Shakespeare loved a fool and not just on 1 April. He used them in most of his well-known plays, but who would their equivalents be today?
It was never about bright clothes, eccentric hats and slippers with bells on them. Shakespeare’s fools were the stand-ups of their day and liked to expose the vain, mock the pompous and deliver a few home truths – however uncomfortable that might be for those on the receiving end.
“Shakespearean fools, like stand-ups today, had a licence to say almost anything,” says Dr Oliver Double, who teaches drama at the University of Kent and specialises in comedy. “It was an exalted position.”
…So, smart and articulate or stupid and foolish, who are the closest modern equivalents of Shakespeare’s fools and comic characters?
Russell Brand has been arrested for allegedly grabbing a photog’s cell phone and firing it through the window of a New Orleans law firm … TMZ has learned.
Russell turned himself in to New Orleans police within the last hour and is currently in police custody.
TMZ broke the story … Russell got pissed [pissed off, not drunk] Monday night, after a photog began taking pictures on his iPhone. Russell allegedly took the cell phone and hurled it through the window of a law office.
The photog got the phone back and Russell agreed to pay for the window, but that didn’t satisfy cops and prosecutors. A warrant was issued for Russell’s arrest.
It’s since been reported that Russell was held for about an hour and then released on $5000 bail.
Posted in miscellaneous on March 18th, 2011 by starleigh
The New York Times has an article about Transcendental Meditation which features Russell as an example one of the many celebrities now practicing TM.
Excerpt:
“Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life,” Mr. Brand said of the technique that prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-three syllable mantra, so that practitioners can access a state of what is known as transcendental consciousness. “I literally had an idea drop into my brain the other day while I was meditating which I think is worth millions of dollars.”
Our fifth annual celebration of what real sexiness looks like.
1. Russell Brand
Randy comic ditches the clown mask and lets us see how sexy he really is.
You’d be forgiven for never noticing how gorgeous Russell Brand is. When he first hit America in 2008 — as the host of MTV’s Video Music Awards — he was a cartoon of British wankery: the knotty spray of hair, the gothy eyeliner, the kinky leather pants and the shirt open down to there. Brand was constantly purring about his own raunchiness, constantly pawing the audience for attention, as if Mick Jagger somehow mated with Robin Williams. Roles in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek” played up his swashbuckling British badness, blurring the line between the movie’s debauched star and the real-life sex and drug addict playing him.
But it’s time to reconsider Russell Brand. Notice, for a moment, the finely sculpted cheekbones, the luminous skin, the twinkling eyes. Notice the loose tumble of dark curls. Like his idols David Bowie and Marc Bolan, Brand possesses a slithery movement that is part feminine, part space alien. And at the age of 35, he finally ditched the pirate drag and let his talent take center stage. His performance in “Get Him to the Greek” was one of the year’s great comic turns, and the fact that it sputtered at the box office while his movie “Despicable Me” became a smash only speaks to the strange no-man’s land in which clever adult comedies not written by Judd Apatow often fall. Later this year Brand plays Trinculo in Julie Taymor’s daring “Tempest,” but it’s his leading role in an unlikely reboot of the 1981 Dudley Moore vehicle “Arthur” that has eyebrows raised. It’s a part Brand seems born to play: The self-sabotaging lush who finds his way thanks to the love of a good woman. Oh, did we mention that Brand married pop star Katy Perry in October? After a decade of threesomes and coke, getting hitched is its own kind of punk rock.
Now, having lived through the divine madness of substance abuse, Brand is a nimble, fascinating interview happy to spill about his days scraping bottom. (“Let’s start with dressing as Osama bin Laden on your TV show the day after September 11,” Terry Gross asked him on “Fresh Air,” to which he responded, “I don’t know if you’ve ever taken crack, Terry. It makes you do some very, very eccentric things.”) In an age of phony publicist spin and tabloid fictions, Brand’s rigorous honesty is a kind of intoxication in itself. “My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents,” he wrote in his hyperactive, confessional bestseller “My Booky Wook,” probably the best celebrity memoir in years written by the actual celebrity whose name is on the cover. Even his most scandalous tales have a touching hint of melancholy: “You don’t truly know loneliness until you’ve spent ten minutes in not-so-glorious isolation at an orgy.” Brand’s book proved so antic and engaging that he released a sequel this fall. The shocker about Russell Brand is not how hopelessly wrecked and naughty he is — but how normal he is. It took us a while to notice that thrilling downshift, but now that the mask has come off, we just can’t take our eyes off him. Russell Brand may do a brilliant sendup of a big star — but this year, he officially became one. And he is Salon’s Man on Top.
He’s got a new book to promote and a marriage to Katy Perry due any minute. But despite the fact that Brand now merits a Paxman interview on Newsnight, Michael Parkinson (who has his own book to promote) thinks Brand is “pointless” and said as much on Five Live this week: “I mean, Rin Tin Tin had a very big career in Hollywood and he was a dog.”
Yes, Rin Tin Tin was a dog – apparently – but Parky’s an old fogey. The fact is that Russell Brand has a big career because he’s good at being funny. Just because he disseminates his work in a variety of ways – stand-up, TV, radio, books, films and just being a character – it doesn’t mean he has no particular talent. He’s as talented as any virtuoso violinist who might – in the eyes of someone like Michael Parkinson – “deserve” to be famous.
What Parky was cackhandedly getting at was the idea that fame for its own sake is a nonsense – and, funnily enough, that’s something Brand is very much in accord with. It was one of the major themes of his Newsnight interview; Brand is startlingly convincing when he talks about the emptiness of celebrity culture.
Get Him to the Greek stars Russell Brand and Jonah Hill talk about their favorite songs.
Brand displays his gift of gab — riffing on witnessing Nick Cave cover Beyonce, why David Bowie makes him feel sane, and what to do when Noel Gallagher sings in your face.
Meanwhile, Hill plunders the Beastie Boys’ catalog, talks about happy breakup music, and reveals the most beautiful song he’s ever heard.
Click here to download the free podcast via iTunes.
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