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Book review: Celebrity © The Author(s) 2019
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Jane Arthurs and Ben Little, Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics. London:
Palgrave Pivot; Springer Nature, 2016. 141 pp. ISBN 9781137596277. £55.12 rrp (hbk).

On 10 June 2016, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a grand and carefully
contrived entrance, as part of his appearance that night on British television’s Channel 4
political satire panel show The Last Leg, in the deliberately humorous manner of what
was instantly recognisable to the viewing audience as an A-list entertainment media
celebrity. Exiting a chauffeured white Bentley sports car, and dressed in a black tuxedo
with a floor length white fur coat hanging from his shoulders, Corbyn adjusts his cuff
links and bow tie as he steps onto a purposely placed red carpet – that most iconic signi-
fier of high-end celebrity status. This leads him to his star dressing room, signified as
such by the large gold star bearing his name, which adorns the door through which he
steps, prior to his subsequent re-emergence, now dressed in the more familiar tieless
smart casual garb of his political persona, as he heads towards the Last Leg studio for his
eagerly awaited guest appearance.
Alongside Corbyn’s subsequent guest appearance on a celebrity special episode, in
support of the charity Stand Up to Cancer, of the Channel 4 reality show Gogglebox
on 3 November 2017, this moment can be seen as a logical endpoint to what had been
building over the course of the preceding decade to become a flashpoint moment in
popular culture for the celebritisation of politics. This can likewise be seen in contem-
poraneous cognate phenomena, such as the celebrity re-branding of Corbyn’s predecessor
Ed Miliband in the years following his resignation from the Labour party leadership
– most memorably via the use of the social media hashtag #Milibacon to remediate
and recuperate his image following damage famously done to it by the mainstream
media circulation of a photograph of him eating a bacon sandwich during the 2015
election campaign.
It is precisely this intersection of celebrity and politics which forms the subject matter
of Jane Arthurs and Ben Little’s Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics, a welcome
and highly teachable case study–oriented research monograph on the celebrity/politics
flashpoint moment that occurred around the public persona of Russell Brand between
2013 and 2015, in the period leading up to the fateful election of David Cameron’s
Conservative government in May 2015 – an election which ultimately brought forth the
ongoing political chaos that the United Kingdom must now live with, and from which the
formerly politically vocal and interventionist Brand has notably long since retreated.
2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

Writing in 2004 about the turn towards celebrity in mainstream political culture,
media and politics scholar John Street asserted that ‘it is at least conceivable that une-
lected persons may legitimately represent politically the views and values of others’ (p.
447) and that ‘in certain contexts and under particular conditions, performers can lay
claim to represent those who admire them’ (p. 440). He continues to the effect that these
individuals have the capacity to ‘give political voice to those who follow them, both by
virtue of the political conditions and by means of their art’ (p. 440). The extent to which
this is applicable to the self-described ‘revolutionary’ turn taken in the public identity
and activities of comedian and actor turned activist and political commentator Russell
Brand is debatable, but, in a number of respects, this is the debate taken up by the
authors of this book, who offer up their astute, thorough and compelling interrogation
of Brand as ‘a case study in the complex interaction between celebrity and the political
field’ (p. 1).
Published as part of the Palgrave Pivot ‘Palgrave Studies in Comedy’ series edited by
Roger Sabin and Sharon Lockyer, Arthurs and Little’s co-authored entry is an outstand-
ing contribution to media and cultural studies, making its most significant contribution
to work that sits at the intersection of popular culture and politics. It is an invaluable
resource for students and scholars in these areas of the field, specifically and especially
in the areas of celebrity studies and political communication.
The book is coherently sequentially organised into four discrete but related chapters
that focus respectively on situating and contextualising Brand as a case study site of
analysis and discussion in the first instance, as well as on laying out the theoretical
frameworks for the ensuing interrogation of the intersection of comedy, celebrity and
politics that he represents; then second, on explaining and contextualising Brand’s career
as a stand-up comedian; third, on Brand’s cross-media profile during the period of his
career when his celebrity status peaked; and finally, on the shift from what they present
as ‘celebrity apparatus’ to ‘political assemblage’ in Brand’s mediated public identity,
which is showcased via the interrogation of four flashpoint moments from his political
turn that epitomise this shift.
These moments, the authors explain, are his guest editorship of the 2 October 2013
edition of political magazine The New Statesman, to which he also contributed as author
of its cover story (Brand, 2013); his weekly alternative news video series The Trews
which commenced streaming on YouTube on 27 February 2014, arguably peaking with
his now notorious interview with former Labour leader Ed Miliband; the October 2014
publication of the book Revolution, which ostensibly served as Brand’s political mani-
festo; and most famously of all, his UK television Newsnight interview with host Jeremy
Paxman on 23 October 2014, during which he admitted to never voting in elections,
urged others to do likewise, and which subsequently went viral online.
The methodological approach taken by the authors is mixed, combining ethnographic
research that includes interviews with activists, politicians and others; close textual anal-
ysis of media content featuring Brand, by Brand and/or about Brand; reception studies
approaches that analyse and unpack reviews of Brand’s work and some of the social
media discourse that circulated around him during the periods of time under scrutiny;
star studies approaches in the tradition of Richard Dyer’s (1998 [1979]) foundational
work that treats stars as texts, encompassing the critical analysis of Brand’s publicity and
Book review 3

promotional activities (e.g. interviews, autobiographical writings etc.); and theoretical

approaches, specifically apparatus and assemblage theory, drawing on Olivier Driessens’
(2013) notion of ‘celebrity apparatus’ on the one hand, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari’s (1988) theorisations of ‘assemblage’ on the other. The authors explain their
combined use of these concepts and theories to discuss Brand’s celebrity as follows:

