Memorable Sacha Baron Cohen moments, from Borat’s mankini to the Ryan Seacrest ash dumping

British comedian’s over-the-top characters and their outrageous acts have delighted and appalled audiences for over two decades. As he affronts a fresh batch of gullible public figures, we recall some of his best/worst stunts

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Sacha Baron Cohen as chauvinistic Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev in a highlighter-green mankini that, once seen, could never be unseen.

Published: 12:01pm, 16 Jul 2018Updated: 12:00pm, 16 Jul 2018

Based on complaints from former US Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Sacha Baron Cohen is definitely up to his old tricks: playing jokes on unsuspecting public figures who didn’t do their due diligence before agreeing to meet him on camera for Who Is America?, his first new TV series since HBO’s Da Ali G Show ended in 2004.

After the revelation that his latest victims are gun-rights activists Philip Van Cleave and Larry Pratt, we remember some of his most memorable misadventures from the past two decades.

2000: Ali G critiques Madonna’s chest

In 2000, Cohen was mostly unknown to American audiences when Madonna – then at the beginning of her faux-British period – tapped him to play her limousine driver in the video for her song Music after watching his Ali G, Innit special, in which he played a British chav of indeterminate ethnicity who spoke in a Jamaican patois.

“Is you Madonna?” Ali G asks after she taps on his car window.

Taking in her white fur coat, cowboy hat, heaps of gold jewellery and plunging neckline, he observes, “Your [boobs] look less big than they do on the telly but I still definitely would.”