Brand appeal

Celebrated British comedian Russell Brand’s memoir is a hilariously honest account of a life lived perpetually on the edge of shame and disaster, writes G Sampath

My Booky Wook
Russell Brand
Hodder & Stoughton
340 pages
Rs1,065

 If all celebrity memoirs had even one-tenth the candour, one-fiftieth the humour, and one-hundredth the amount of narrative energy that Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook has, they would be 500 times more readable than they usually are. Brand may not be well known in this country where laughter is considered a challenge, but in Britain he is a one-man comic spectacle. If you cross Cyrus Broacha with Dean Moriarty, you just might — if you do it right — get a version of Russell Brand. 

Brand, by profession, is a stand-up comic, print journalist, television host/star, and actor. But if you set his profession aside for a moment, what he is actually, is the tabloid’s wet dream. He is a celebrity who, unlike other animals of that breed, would make it to the pages of the gutter press purely on merit. Brand himself has admitted that he’s fascinated by tabloid culture: “Out of sheer narcissism it’s interesting to see yourself abstracted from yourself.” While all memoirs are essentially exercises in narcissism, Brand is so maniacally narcissistic he sets new benchmarks for memoirist self-disclosure — thanks, save your paparrazzi for the others, he seems to say.

In the age of the ‘misery memoir’ it is not uncommon for unknown people seeking fame to come out with ‘shocking’ tales of abuse and suffering and even criminal transgression. But when was the last time you read a celebrity writing about his favourite place for scoring heroin? Or about the multiple times he’s multi-timed his girlfriends? Or going whore-hunting with his father? If it is possible for anyone to talk endlessly about himself and not be boring for even a second, Brand’s got to be that man.

Here’s a typical Brand episode: On one occasion, he brings a stripper home. After they’ve done the act, Brand and the stripper quarrel. She slaps him, he spits at her, and pushes her out through the front door. Before he can turn back, the door clicks shut, leaving him standing naked on the street at three in the morning. Looking for help, he wanders, completely naked, and like a phantom of delight, into a gay bar. By the time he gets through to a locksmith, his crown jewels have passed through many hands.

As the memoir opens, Brand is holed up at Keystone clinic, a sexual addiction treatment centre in Philadelphia. Before that, he had spent time at a drug rehabilitation centre. As you read about his addiction-driven escapades, you realise that it is pain that produces the best humour. Brand’s parents separated when he was six months old, and he grew up an only, lonely and depressed child. At 16, he was into drugs, and at 17 his father took him on a tour of the Far East, where he discovers the joys of escapism through orgasm. Swiftly, his life becomes a pendulum swinging from a cocktail of drugs (marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, heroin, the works) to hookers and back. What keeps him ticking, though, is his burning ambition to become a famous comedian.

But every time glory seems within reach, Brand self-destructs. He is bewildered by the fact that in school, you even have to attend classes. And when he does attend, they throw him out, for the ridiculous reason that he turned up stoned and drunk. He resents having to buy tickets for train travel. He finds girlfriends irrationally demanding — they all expect him to stop taking drugs and not sleep with anyone else. When he continues taking drugs and any woman he could, his girlfriends eject him from their flats; one of them actually throws his stuff out of the window in bin bags. Brand, cunningly, starts a new standard operating procedure: every time he moves in with a new girlfriend, he secretly makes a duplicate key to her flat in anticipation of the day when he will be thrown out, so that he can keep coming back afterwards to steal food and money.

Brand loathes authority of all kind and loves disrupting the placid lake of social interaction by flinging an anarchic rock or two into it. And his crimes against conformity keep getting him into trouble — he is forever getting evicted from pubs, flats, restaurants, hotels, schools, parties, and even streets. He gets serially sacked from every job he ever lands. He is sent packing even by that icon of wacky humour, MTV, for being too wacky. All he did was turn up for work on September 12, 2001 dressed as Osama bin Laden.

The abiding principles of Brand’s life are authenticity and “triumph over conformity”. Of course, neither of these is easy to uphold in a consumerist world that is forever pressurising you to ‘be yourself’ and ‘fit in’ by being ‘cool’, which you can only do by purchasing variously culture-coded commodities. Brand is aware of this, and he tries to — consciously or unconsciously — transgress every social and cultural norm there is. The mayhem that ensues when he does that supplies the material for his edgy comedy shows. Brand’s real body of work, therefore, is his own life — an anarchic force that is forever threatening to devour him and derail those around him. This 21st century Pan or Bacchus, whichever way you look at him, summed it up best when he wrote, “My biggest problem is that I’ve lived an autobiography rather than a life.” Perhaps that’s the only way to live. If India gets a Russell Brand-type celebrity of its own, the fortunes of our ‘entertainment’ news channels can be guaranteed to remain up, propped up by triumphantly priapic TRPs.