"Let's just assume scurrilous things will occur at their own momentum." So says the comedian Russell Brand as he sits down, having been informed by me that we can concentrate on civilized, decent, grown-up things. He looks disappointed. Or perhaps, I offer, you'd like some scurrilous questions? At this his brown eyes light up, he sighs with relief, and he gets a distinctly saucy look about him. Scurrilous suits him, you see.
In England, where he's from, Brand is a national treasure and tabloid fodder. At 33, he is now becoming famous in America thanks to his turn as rock-star dilettante Aldous Snow in Nick Stoller and Judd Apatow's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which has spawned a further collaboration with Apatow and Stoller, Get Him to the Greek, due out next year. Brand's twisted dandy humor has also captured the attention of Adam Sandler — one movie completed (Bedtime Stories), another (and perhaps another) in the making — and he has also passed the board as the presenter for this year's MTV Video Music Awards.
In the great tradition of comedians, Brand is contrary and subversive in both his comedy and his personal life. He is super camp yet hopelessly heterosexual, and was voted The Sun newspaper's "Shagger of the Year." He speaks of his lack of formal education with an almost teenage pride — "No, I never went to school, actually" — but he has a sweeping lyrical vocabulary and a London Sunday Times No. 1 best-selling memoir with the wildly ignoble title My Booky Wook (cribbed from A Clockwork Orange).
The book takes the confessional to a whole new level — and how. We have Brand the ex-junkie, Brand the compulsive habitué of prostitutes (graphic descriptions of pendulous dugs and such), and Brand's exploits on his first TV show, RE: Brand, in which he bathed with a homeless man with a weeping ulcer on his leg, gave a guy a hand job in a Soho gay pub, and generally pushed the envelope as far as he could humanly push it. As I read it, I felt a degree of compassion in the face of his self-loathing and confusion, and laughed out loud at the pithy wryness he does so well. But I also felt a moral bristling and physical repulsion for the manner in which he perhaps all too blithely hurls this squalid stuff at his reader. (Brand now has a multimillion-dollar deal with HarperCollins in the United States.)
He'd asked me to meet him in an unassuming little café near his house in North London. I am slightly early. He is on time and slopes towards me with a nervous, wide-eyed — Aw, shucks, should I shake your hand or kiss you on the cheek? — preamble. Brand is tall and pretty, and his trademark teased wasp's nest of hair is standing at attention. Wearing impossibly skinny jeans, Converse sneakers, and a pirate's trove of jewelry (black sapphire and diamond rings from Stephen Webster), he looks like the love child of Lord Byron and Marie Antoinette, with a few spare genes from the Strokes thrown in.
