me really, really laugh."

"He's always stepping out of a car with bad techno music blasting out of it."

"I think the idea is that Communism has collapsed, and that country has inherited the worst of the West."

Geopolitical critiques are all well and good, but Borat also has his raunchy side, which tends toward the scatological. At a gentlemen's lawn-bowling club in England, while getting a tour of the men's bathroom, Borat was amazed at the sight of a urinal, which he had apparently never seen before. He squatted with his posterior halfway into its basin, saying to his alarmed host, "I make dirt."

The satire Baron Cohen creates as Bruno is more pointed. At New York's Fashion Week, Bruno got a lovely young fashionista to agree that all unstylish people should be put on trains and sent off to camps. Bruno's interview with a designer named Hushi, who had just shown his latest collection, quickly shot to Who's on First heights of absurdity:

BRUNO: What I loved about the show was that it had no humor at all.

HUSHI: It was dead serious. It was super-serious.

BRUNO: HOW did you keep the show humorous all the way along?

HUSHI: Using pop icons.

BRUNO: I found the collection so heavy that it was pulling me down into a place better than heaven.

HUSHI: Yeah, I wanted it to be like a weight on people. I wanted you to just fall, collapse.

BRUNO: HOW did you make sure the show was just so light?

HUSHI: Because we wanted things to flow but at the same time not just be too overly feminine.

BRUNO: But you somehow managed to achieve this sense of the whole show being kind of light as air, everyone just floating up.

HUSHI: Yeah, that's what it was. They were in the clouds; they were in space.

BRUNO: Do you think consistency is important?

HUSHI: No.

In the South, Bruno has had a gun pulled on him, twice—once for asking a neo-Nazi if he used moisturizer (he didn't) and the other time for flirting with the organizer of an American patriotism expo.

"It's an enjoyable character to play," Baron Cohen says, "because he's so bitchy and so rude. We're interviewing the most pretentious and superficial people, and Bruno is the most pretentious, superficial person that anyone's met, and so they let their guard down. I do occasionally play Bruno in a fish-out-of-water way. So Bruno in Alabama was, obviously, seeing a gay guy in a homophobic environment."

He's referring to an episode where Bruno pranced onto the University of Alabama football field and joined the line of cheerleading southern womanhood in rooting on the Crimson Tide. Baron Cohen knows how to camp it up—the hand on the hip, the lithe movements. Bullnecked fans gave him and his camera crew the finger. A chant of "faggot" went up in the crowd. The local bodyguard he had hired simply ran off.

He was in real danger once again while filming a segment for the show's new season, this time as Borat. It happened in Sedona, Arizona, a New Age capital. Baron Cohen: "I was interviewing a guy who probably was a biker who then had become a hippie. I think he created some hexagon, a spiritual hexagon, which you have to lie inside and then you get healed, and he basically wanted me to relax, and I never would relax as Borat. He said, 'Listen, I'm going to go out. When I return, I want you to be fully relaxed.' And then he came back in, and I'm underneath the blanket in this hexagon, pretending to masturbate furiously, and I'm naked underneath it. At which point he goes wild. I quickly put my clothes on."

But the biker-hippie had called the cops. "I suddenly see one police car arrive, and finally there's four police cars. Eventually, they come over, and I think, What do I do? Do I stay in character? Or do I speak in an English voice? And I go, Fuck it, I'm going to stay in character. I just won't lie to them. And they say, 'Would you like to explain yourself?' And I go, 'What? What happen?' They say, 'You've been accused of committing a crime.' 'What? Why? I did not touch my chram. ' 'Well, sir, he said that you did touch your chram.'' I went to get a tissue from my pocket, and he went for his gun. You suddenly realize how people get shot accidentally. I said, 'I did not touch my chram! I was only going like this? He goes, 'Sir, if you were simulating masturbation in the state of Arizona, that is an imprisonable offense for up to two years. Do you have any footage?' I say, 'Yes, over there, no problem.' So he went over to look at the footage, saying, 'All right, we've got to take this guy in.' I suddenly had visions of me being in a cell thinking, When would I actually break character?" He never did. The cops eventually let the mustachioed Kazakh and his crew go, but with instructions to stay in Sedona. "We were told by our lawyers to get on the next plane. Drove straight to the airport."

Don't expect to see the segment on HBO anytime soon: the Sedona police force still has custody of the tape.

