But if the title of cinema's most outlandish offender is a competition, Cohen's mankini-wearing agitator was pipped to the post three and a half decades prior by an Australian booze hound by the name of Barry McKenzie.
It was cheap but cheerful at the crisps company Walkers' "Do us a Flavour" party at London's Paramount Club on 8 January, where the outlandish finalists in a public competition to create a new variety were unveiled.
"Project Runway" also found a large audience with its alchemy of cutthroat competition, hyper-sensitive egos and outlandish creativity on the clock: designers who are given 24 hours to create evening gowns out of bark or plastic wrap.
+ An inside look at the gravity-defying, outlandish, and award-winning facial hair of bearding competitions.
The outlandish ideas seen pictured here are all from a competition dreamt up by Nissan and website Designboom to encourage people to think outside the parking box.
Some engineers in the meeting believed that this wavy line, which translated to a succession of arches rising above and below the roadway between Santa Fe Avenue and the 101 Freeway, was outlandish, expensive and far too risky a concept to win a competition.
Either that or they are having a competition to see who can come up with the most outlandish combination of meats, seafood, cheeses and desserts you can pile onto one plate.
The Rocky, which went from a full-size broadsheet to tabloid size in the 1940s, was never a tabloid in the imprint of say, papers in New York or Chicago, where fierce competition for readers of the penny press drove a frenzy of outlandish stunts and chicanery.
As ideas go it is hardly more outlandish than staging the tournament in a small, scorched country that has never qualified for the competition. .
It's an invention reminiscent of the outlandish gadgets seen in James Bond movies, and it won Bieling first prize in the 2014 Falling Walls Lab competition – a kind of TED Talks meets Dragon's Den – held annually in Berlin.
