If you’ve seen British comedian Russell Brand on any of the late-night talk shows, you’ve no doubt recognized that his peculiar brand of humor rests on his ability to blur the line between the real and the farcical. The celebrity persona he creates for himself doesn’t deviate from the characters he plays on screen and on television. Brand comes off as an indulgent aesthete, intelligent and decadent, who slyly references an X-rated private life that shocks us even as it satisfies our expectation for voyeuristic titillation. Beneath the jokes, Brand seems to be playing with an underlying satire on the nature of personality in a world relentlessly mediated by media, where Joe the Plumbers become YouTube celebrities and celebrities are our Twittering acquaintances. Brand’s comic conceit is particularly apt for our 21st-century digital world; he exists as a kind of meta-character whose exaggerated persona makes us doubt its honesty, thus making us aware of the fabrication of all celebrity personae. Brand’s way (it doesn’t seem appropriate to call it an act or a routine) is a perpetual riff on this mishmash of personality, image, and the obstruction of reality through transmission.
So it doesn’t seem right to say that Russell Brand is the perfect casting for the role of the loony rock star in Get Him to the Greek. The movie is rather the perfect extension of Brand himself. And in this comfortable territory, he excels boundlessly. Produced by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad, Step Brothers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Get Him to the Greek casts Jonah Hill (Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) as young music corporation representative Aaron Green, who is tasked with getting Brand’s Aldous Snow, a washed-up rock star, from his home in London to a planned reunion concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The show was Green’s idea as a way to revitalize Snow’s career and stir sales of his back catalogue.
Brand is a caricature of the indulgent rock star — always high and drunk, always sleeping with random beautiful women, living a life that is a perpetual party. The comedic situation is set when Aaron Green arrives. He is a mild-mannered, earnest, and sincere fan of Snow’s, and a shy music nerd. The joke: What would happen if a normal, unspectacular 20-something was thrust into a rock star lifestyle? The answer: madness.
Apatow and his team deliver their usual brand of crude, boundary-pushing humor that seems culled from the marijuana-induced giggles of college dorm rooms. No drug or sex joke is left untold, and the comedy often seems so base and adolescent that you feel silly for laughing at it. I thought this brand of humor worked best in the Will Farrell-starring Step Brothers, in which it could read as an ironic commentary on a generation that refuses maturity. Brand and Hill give it a new twist in Get Him to the Greek. Here we have an adolescent male waking up in his own pornographic fantasy, and the reality is severe and unbearable for him. Could we really live the rock star lives we think we want or try to realize through the vicarious celebrity the internet age affords?
This is the grand joke in Get Him to the Greek, though the plot is jam-packed with supporting riffs and spoofs on contemporary culture, celebrity obsession, and our insatiable Freudian appetites. Snow’s career failed after he released his album “African Child,” which is portrayed as the most over-the-top, offensive reimagining of Brad Pitt-style celebrity humanitarian intervention in the Third World. Snow’s ex-wife, Jackie Q (Rose Byrne), is a New Age-y spiritualist singer whose post-Snow career consists of the most demeaning and foul-mouthed female booty songs the writers could come up with. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs stars as Green’s boss, record company executive Sergio Roma, who is an exaggeration of the aggressive, jive-spitting, fast-talking hip-hop executive — the unchallenged king of MTV cool. Combs is downright hilarious in the film, his humor often taking advantage of that taboo reality that white kids from the suburbs ultimately both idolize and fear African-American males. And, as expected in a self-reflective spoof on celebrity culture, the film is populated with cameos, including Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mario Lopez, and Lars Ulrich (who satisfies Jackie Q’s post-Snow sexual obsession with heavy metal drummers).
Stoller deserves much credit for whipping this dense concoction of comedic material into a frantic roller coaster laugh machine. The film had me at times with my head literally between my knees in convulsive laughter. Brand almost feels here like Peter Seller’s Chance in Being There (1979), the innocent fool who is the foil for the revelation of the absurdity of the political world. Brand is his own kind of innocent, an enfant terrible, engaged in a pure indulgence of all the pleasures that are the highest values of contemporary pop culture. As a result, he reveals something desperate and lonely about our times. We laugh and laugh at the ridiculousness of our cultural situation, but after the film ends, there is an emotional hangover: the lasting impression that all our post-post world has left is gallows humor.
