"When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," he said.

"It is like saying goodbye to a loved one. It is hard, and the problem with success, although it's fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I 'get' with Borat again, so it's a kind of self-defeating form, really.

"It's upsetting, but the success has been great and better than anything I could have dreamed of."

Indeed, it's sad to face the reality of a world in which we'll never again see the wide-eyed Kazakh journalist proudly present a Southern etiquette coach with a fresh bag of his own feces at a dinner party or nearly asphyxiate under the crushing weight of an obese compatriot's fetid hindquarters. Still, we have the considerable promise of Bruno to look forward to, as well as a new round of lawsuits filed by homophobic Baptist ministers who never thought that the seemingly innocent hot oil, full-body "anointing" they were talked into giving the Austrian TV fashionista would play out so erotically when presented on a multiplex screen.

• Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing off Borat [Telegraph]

But it was his recent hosting duties at the MTV Europe Awards, where he famously mistook Madonna for a transvestite ("He was very convincing. It was only his hands and his testi-satchels that gave it away,") that brought Borat to a higher level of visibility and, not surprisingly, the Kazakh government was none too pleased:

Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

"We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.

"We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind." He declined to elaborate.

This would not be the first time one of Baron Cohen's characters got him into trouble, the most noteworthy being the incident at a Roanoke rodeo where Borat's mutilation of the "Star Spangled Banner" led to a near riot. But with an entire country threatening legal action against him, this could elevate the comedian to Lenny Bruce-levels of comedy-martyrdom, doing for cow-punching and recreational rape what Bruce did for freedom of speech.

• Kazakh govt threatens to take comedian to court [Reuters]