He’s straight out of Cambridge

On a basketball court between two Harlem brownstones, Mt. Rushmore is redone. Alongside the likeness of George Washington sit the faces of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Standing in front of the monument is one of Britain’s hottest comedic sensations, Ali G, in a fire-engine-red Sean John shell-suit.

America is plagued with “racialism, even to da Native people. You know, what is dey called?” asks Ali G in his exaggerated mixture of working-class British, West Indian and Cockney accents. He then tries to belt out a Native American rebel call. “Yeah, dem ones.”

Ali G is coming to America, bringing his brash, funny and sometimes offensive humor with him. “Da Ali G Show” premieres at 12:30 a.m. tonight on HBO.

Since arriving on the British scene four years ago, Ali G has become a youth cultural icon, loathed by politicos, dismissed by cultural snobs as obnoxious and by black intellectuals as racist and a cultural thief. Yet his television show and movie have helped revive irony-heavy British comedy.

Ali G grew popular peppering stiff Establishment figures with tawdry questions. (He once asked Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the former U.S. secretary of state, “Is it true that Reagan and Thatcher was doin’ it?” And in the U.S. show, he asks Dick Thornburgh, the former attorney general and Pennsylvania governor, “What exactly is da law of cuttin’ da cheese?”

Ali G is the alter ego of creator Sacha Baron Cohen, who rarely grants interviews either as himself or his character. He did, however, make a brief appearance in Madonna’s “Music” video.

“I had a contract put out on me life,” Ali G is saying by way of explaining his aversion to interviews. The man after him, he says, is Hasham B, who wants Ali G punished for having an affair with his wife. It’s all in the head of Cohen, of course, who is just back from months of taping the HBO show in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

Born into an affluent Jewish-Welsh North London family, the 30-something Cohen was educated at the posh Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School and at Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights, a dramatic club. On a campus of individualistic, often boisterous personalities, Cohen was the class clown, louder than most.

“He was a cultural polyglot, and that’s the nature of Cambridge, your interests become quite eclectic,” says Dan Mazer, who met Cohen in grade school and is producer and co-writer of the U.S. and British versions of “Da Ali G Show.”

Cohen, he says, developed a deep affection for hip-hop culture, listening to music and studying black hip-hoppers and the white kids who emulate them.

Cohen poured it all into the Ali G character, which debuted on Britain’s “11 O’Clock Show” in 1999. Soon Ali G had his own award-winning show and, last year, his own movie, “In da House.”

“Da Ali G Show,” part of HBO’s new Friday late-night lineup, is a mix of three characters: Ali G; Borat, a TV reporter from Kazakhstan; and Bruno, a flamboyant gay Austrian fashionista and ex-supermodel reporter.

All three crisscross the United States exploring its culture, interviewing diverse subjects such as lesser-known designer Lloyd Klein, Ralph Nader and Newt Gingrich.

HBO’s six-episode show has changed little from the British version. To do so would dilute Ali G’s authenticity, producers say.