Between interviews with Baron Cohen, I read Nick Tosches's meditative book on minstrelsy, Where Dead Voices Gather. Tosches describes the leading minstrel of a hundred years ago: a man named Al G. Field, who was known affectionately as "Al G." From Al G. to Ali G in one century. In a 1999 interview with Britain's New Nation weekly newspaper, the black British comedian Curtis Walker likened Ali G to Al Jolson, the last blackface star. Another black British comedian, Felix Dexter, told the paper, "I feel that a lot of the humor is laughing at black street culture, and it is being celebrated because it allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at that culture in a safe context where they can retain their sense of political correctness." Guardian critic Gary Younge weighed in: "Is he a white man impersonating a black man or a white man impersonating a white man impersonating a black man?" Younge posited that people laughing at Ali G could see the show "as a joke on the black community which conveys black male culture as misogynistic and ignorant" instead of as a "joke on that section of the white community who over-identify with black culture." Wolf, in her Sunday Times piece, railed against the notion that Ali G was a spoof of white suburban wannabes, saying that the character's backstory (raised by his grandmother; absentee father) "included every stereotype of the black underclass."

Time for another interview. Baron Cohen and I step into an elevator. Going up. We've planned to talk by the hotel's rooftop pool tonight. It's deserted, except for an actual pool boy who emerges from the darkness and takes our food order. As he leaves, Baron Cohen tells him, matter-of-factly, to bring some Kleenex, because we'll be having sex later. I laugh. It's the first crude or even unstudied remark he has made in my presence. We sit down at a table. The pool boy returns, with six lit candles on a black tray. "It's gettin' sexy up here," he says. Everybody's a comedian. Exit pool boy.

Baron Cohen talks about his upbringing—the dinner-table political debates, the jokes—saying, "There's a very high premium placed on humor in the family. My dad still advises me on the series, whether it's welcome or unwelcome advice. The irony is that, most of the time, he's right." He says that his dad loves the physical humor, that both parents tend to favor the "somewhat more intellectual" bits over the raunchy ones. "They're very, very, very harsh when they don't like something."

"What are your feelings about the ethics of the show? Do you ever feel guilt or embarrassment if you feel like you've duped somebody? Even someone like Newt Gingrich—it's easy to think of him as a villain, but is it fair to trick him?"

"Yeah. I think Newt Gingrich is pretty renowned for tricking lots more people for a much greater period of time, but I think with someone like Newt Gingrich you feel it's good that they are a good target."

"Are there different ethical issues with each character?"

"Not really. Bruno is probably the only one where the joke is on them slightly, but the kind of people that we tend to target with Bruno tend to be superficial, tend to have a value system that I don't really respect.... I think the most important thing is, with Ali G, you're certainly not making a fool out of these people. If anything, you're showing them in a different light, and the joke is always on Ali G."

"I don't know—I think it's partly on Ali G, but it's also on them."

"That's true. I'm showing how separate these people are from the society they govern, and that's a very worrying thing, that they believe that an Ali G could exist."

"I read that some critics in England said the show was like minstrelsy. The poll of black comedians, I wondered what you thought of that."

"It was quite ambiguous. In the same article, they did a poll of the black community and 80 percent were not only in favor but they were fans. That was the irony. Black radio stations and the Afro-Caribbean community were really the first to jump on the show, and still, in Britain, most of the people who come up to me on the street, you know, many of my fans are in the AfroCaribbean community. So it was very upsetting to me when I had those accusations. ... And also it was very ironic for me, because I've been very involved in the antiracism movement in England. I've gone on numerous marches against apartheid, long before Ali G."

He mentions his thesis at Cambridge, on the sometimes troubled relationship between blacks and Jews in the American civil-rights movement. "I spent quite a lot of time, actually, at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, studying and actually living in downtown Atlanta, which was an interesting experience, because it's so segregated there that I was one of the few white people there for the month I was there. I went round to various communities and interviewed Bob Moses." Robert Moses, an intellectual and activist in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was a driving force behind registering African-Americans to vote in Mississippi. "I had a brilliant professor at the time who is a guy called Tony Badger. When I came back I told him I had an interview with this guy Bob Moses. I said, 'It's all I've got,' and he said, 'No one's managed to interview Bob Moses for 20 years. That's a dissertation in itself.' I considered doing a Ph.D. after that, but it's such a lonely pursuit."

A lonely pursuit. Suddenly I'm with a character out of E. M. Forster. We're a long way from "the bushy bowl" and "I make dirt." Clearly, Baron Cohen wants to be a force for good in the world. He has some nice arguments, too. How swishy Bruno exposes homophobia. How black-seeming Ali G shows us the distance between those in authority and the multicultural masses. How foreign Borat gets others to reveal their own xenophobia and class prejudice. But comedy is really just a lot of screwing around, with not much redeeming social value. That's why we love it. It lets us off the hook. After meeting him, I could easily picture an alternate Sacha Baron Cohen. He would make for a very credible member of Parliament, on the Labour side, or perhaps a high-minded intellectual who writes influential tracts in a country garret. But his lot in life is more ridiculous and more sublime. Whether he likes it or not, he's funny. He makes people laugh. It may not always be pretty, but the best comedy never is.