Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan turns 20 this week. The film remains a striking artifact of the 2000s: dated in its references and methods, but still capable of delivering the physical comedy and escalating absurdity that made it a mass phenomenon in 2006.
Borat emerged from Da Ali G Show, which began on Channel 4 in 2000 before moving to HBO in 2003. The character was one of several personas Cohen used in confrontational comedy built around unsuspecting interview subjects, alongside Ali G and Brüno. Borat’s apparent cultural ignorance and aggressive cheer made him an especially effective vehicle for exposing prejudice, vanity and social discomfort.
The film expanded that television formula into a loose story. Borat travels to the United States to make a documentary about the country, while hoping to pursue Pamela Anderson. Its strongest moments, however, come less from the narrative than from Cohen’s physical performance and provocative non sequiturs, including the toilet-bowl scene, the tortoise exchange and the increasingly chaotic hotel chase involving his producer, Azamat, played by Ken Davitian.
Borat was also a major commercial success. It earned $262 million worldwide against an $18 million budget and brought Cohen a Best Actor Golden Globe. Its arrival during George W. Bush’s second presidential term, amid wars abroad and intense domestic tensions, helped give its confrontational humor a particularly receptive audience.
Some of the film’s most memorable sequences exposed ugly attitudes that were already present in American life. A group of fraternity members expressed white-pride views and criticized the end of slavery before watching Pamela Anderson’s leaked sex tape. Other scenes targeted sexism, Confederate nostalgia and everyday social prejudice. The production also faced considerable legal fallout, including unsuccessful lawsuits from several participants and a privacy claim from a New York subway passenger after Borat released a live chicken on the train.
The film’s treatment of Kazakhstan and its use of antisemitic, misogynistic and anti-Muslim stereotypes remain central to any reassessment. Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakh culture provoked negative reactions from the country’s government, while the character’s bigotry was presented as both a comic device and a source of discomfort. Jewish hosts Joe and Miriam Behar, who welcomed Borat and Azamat into their home, viewed the film more lightly, but their response does not erase the broader concerns surrounding its premise.
Cohen’s later work increasingly intensified or redirected those provocations. The Dictator leaned heavily into stereotypes of Arab culture, while Brüno used deliberately homophobic material and led to an out-of-court settlement involving a Palestinian grocer falsely identified in the film as a former terrorist. After the box-office failure of Grimsby in 2016, Cohen moved toward more explicitly political projects, including Who Is America? and the 2020 sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Those later productions made their political intentions more visible, but they were not always as funny as the original Borat. The sequel received several Oscar nominations and became associated with an election-season episode involving Maria Bakalova and Rudy Giuliani, yet its message often overshadowed its comedy.
Cohen’s latest release, Ali G: Who Iz I?, returns to the character who preceded Borat. The film presents an older Ali G with gray dreadlocks, debating cultural appropriation and confronting a DEI coordinator over the origins of the durag. Its tone is described as sullen and overextended rather than genuinely revealing, suggesting that Cohen’s once-provocative method no longer produces the same insight into the public psyche.
That contrast has sharpened Borat’s reputation as Cohen’s peak achievement. The 2006 film remains offensive and ethically contentious, but its combination of performance, unpredictability and social exposure continues to land more effectively than much of the work that followed.
Sources: GQ.