Sacha Baron Cohen hopes to fight bigotry with return of controversial Ali G character

Sacha Baron Cohen defended reviving his Ali G character at a live podcast taping at New York's 92nd Street Y, promoting "Ali G: Who Iz I?" and pushing back against a British campaign urging cinemas to boycott the film over cultural appropriation. He said Ali G cannot exist in 2026 because he is a cultural appropriator — and that this is exactly why he brought him back.

Sacha Baron Cohen used a live podcast taping at New York's 92nd Street Y to promote "Ali G: Who Iz I?" and to defend the return of the tracksuit-wearing, faux-Jamaican character he created in the late 1990s, more than two decades after Ali G last appeared on the big screen. Speaking with host Josh Horowitz on Thursday night, Baron Cohen pushed back against a British campaign that called for cinemas to boycott the film, arguing that Ali G's appropriation of Black culture and his comedy risk making racial caricatures acceptable under cover of satire. Black British comedians have criticized the character since 2000. "Ali G is a character that cannot exist in 2026 because he's a cultural appropriator, because he's so problematic," Baron Cohen said. "And that's exactly why I wanted to bring him back." He described Ali G as a naive figure with horrific views who nonetheless wants the world to be better, and said the character was an ideal vehicle for exposing what he called a new and insidious explosion of bigotry. The event repeatedly turned on the comedian's Jewishness. He recalled that the mostly Black creative team behind Marvel's "Ironheart," in which he played the demonic Mephisto, asked whether he would be offended by the offer given the history of associating Jews with the devil. "It was such an amazingly considerate, empathetic thing to say," he said, adding, "I think for the Jews out there, sometimes we don't feel seen." He joked to the largely Jewish audience about the streets of "the new New York." The article notes Baron Cohen, 54, is a three-time Oscar nominee who wrote his Cambridge undergraduate thesis on the US civil rights movement and has started a campaign against online bigotry.