Ali G wows da USAiiii

Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G character is taking America by storm. His second series started nationwide last night and is already winning over the toughest audience in the world.

The Cambridge graduate's show is going out on primetime television and critics believe he will become as big a star in the States as he was in Britain.

Cohen's tactic of transforming himself into hugely ignorant characters - Kazakhstan's "premier journalist" Borat, Bruno the Austrian fashionista and of course Staines' greatest cultural ambassador, Ali G - is fresh fare in the States.

The New York Post has delivered its verdict, hailing him a "Brit wit sensation". "He assumes personas that are so out-of-control, and so hilarious and so scary, that you only stop laughing out loud long enough to hide your eyes and cringe. He is fearless in his shamelessness with people others consider icons."

The reviewer added: "the tears pour down my face from laughing so hard... if there's such a thing as terrifyingly funny, this guy's it."

Salon has hailed Cohen as: "a prankster and a provocateur whose startlingly real alter egos and shrewd tactics make Michael Moore look like a slow-moving animal."

Baron Cohen, 32, is notoriously shy of publicity. However he has granted interviews to top-end publications, including The New York Times. He told the Times: "The best targets - the legitimate targets - are successful, powerful white men, who rule the country."

In a candid interview with the US edition of Vanity Fair, he revealed how his parents have been among his harshest critics.

"My dad still advises me on the series, whether it's welcome or unwelcome ... Most of the time, he's right. They're very, very, very harsh when they don't like something," he said.

Baron Cohen's reported multi-million pound deal with HBO - plus huge dividends from DVD sales - has allowed him to join Hollywood's elite. He and his fiancée, former Home and Away actress Isla Fisher, are renting a £2 million Hollywood mansion owned by new friends Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.