Russell Brand’s particular brand of comic innovation is bizarre to some, and somehow interesting to all
Like all of the most revolutionary public figures, Russell Brand seems to have come completely out of nowhere. He’s like a living parody of Johnny Depp infused with the manners of an 18th century squire, and for some reason the public has sense enough to really, really like him.
But Brand’s recent involvement in Taymor’s ‘Tempest’ makes me think more about the actor’s potential as a free agent.
After all, it’s ballsy enough, in light of the comic monopoly in Hollywood, to break away from the Judd Apatow mold, even temporarily. The main distinction of Brand is that he gets people asking, ‘who the hell is Russell Brand?’ To Hollywood, he seems like a recent import with basic comic potential. To MTV, he’s the enfant terrible who went off the deep end and bounced back sober. But to the movie-going, late-night-interview-watching public, he’s a deeply strange person—deeply strange, yet unavoidable.
For it is a comedy of discomfort that Brand engages in—different from, yet of course related to the comedy of awkwardness that prevails in the Apatow films and the newly developing Galifianakis genre (yes, he rates his own genre). Russell Brand doesn’t do the whole understated ‘I’m a spaz’ thing—he makes it quite clear that he is in fact a spaz.
Yet it is this quality about him that makes him engaging—he is someone you can watch hitting on Helen Mirren on public television, getting constantly chastised by the media for being ‘inappropriate’, and nonchalantly accusing his talk-show host of slipping the date rape drug into his drink. He is someone for whom this line of almost-taboo doesn’t quite exist. Brand’s persona isn’t that he’s so unrelatable to that we end up relating with him, it’s that he’s straight-up weird in the way we’d all like to get away with being. In public, and a lot of the time. And he does it all while wearing the tightest pants imaginable, as if at last this century found a way to marry sex appeal with genuine invention.
Certainly he’s made some mistakes in his short career. That whole drug situation, and of course, marrying the most obnoxious woman in pop. Still, it may well be that Russell Brand is the Jonathan Swift of comedy—wildly inappropriate in a very public way, and yet completely tolerated.
December 20, 2010 at 4:51 pm, Ddd said:
yes! but u did not write some of the more interesting things about Brand– that he is highly intelligent and very socially and politically conscious. He talks about class and is totally aware of the media's manipulations, of the dangers of monarchy and big corporations. but the coolest thing about him that he shares his worldview in the most engaging and comic way. while comedy for many other american comedians is about accidents, and pee and poop– his own comedy is intelligent.