Review: Russell Brand, ‘My Booky Wook’ and ‘Russell Brand in New York’

Normally I’m not in the business of writing comedy reviews. As any theorist can tell you, individual humor is incredibly subjective, and you can’t argue funny. So I’m not here to tell you whether Russell Brand is funny or not. But Brand’s book, My Booky Wook, came out in the U.S. today, and his special, “Russell Brand in New York” aired Sunday on Comedy Central. I happen to have read the book and seen the special, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll write a review.

I found My Booky Wook laugh-out-loud funny, but not for the faint of heart. Brand’s honesty is almost child-like at times, except that he’s dealing with very adult topics like depression, sex addiction, and drug use.

That honesty was precisely what made the read so compelling for me. Brand has a unique gift for non-pompous self-reflection, and refuses to bowdlerize his life just because it might offend some. His description of what it’s like to take heroin deserves a place right up there with The Velvet Underground’s song. It’s loving and funny and unapologetic, while still acknowledging the horrific damage that addiction brings.

Brand’s prose, like his personality, is unabashedly flamboyant. I found myself feeling that, by all logical reasoning, I should be put off by his deliberately Dickensian flourishes. But self-knowledge saves all, and Brand combines his rococo prose with colloquial diction, self-mockery, and traces of his real, non-elite accent. In this regard, I kept thinking that Brand’s style was akin to that of a very dirty P.G. Wodehouse.

The result was (dare I say it) addictive. I couldn’t put the damned book down, and after finishing it I had to immediately lend it out so I wouldn’t re-read it a million times.

Like all great comedians, Russell Brand turns his personal pain into comedy. Given the variety of individual senses of humor, it’s impossible to guarantee that you’ll find this book funny. But if you’re not easily offended, you’ll probably be laughing. Even if you are easily offended, you can treat this as a very honest memoir of sex and drug addiction, and be shocked that Brand tells it as a funny story.

For the uninitiated, I would suggest reading the book before watching the Comedy Central special (soon to be available on DVD, I note). Brand only has 40 minutes to win your heart on television, whereas he has several hundred pages in the book. Also, he tells you about his childhood in the book, which, if you’re a fan of Freud, explains quite a bit.

The persona he displays onstage is just as bold and honest as his voice in his book. But if you’re unfamiliar with Brand’s idiom, his advice to his female audience members (“Be sure it’s sex you want, and not an autograph”) might be a bit shocking, as might his story of a threesome, invitation to orgy, or description of “seagulling.” If you’ve read the book, on the other hand, you’ll only be shocked that Brand does not include more lurid details.

I particularly enjoyed Brand’s account of what really happened at the VMA’s, complete with very funny imitations of American executive accents. He also dishes on working with Mila Kunis and meeting Britney, a la Kathy Griffin, except with a much sweeter approach (see video to right).

That is Russell Brand in a nutshell: he is by turns horny, sweet, and genuinely bemused by people’s reactions to his flamboyant persona. The latter element came through very clearly (and funnily) in a staged reading of death threats he received after the VMA’s.

Brand also continues the British tradition of intellectual comedy, making a literally Foucauldian argument about the Jonas Brothers’ promise rings, explaining that “drop dead and die” is a logical tautology, and articulating why he is “against surfing both semantically and ideologically”:

Brand’s literate intelligence defies the viewer to write him off as some vapid lothario. Despite his Byronic persona, he’s less of a Casanova and more of a Ben Franklin in some ways. But this fact invites you to engage with him as real, complicated, human being, which is why you keep watching.

The only thing lacking in Brand’s routine is a moment of stillness. One gets the sense that Russell Brand is naturally turned up to 11 at all times, and this is somewhat exhausting for lazier spectators such as myself. Some comedians (such as, say, Eddie Izzard or Ron White) have perfected the art of ebb and flow, allowing the audience to catch its breath between knee-slappers. (NOTE: after buying the unedited version of the special, I revoke even this criticsm, and blame Comedy Central’s editing.)

He may or may not choose to tweak the dynamics of his act. But Russell Brand is already very funny, at least if you’re not offended by his subject matter, and the clips on Comedy Central are worth a look.