"The character of Borat—a second-stringer to Ali G, Mr. Baron Cohen’s ethnically confused, suburban hip-hop character—is a weirdly likable one. It’s hard for even the people he sends up to resist his wide-eyed astonishment, his ebullient happiness and the flash of his uncomprehending smile. Borat is joyfully anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic and racist—and brings out those same traits in many of his unwitting interview subjects, a fact that lends his comic bits a distinct edge of queasy darkness."

"When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," he said. "It is like saying goodbye to a loved one. It is hard, and the problem with success, although it's fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I 'get' with Borat again, so it's a kind of self-defeating form, really.

"It's upsetting, but the success has been great and better than anything I could have dreamed of."