Brand sticks to what sells for capital appearance
Comedian’s show is heavy on raunch
What would happen if British comic Russell Brand dropped all the expletives and sex talk from his show?
For sure, he’d have considerably less than the 90 minutes he presented Wednesday night to a soldout audience who greeted his appearance, 30 minutes late and with neither apology nor explanation from the star, with a standing ovation.
However, Brand, who over the years has racked up a reputation for drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity and generally outrageous behaviour, is a smart guy.
Follow his skittering narrative, his vignettes, his social commentary to the end, and you realize that his overarching theme — well, themes, really, including our sad hunger for heroes in a fractured world and the crushing hand of consumerism — are ones that the world could benefit from by heeding.
Brand could put together a far smarter, funnier show if he sidestepped the temptation to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
(If you want an idea of Brand at his best, when he’s truly poking the stick in the eye of collective idiocy, check out his interview, available on YouTube, with a couple of homophobes from Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.)
Then again, a pared-down, smartened-up show might not fill big halls. And Brand, by his own admission Wednesday night, really does bask in the warm glow of attention.
The 38-year-old comic, who wore skin-tight pants, a white jacket, and a dangling necklace and scarf — removing the jacket to reveal the muscle shirt and his tattooed arms drew cheers from the ladies in the audience — calls his current show the Messiah Complex World Tour. The show, as the publicity material trumpets, also features Jesus Christ, Che Guevara, Ghandi, Malcolm X and Hitler.
Those five, most of them heroes with flaws that Brand illustrated and one a villain with very human qualities that the comic also underscored, were shown in images on the stage or a video screen and woven into his overall narrative.
He used them to make points about leadership — he contrasted Che Guevera’s noble, visionary image with that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the delight of his audience — frailty and the commonalities that bind all humans.
He peppered his narrative about heroes and villains with countless interspersions, all fluidly delivered as befits someone who’s been a film and television star, a radio host, a newspaper sports columnist and an author.
He had riffs on the cult of celebrityhood, the banal hyperbole of consumer advertising, the prison of marriage (he was briefly married to pop star Katy Perry), corporate control of the news media (which elicited huge applause from the audience and suggested a vein of paranoia in Brand).
He also slipped in an observation that Southam Hall resembles something from Star Wars and a brief narrative about self-abuse in the dairy aisle of a supermarket.
Despite the climactic — you should excuse the expression — conclusion of the show, which found Brand on his knees extolling the virtues of various sex acts and urging us to be better humans than we are, the Messiah Complex World Tour is, like the consumer culture Brand ridiculed, ultimately less than satisfying.