Baron-Cohen's act is nearly-entirely one of mirrored satire...he's holding the mirror up to subjects he finds deserving of ridicule and using staged characters to goad people into making themselves the butt of the joke or outing the worst in themselves. It's not about his characters, it's about the interaction with real people ultimately revealing their nasty true selves.
Work through the premise-summaries of his major works:
Ali G: An interview show is hosted by a chav, literally a low-class buffoon. He says dumb things and his interviewees either get mad or they joke along...either way they're off-kilter, they say things they probably shouldn't, underestimate the danger to their credibility, then he drops the bomb by asking the serious pointed follow-up question they don't want to answer. Imagine what it would be like if someone got Grover Norquist to open up, play along...then dropped the "How does it feel to be an asshole who'd rather see the elderly and children starve than pay your fair share in taxes?" question and refused to accept the non-answer. People have walked out on him...they look the worse for it. Such questions need no answers, the truth is revealed in the question.
Borat: Pretty straightforward; how much antisocial, rude, sexist, homophobic, vicious behavior will people put up with from a strange foreigner in the name of cultural sensitivity or worse, an unwillingness to confront bigotry. How many people, when confronted with such behavior, will actually cop to feeling the same way or thinking the same thing. The joke isn't that the national holiday of Kazahkstan revolves around beating Jews hatched from eggs or his firm refusal to understand that the culturally-appropriate term is not n****r; it's that people will believe it when he says it, not challenge the underlying racism of it and some will even praise or admire it. It's not a ha-ha-funny joke...it's the sort of joke that forces you to confront the hard truth that we're not as evolved, civilized or decent as we want to think we are. While we're laughing at the backward customs and bigotry of provincial foreigners, we're not any better.
Bruno: Same as a combination of the above, he literally builds the most-extreme caricature imaginable of high-fashion down to the fallacy that there are no not-offensively-flamboyantly-stereotypically-gay misogynistic male fashion designers and the image that everybody in fashion has a dysfunctional body-image then sends that caricature out into the centers of the high-fashion and design industry in the guise of a style-mag journalist...where industry insiders accept it at face value as not even slightly abnormal. That acceptance underlines the point better than any mockery could: The fashion industry is an incredibly fucked-up world whose views of appropriate behavior condone and encourage misogyny, eating disorders, poor body-image, the worst kinds of stereotyping and even subtle forms of homophobia.
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