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Laughing all the way to Burbank

Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
  • Posted at 5:30pm
  • 29 November 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

During the war, American GIs were said, with a mixture of male envy and female admiration, to be "oversexed, overpaid and over here". Well, we're finally getting our own back, having parachuted an entire regiment of British comedians into America's backyard, there to beat them at their own game.

I don't know about oversexed – although if lurid tabloid stories are to be believed, Steve Coogan will keep the British end up – but a new wave of comics like Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg and Sacha Baron Cohen are certainly reaping big bucks "over there", without selling nylons.

Many Brits have attempted to export their jokes across the Atlantic. But for every Tracey Ullman – whose US TV show debut in 1987 was the first big hit on the Fox network, leading her to roles in movies including Bullets over Broadway and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (OK, it was only her voice) – there's a Lenny Henry, whose Hollywood entrée, True Identity, flopped in 1991.

Rowan Atkinson was named Britain's second wealthiest comedian last year (after Ullman), worth £40 million thanks in part to the success of Bean which grossed $45 million in the US.

It's a minor leap to the face-pulling appeal of Lee Evans, who also enjoyed US success with Mousehunt and There's Something about Mary, in both cases dropping his Essex accent.

I find it oddly self-defeating when English comics go to America and play Americans – like Hugh Laurie in House or Izzard in current hit The Riches, but Baron Cohen sidesteps this by appearing "in character".

In Borat, he made many Americans believe he was from a village in Kazakhstan, rather than Hammersmith.

Never mind, Lenny. Neither Peter Cook nor Tony Hancock cracked the States, and they were comic geniuses.

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