Growing anger over those $500 citations spewed by photo enforcement cameras. They have little to do with safety say critics who claim the creepy, peepy red light cams can actually increase accidents at intersections.
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Is America ready for Russell Brand?
Big hair, bigger ego, an enormous sexual appetite and a stream of consciousness summed up by Russell Brand himself as “bionic, Byronic, ironic” with influences that range from Kerouac to Morrissey.
The bed-headed comic’s got a two-hour Saturday night BBC Radio 2 program and a new TV series, Russell Brand’s Ponderland. But is America ready for the next big thing in British humor?
Whether crediting a caller’s pheromones for the pigeons mating on his window ledge, railing at the Chinese to get out of Tibet, or accusing Blackpool’s mayor of embezzling municipal funds to finance a private brothel, Brand’s humor is playfully psychotic, often self-deprecating — wordplay on steroids, a thesaurus spew of major proportions.
Just the sort of thing you’d imagine from a thirty-something former booze-and-heroin addict who’s dad hooked him up with hookers in Russell’s teenage years. A guy so randy Bob Geldof kept daughter Peaches far from Ibiza lest Brand get his hands on the teenbabe.
“Russell Brand came out of nowhere,” a British couple told me over fish and chips at Danny’s Deli in Venice the other night. Though not exactly right. He began as a British MTV presenter at 18, and was promptly fired after showing up for air dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001.
Now, he’s being promoted as London’s next mayor — though the whole idea of a Colbertesque promotion-stunt candidacy seems a bore to Brand, a concept to work for a few moments on air, but nothing to make a career. ADD works for this guy.
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Brings up the question: Is America not so funny anymore? Brand represents a change-up from the Imus-Stern school of hard-bitten realism cloned by scores of local shock jocks, guys whose edge has been sharpened over years of seeming to have seen too much. Now, the U.K is setting the ground rules for next-gen humor — more carefree, with a dollop of non-toxic irony, in which bitterness is way old school.
Brand is doing for stand-up, TV and radio comedy what “Flight of the Conchords,” (a former BBC radio series) has done for situation comedy.
The post-modern sensibilities of New Zealand folk/comedy duo Jermaine Clement and Brett McKenzie could easily be seen as an extension of Ricky Gervais’ “The Office,” thought by many to trump the made-for-America version. (Happily, plans for a dumbed-down U.S. treatment of “Absolutely Fabulous” were scrapped while Patsy and Edina were flying high.)
Brand recently crossed our country on an homage to Jack Kerouac, discovering the wonders of skull and crossboned cowboy boots along the way but scarcely blipping our radar. Here’s hoping he’s back soon, and that U.S. audiences listen up to a fresh, new voice.
You heard it here first, America.
Posted by November 4th, 2007
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