60 Minutes Transcript: Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen has made a career in entertainment out of rendering himself unrecognizable — as the lovable but ignorant Kazakhstani reporter Borat, the fashion and fame obsessed narcissist Bruno, and the hip-hop idiot Ali G — hilarious fools he deploys to trick real people into exposing their real beliefs. At 55, Baron Cohen has been doing his undercover comedy for more than half his life. In that time, the complexity, moral stakes and physical danger entailed in his deceptions has increased. He sometimes requires trap doors and getaway-vans to escape the situations he's created. He is a rare combination, a mission-driven public intellectual and an adrenaline junkie, who has invented his own genre of comedy in the hopes of making us laugh and waking us up. We talked to him at his alma mater Cambridge University, where his parents sent him in the hopes that he would become a lawyer.

Sacha Baron Cohen: I wanted to be a comedian. But I was embarrassed to tell anyone that I wanted to be a comedian because it's a bit like saying, "I want to be a super model." You know, and people go, "Well, you're not actually very good looking"

Ariel Levy: It's a secret.

Sacha Baron Cohen: So exactly. No one knows this.

But Baron Cohen had been experimenting with a version of the character who would become Ali G for years.

Sacha Baron Cohen: He was this upper-class kid who did all the same catchphrases as Ali G. Booyaka. But he was upper class. So it was "Booyakabooyaka, you know, Junglist Massive." (LAUGH) 

Baron Cohen took his prototype of Ali G for a test drive among the skateboarders of London, with the intention of airing the sketch on a youth culture show he was hosting on cable.

Sacha Baron Cohen: And I start skateboarding terribly. And they go, "You're-- you're crap, man. You're whack" After about five minutes, I went back to my real voice. I said, "Guys, I'm pretending. This is-- this is a character." They were shocked. At the end of the hour, I get called by the head boss. He says, "If you try that again, you're fired."

Ariel Levy: Oh, wow.

Sacha Baron Cohen: And then I knew I was onto something.

That something was honed into the character millions have come to know as Ali G: a White imbecile and hip-hop journalist who wants to be a Black rapper, and whose debut on a satirical late-night talk show in 1998, was the steppingstone to "Da Ali G Show," a smash hit in the U.K. that spawned an HBO series and a feature film.

Sacha Baron Cohen: So the core idea of "Ali G," was, I thought, "Would it be funny to have the world expert in something with the biggest idiot in the world, you know? Would that juxtaposition be really funny, if the world expert takes it seriously?"

Ariel Levy: Right. And apparently, yes.

Baron Cohen went on to unleash Ali G on dozens of credulous authorities.Ccase in point — the former surgeon general of the United States, C. Everett Koop.

Sacha Baron Cohen: I kept on-- telling him these stupid questions, like you know, "Ain't the heart a bit crap, you know? (LAUGH) Don't-- shouldn't it have a different rhythm 'cause at the moment, it's boom-boom, but what about a-- (BEAT BOXING)

Ariel Levy: So Ali.

Now, after more than 20 years in remission, Ali G is back.

ALI G: Yo, well, we is here now. This is called Buckingham Phallus, and people from around the world come here to take photos and to wait and get boned by Prince Edward.

Ariel Levy: Like if I play my cards right, that could be me.

ALI G: How old is you?

Ariel Levy: 52. 

ALI G: No. Even if you switch those numbers around, that ain't gonna work. 

ALI G: Oh, up there is Big Ben…. 

We went along as Ali G commandeered a double decker bus and took us to see his version of the London landmarks.

ALI G: The big hand is on the I-I, and the little hand is on the I-I-I. 

Ariel Levy: Do you feel like you bring any element of your actual self to some of the characters?

Sacha Baron Cohen: If I knew who I was, then I could answer that. But I don't know. I mean, Ali G definitely, because in a way, at the age of 11, I was-- an Ali G of sorts.

The youngest of three boys, Baron Cohen grew up in northwest London the son of a fitness instructor and an accountant. 

Sacha Baron Cohen: my mom was hilarious, but probably not intentionally so. Some--

Ariel Levy: Like, can you give me an example?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Well, she has a voice like this. (LAUGH) Sorry, if you're watching this. And she had such a distinct voice that everyone in my high school could imitate it. (LAUGH) So everyone would go, "Sacha, telephone." (LAUGH) Because that's what she would say when people would call me.

He had a passion for breakdancing and early hip-hop, even providing the entertainment for his own bar mitzvah. He went on to study history at Cambridge University, where Baron Cohen discovered the stage.

Sacha Baron Cohen: I realized I loved making people laugh, but I also really liked making them cry-- onstage. 

Ariel Levy: You like to give people the full emotional workout--

Sacha Baron Cohen: I wanna give them their-- yeah, bang for their buck. I really do. (LAUGH) I do.

Ariel Levy: How do your parents react when you finish Cambridge and you say, I think I wanna be a actor."

Sacha Baron Cohen: They thought it was a ridiculous idea. It was just an impossibility. They were right. They were actually correct.

Ariel Levy: Well, no.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Well, it was so-- it would've been irresponsible for them to support me, (LAUGH) because the likelihood of success was-- seemed impossible.

He pursued his goal by studying with the Stanislavski of clowns, a man named Philippe Gaulier.

