Wigga with attitude and the funniest comic around

Fact File

Name: Ali G

Occupation: Hip-hop's answer to Jeremy Paxman

Charged with: Being racist and offensive to black people

Tried by: Liberal broadsheet press

Verdict: Laughed out of court

'Nuff disrespect to the man Ali G. The funniest comic creation since Alan Partridge and a role model for yoof everywhere is being dissed by the ethnic establishment.

They're down on the man, not because of his day-glo shell-suit, wrap-around shades or £700 trainers, but because they say he's racist and a "latter-day Al Jolson". If the gangsta with the gags was afforded a reply to his critics, he'd probably say: "Is it 'cos I's black?"

And therein lies the liberal-baiting problem: the character of Ali G is either a white man or an Asian man who believes himself to be black. To further complicate matters, the actor who plays and writes the character is Jewish. The comedy Thought Police can't get around the inter-tangled ethnicity of it all, and the PC brigade have long since run for cover.

Last week, though, the British weekly black newspaper New Nation interviewed a number of leading black comics, some of whom said the character was "offensive to black people" and "trading in stereotypes". Simon Hoggart writing in the Guardian, while admitting that he found Ali G tremendously funny, wondered how far removed the character was from The Black And White Minstrel Show.

As the hero of the Channel 4 programme, The 11 O'Clock Show, Ali G has become the comic du jour by virtue of his preposterous street image and his downright hilarious interviews with the supposed great and good.

Coming across as a clueless hip-hop kid, he asks his unsuspecting interviewees preposterously rude and naive questions which they take at face value, believing they are contributing to a Channel 4 youth programme, not a comedy series.

Thus he has memorably asked James Whitaker (Mirror royal correspondent): "Why was Diana bonein' that Paki?"; former US secretary of state Gen Alexander Haig: "Do you t'ink it's worth nukin' Russia now while it's weak?"; and the Orange Lodge's George Patton: "Under what circumstance would you marry a Catholic girl - if she was really fit? Or maybe if she was one of The Corrs?"

He once asked Ernst Vegelin, the curator of paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, who the best impressionist was. When Vegelin replied Monet, Ali G shook his head and opined that Rory Bremner was much better.

The man behind it all is a 28year-old, white, Jewish, Cambridge graduate from Wales called Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen, who had previously enjoyed an unremarkable career as a stand-up comic on the London comedy circuit, came to the attention of Channel 4 when he was playing a not too dissimilar type of interviewer on a programme for the Paramount Comedy Channel.

Trawling movie premieres and fashion shoots, Cohen pretended to be a bewildered Albanian TV presenter who blamed his shockingly rude questions on his poor understanding of the English language.

The producer of The 11 O'Clock Show, Harry Thompson (who is also the man behind BBC2's Have I Got News For You), was impressed and asked Cohen to come up with a new character for his new show. Cohen has never publicly acknowledged who he based Ali G on, but it's alleged that he is modelled on the BBC Radio 1 DJ, Tim Westwood.

Westwood, who is the white, middle-class son of a churchman, is a specialist in rap music and on his popular radio show speaks in urban black argot, much of it borrowed from US gangsta rappers. Cohen used Westwood's black wannabe image to come up with Ali G, an ambiguous name that hints that the character is Asian, but may also be white because, according to Harry Thompson, it stands for Alistair Graham.

Ali G is from Staines, a dreary London suburb where he and his posse (friends) spend their time stealing things, smoking dope and trying to recreate the excitement of living in an American ghetto.

IN an interview with me last year, Ali G said he got into television "because my bitch, Julie, said I should stop sitting around wiv' me hand on me warrior and do something with meself.

"I started dealing drugs to the production company who make The 11 O'Clock Show and one day they wanted someone to do the weather 'cos the weather lady was banged up on some superskunk me had sold her and she was just staring at the camera and going `Whatever . . .' so that got me the job on the programme."

The character was developed as a parody of the new urban sub-culture known as the wigga (short for white nigger). By their trainers you shall know them: wiggas are young white males who exist on a musical diet of hardcore black gangsta rap and who dress and talk as if they are from Harlem, not some backwater English (or Irish) suburb.

Far from being racist, the character of Ali G is merely a superb parody of a clueless white person (if not patronising white person), a self-referential creation along the same lines as MTV's Beavis and Butthead.

He is the hip-hop generation's way of satirising their own opinions and attitudes: almost terminally dumbed down, totally clueless about politics and global events and ridiculously macho in their attitude to women.

Over the last week, Sacha Baron Cohen has remained above the argument about his character, primarily because he never talks to the press as Sacha, only as Ali, but also because, such is his character's popularity that he has just started filming his own series for Channel 4.

Expect his first interview to be with the editor of the magazine which called him racist.