Las Vegas Weekly

What I learned about wanking from Russell Brand

Brand takes the stage at the Mandalay Bay on Friday.

MJ Kim, AP

Russell Brand can say some crazy things onstage. But he seems not so crazy, just a little … informal. Brand plods in long strides across the great expanse, and he might well describe himself as a swarthy mantis. At Mandalay Bay Theatre last Friday night, he wore a Def Leppard T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, low-riding black jeans and eggshell-white Chuck Taylor high-tops. In this nondescript attire, he warbled away for an hour in his thick British accent.

You can tell a lot about a woman’s romantic passion by how she wails on a tennis court: In talking of Serena Williams, whom he unsuccessfully attempted to court via email, he mocked her in-game shouts and offered, “God, that’s what she sounds like when she’s playing tennis, imagine what she sounds like when she comes! It would be amazing!”

Masturbation carries variable importance depending on one’s marital status: “I’m trying to dispense with it, as an activity, but it is difficult now that I’m married. It’s a lot more pertinent now, when I’m married, than it was before. It’s more personal, isn’t it?”

Speaking, as he does, with a thick British accent gives one “a good 50 percent head start at getting a blow job.”

Brand improvises much of his material because he can’t be trusted by himself with a laptop to write jokes. “I will just end up wanking. I’m not taking responsibility for that any longer, because the Internet encourages it even when I am trying to behave it. I go to the BBC to write some comedy, trying to do legitimate things, but the Internet won’t have it! ‘Russell, wouldn’t you rather see pictures of women’s boobies?’ I’m not taking credit for that!”