Ali G
Emerging from the smouldering ruins of the East Staines/West Staines turf war in a slightly out-of-date FUBU shellsuit, Ali G graduated from TV's worst interviewer to political warrior on the big screen. If you're looking for a man unafraid to confront corruption in all its guises, you've come to wrong place: Ali G just wants some R.E.S.T.E.C.P., a phat blunt and some quality time with "his bitches". Or failing that, his dog Tupac. Somehow the man who once mixed up Buzz Aldrin and Buzz Lightyear manages to foil the scheming of Charles Dance's evil MP and, with a little help from Da West Staines Massiv, save the country.
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Borat Sagdiyev
Borat burst from the Da Ali G Show like a toxic plague: a moustacheoed maniac from the Kazakh Ministry of Information hellbent on upsetting the US of A. Sexist, anti-semitic, homophobic and less self-aware than an unplugged Skynet, he's like Peter Sellers in Being There by way of Benny Hill, Russ Meyer and your local mankini store. Sacha Baron Cohen's most subversive character? You betcha. Borat is a trash savant who brilliantly exposes the dimmer, darker side of America. It takes either serious stones or dimwittery on an epic scale to take the mickey out of small-town America in small-town America. Baron Cohen is no dimwit.
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Bruno Gehard
After Borat's naked sumo, you'd think Baron Cohen couldn't get any more out-there, but by the time Meinspace-touting clothes horse Bruno has finished eating sushi from naked Mexicans, tormenting rednecks and tornadoeing through fashion shows in a velcro jumpsuit, you'd admit you were very, very wrong. "You may find zis hard to believe," the leather-clad loon announces, "but I am gay". What follows is the sums of all bigots' fears: Straight Dave. "I'm so straight that when I bought my house the first thing I did was brick up the back door!" Baron Cohen's alter alter ego informs a wildly cheering Arkansas cage-fighting crowd, shortly before liplocking his assistant Lutz.
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Admiral General Aladeen
Baron Cohen's latest invention General Aladeen, rogue tyrant of the fictional North African republic of Wadiya, sees him abandon his mock-doc formula and throw in a proper plot. It sends the medal-clad meglomaniac to New York for a big speech at the UN and fish-out-of-water mayhem – a little like Eddie Murphy in Coming To America only with more camels and wanking jokes. There's no soft-peddling the satire here: Arab Americans have already registered their disgust with his "stereotypical" depiction of a third-world dictator. By our reckoning, this leaves just astrophysicists and the Welsh yet to take exception to his satire. Meshuggeneh!
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