The Comedian Who Meant It

Russell Brand spent most of his public life being known for two things: being Katy Perry’s ex-husband and appearing in raunchy comedies. Smart people occasionally noticed he was sharper than the context suggested, but celebrity flattens everything down to the obvious.

Then he sat across from Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight—ostensibly to discuss his guest editorship of the New Statesman—and spent about ten minutes saying things that most people in his position are specifically paid not to say. He admitted he’d never voted in his life. Paxman, who has dismantled politicians for decades, treated this as the obvious gotcha. Brand didn’t blink. His argument was essentially: the system is so thoroughly captured by capital and so entirely unresponsive to ordinary people that participating in it is a form of complicity, not civic virtue. He called for a socialist egalitarian revolution. He said it warmly, with jokes, with specific references to corporate power and wealth concentration—in the register of someone who’d actually thought about it rather than rehearsed a talking point.

Paxman pushed back the way Paxman pushes back—through repetition and mild contempt—and Brand absorbed it cheerfully and kept going. What made it go viral wasn’t the radicalism. It was the lucidity. Watching a comedian explain the rottenness of the current arrangement to a professional political journalist who looked vaguely discomfited by the whole conversation—that was the real spectacle.

He probably wasn’t wrong about most of it. Whether a man known primarily for Get Him to the Greek was the right vessel for the message is a different question, and one he would later answer by endorsing political candidates and doing the standard celebrity-activist deflation. But in that interview, in that particular moment: he had it.