Was Borat Based On A Real Man?

A 1999 field piece from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart includes footage of a man who shares striking similarities with the character.

Last year marked the ten-year anniversary of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

A surprise box office smash and cult phenomenon, the film told the story of Borat Sagdiyev, a fictional character popularized on the British-American satirical television series Da Ali G Show.

But how fictional was Borat?

As cartoonishly bizarre as the character is, there exists footage from nearly two decades ago of a man named Mahir Cagri, who — in appearance, behavior, and various idiosyncrasies — greatly resembles Sacha Baron Cohen’s now comedically ubiquitous character.

Here’s how it happened.

For the past 6 months, I, along with my friend Vic Shuttee, have been watching every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in order beginning with its 1999 inception. We’ve chronicled this journey in our podcast The Daily Show Weekly. On the December 21, 1999 episode — notably, the last episode of the millennium — Jon presented a field piece by correspondent Nancy Walls (later Nancy Carell).

Mahir Cagri was already famous.

Describing the interview subject as “a Turkish cyberspace giant named Mahir,” Jon notes that the man in question gained notoriety after his home page garnered 3 million views. (Da Ali G Show would premiere the following year, in 2000).

The piece opens with Mahir, an eastern European man with a thick, long mustache, stating in a heavy accent that “many many people and many many womans want to come my home.”

It cuts to B-roll of Mahir’s website, featuring him in a dark brown suit, playing ping-pong, and wearing a revealing bathing suit.

The website includes declarations like “I kiss you,” “I like sex,” and “My profession jurnalist,” all of which align with Borat’s characteristics.

He even indicates an affinity for Pamela Anderson, who is the object of Borat’s obsessive desire over the course of the 2006 film.

Mahir himself has noticed the similarities.

He indicated in a WIRED article in 2006 that he intended to sue Baron Cohen. The lawsuit has not come to fruition, and it has been pointed out that Borat existed as a character in various forms throughout the 1990s before being popularized by Da Ali G Show and the eponymous film.

The piece is still available on the Comedy Central website, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.

And if you want to hear more commentary about this subject (and other Daily Show fun facts and conspiracies), check out The Daily Show Weekly by subscribing to Hail Satire! with Vic Shuttee on iTunes. Finally, you can see Mahir’s original website here.