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Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics pp 1–26Cite as

Introduction

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comedy ((PSCOM))

Abstract

This introduction sets out the rationale for a book on the comedian Russell Brand as a case study in the complex interaction between celebrity and the political field. As well as commenting on the broader political context, it gives a brief overview of Brand’s career and explains the foundations of our approach to understanding his public persona as a performer and activist. It establishes how Russell Brand is positioned in the field of culture and politics and the discourses through which audiences make sense of his meaning and value. It then elaborates the hybrid nature of Russell Brand’s celebrity and how his relationship to his audiences changes as he traverses across different media and genres. It concludes with his move into politics and sets out a new theoretical model for analysing the impact of his activist interventions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The amalgam of concepts we are bringing together here are intended to be a functional or ‘machinic’ tool box – a model, for use in an analysis, not an ontology (Malins 2004, p. 84). The terms we use and the things we group could be organised differently, but this is entirely acceptable within assemblage theory.

  2. 2.

    There are some similarities here with Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model where the text itself is important in analysis, but not the sole determining feature of how meaning is generated (1980).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

    Jane Arthurs

  2. University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Ben Little

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  1. Jane Arthurs
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Arthurs, J., Little, B. (2016). Introduction. In: Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59628-4_1

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