Sacha Baron Cohen: His idea of idea of clown was the stupidest creature that can ever be on stage." He used to say, "More stupid than this, and you die." (LAUGH) Sorry for the cultural appropriation of the French accent. 

Ariel Levy: And what'd you learn?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Everything. Everything. He was my mentor. 

And Baron Cohen brought it all to Borat: the beloved, bumbling antisemite, Kazakh reporter who made his grand entrance touring America in 2006.

Ariel Levy: So when you're making Borat, obviously you meticulously plan ahead.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Yeah.

Ariel Levy: And, you know, it's not like you and your merry band of producers is just going into antique stores 

Sacha Baron Cohen: there's a huge amount of stuff that you don't see, which is us behind the scenes looking at who we are interviewing going, "They-- not them. Not them."

The movie was both hysterical and revealing — an experiment, he says, where interactions with real people move the plot forward. What's more: Borat made $260 million.

Sacha Baron Cohen: You know, Borat is, again, a funny character, but also to-- he also shows the kindness of people as well, who are so nice to him, but also can expose, you know, the layer of hate and bigotry below the surface that people normally wouldn't go on air and-- and show.

Baron Cohen's undercover comedy ventures into morally complex territory, in many cases, his incognito encounters with unsuspecting people create an ethically questionable bargain: the worse they look, the better it is for him.

Ariel Levy: I guess what I wonder is have you felt conflicted or guilty about baiting someone into making a complete fool of themselves?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Okay, well, I think a lot of the times they're not making fools of themselves. I think a lot of those in the "Ali G" interviews they come ac-- across well, actually. I think the same with "Borat."

The encore to Borat was Bruno- a flamboyant fashion reporter who wanted to become the, quote,"biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler." Baron Cohen says the movie was conceived as a gay rom-com — and rom-coms need to end with a kiss, usually in a setting that's scenic and sentimental.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Instead of that, we did it in a cage match and it was me and my love interest, and we kiss. And we wanted to see what would happen with the crowd? Would they become violent really.

Ariel Levy: No, it seemed like they wanted to kill you.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Yes.

Ariel Levy: What's the sort of ratio of fear to thrill for you while that's happening? How much are you worried about dying, and how much are you thinking, "Oh my God, this can be the best scene"?

Sacha Baron Cohen: I'm thinking about the scene almost entirely in that moment. I mean, I can remember it vividly now, yeah. I reme-- well, I remember lying down, and I'm kissing him, and I'm looking at the chairs. And I'm thinking, "This is great."

Baron Cohen's work has earned Golden Globes and BAFTA awards, as well as Oscar nominations for "Borat" and for his dramatic role as the 60s activist Abbie Hoffman in "The Trial of the Chicago 7." Before that he played Israeli Mossad agent Eli Cohen in a mini-series called "The Spy" and starred opposite Will Ferrell as the French nascar driver, Jean Girard, in "Talladega Nights."

Sacha Baron Cohen: I was in the middle of shooting Borat, and on the plane over I thought, "I need to do a French character. Why don't I do my old French clown teacher?" 

Sacha Baron Cohen: (IN FRENCH ACCENT) So that it is that, you know? "You are Ricky Bobby," you know?

Peter Sellers – in all his absurdity, faux-Frenchness, and physicality – was the first and remains the greatest influence of Baron Cohen's career.

Sacha Baron Cohen: I mean, Sellers is still my favorite comedian--

Ariel Levy: Of all time?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Yes. Yeah, because he completely inhabited the character, and it's laugh-out-loud funny, and they are silly voices.

In Baron Cohen's new movie, "Ali G: Who Iz I?," his directorial debut out later this week, he plays Ali G, a deranged leftist professor, and a former Mossad agent, who all interact with unsuspecting strangers. The result, designed to expose the extremism at both ends of the political spectrum, is as disturbing as it is funny. 

Ariel Levy: Did you go into this movie with any kind of question you wanted to answer?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Yes. I mean, number one, I wanted the people to laugh really, really hard And I wanted to also just examine this idea of conspiracies and lies whether we in a matter of hours could turn intelligent people who believed in the theory of race replacement into murderers. Doesn't sound that funny. There's loads of laughs in the movie as well,

The scale of the challenge was unlike anything Baron Cohen had undertaken before.

Sacha Baron Cohen: we had to have, you know, prosthetic teams working on this for years. We had animatronic teams. There are hundreds and hundreds of things that can go wrong, and each of them has to go right.

Ariel Levy: Do you feel like you're holding up a mirror to society plain and simple? Or is it like a -- like a weird, warped, fun house mirror that gives us a distorted perspective of how scary things actually are?

Sacha Baron Cohen: Again, the primary objective of all of this is to get people to laugh really hard-- And smuggled in there is a bit of satire, is a bit of hopefully the people come out of the movie theater and think. 

Baron Cohen is trying to show us that democracies depend on shared truths — and autocracies survive on shared lies. He says he's just doing silly voices, but for more than half his life, his characters' curiosity, stupidity and charm have also revealed our character.

Sacha Baron Cohen: You know, my dream was could I make one classic comedy? And I felt like with "Borat" I was like, "I did it." You know, so anything else is-- is really gravy. And yeah, I feel very, very lucky.

Produced by Michael Karzis, Aaron Weisz and Ian Flickinger. Associate producer, Katie Kerbstat. Edited by Craig Crawford. Assistant editor, Aisha Crespo