An assemblage is the term we use to describe what is mobilised by the activities of the celebrity
apparatus, and incorporates both the specific formation of a given apparatus, the populations it
works on and the socio-political terrain created by its activities in the world. Thus the nexus of
industry agents, PR, contacts and media professionals constitutes Brand’s apparatus, while the
assemblages that centre on his celebrity interventions integrate that apparatus with audiences,
reactive media, legal and political processes, commercial and political stakeholder organisations
and their members. (p. 21)

As the introductory chapter unfolds, the geopolitical and socio-political circumstances in

which Brand’s celebrity peaked before taking a deliberate and explicitly political turn,
are deftly and expertly contextualised by Arthurs and Little, who situate the politicisation
of Brand’s public persona in relation to key contextual phenomena like the London riots
of 2011, the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the rise and
spread of the Occupy movement, and the wave of student protests in the United Kingdom
that followed the formation of the coalition government between former Prime Minister
David Cameron’s Conservatives and former party leader Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats
in May 2010. Other ongoing external contextual factors discussed as significant and
impactful to creating a political environment in the United Kingdom that was conducive
to Brand’s celebrity intervention into UK politics include the aftermath of the global
financial crisis, the take-up of austerity policies as a purported solution to this crisis, and
the resulting disproportionate and acute impact of these upon the poor and the young. All
of the above, the authors demonstrate, are key contexts in relation to which Brand’s
political turn and the resonant chord it struck with his followers and acolytes must be
understood. According to Arthurs and Little, this combination of social and political
contexts and events produced a shift in cultures of protest alongside the harnessing by
protesters of social media to facilitate a new kind of grassroots political activism for the
digital era (pp. 1-2).
The second chapter focuses in the main on Brand’s persona and stage performances
as a comedian, engaging as it does with what Arthurs and Little specify to be ‘the signa-
ture practices of his stand-up comedy’, with a view to arguing that Brand’s ‘charismatic
transgression of boundaries’ is what constitutes the main source of his appeal to audi-
ences (p. 7). This is a persona that they characterise as ‘akin to that of a rock star’ (p. 15)
on the grounds that his ‘explicit sexual joking, energetic vitality of movement, and ges-
tures of phallic masculinity’ are constitutive and expressive of what they call his ‘rebel-
lious anti-authoritarian attitude’, which they later position as key to his anti-establishment
political intervention, but which they here demonstrate to have been present in his per-
formative persona from the germinal stages of his comedy career (p. 15). The third chap-
ter dedicates itself to mapping out the dimensions of what the authors refer to as Brand’s
‘hybrid celebrity’, tracing what they describe as his ‘diverse roles in broadcasting, film,
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

and digital media’ and to tracking ‘the reputational dynamics of his celebrity brand and
performance practices’ as they traverse and move between new forms and contexts (p. 7).
In many ways, the fourth chapter is the book’s most important and is where the clearest
and most significant intervention into the intersection of celebrity studies and political
communication is made, interrogating as it does the movement in Brand’s public persona
from ‘celebrity apparatus’ to ‘political assemblage’ (p. 83). The ‘reactive assemblages’,
that Arthurs and Little demonstrate are formed from a series of flashpoint moments in
Brand’s mediated political activism, are treated in turn here as case studies, interrogations
of which serve in this chapter to explain their various modes of political impact (p. 7).
The work of Arthurs and Little sits extremely well alongside broadly cognate scholar-
ship on the subject of celebrity and politics, including but not limited to Mark Wheeler’s
(2013) survey approach to the topic in his monograph Celebrity Politics: Image and
Identity in Contemporary Political Communications, Neil Ewen and David Zeglen’s
(forthcoming) special issue of Celebrity Studies on right-wing celebrity politicians in con-
temporary Europe, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2019) work on Donald Trump and the poli-
tics of emotion, and Jo Littler’s (2016) work on the celebrification of Jeremy Corbyn that
took place during the run-up to and aftermath of his election to the leadership of the
Labour Party, which formed the substance of her keynote address to the assembled dele-
gates of the third biannual Celebrity Studies conference in Amsterdam in June 2016.
Furthermore, it also compares favourably to more directly cognate work that specifically
focuses, as this book does, on Brand and his celebrity intervention into politics, such as
Colleen Harmer’s (2017) conceptualisation of it as a manifestation of ‘spiritualized mar-
ket subjectivity’, and Arthurs’ earlier collaboration with Sylvia Shaw (2016) in their con-
sideration of Brand’s negotiation of his celebrity capital to intervene in the political field.
Since the authors’ time of writing, Brand has retreated really quite far from the main-
stream media and the political sphere into which he made such a visible and audible
splash for a brief period of time from 2013 to 2015, and has instead embraced life as a
resident of the affluent area of Henley-on-Thames since becoming a father in November
2016, an experience that Brand positions via his public persona through his 2017 stand-
up comedy show ‘Rebirth’ as having been personally transformative, in line with predict-
able and familiar patterns of maturation for celebrity masculinities that are experiencing
peaks and troughs in their A-list status. As Arthurs and Little highlight in the closing
remarks to this valuable and insightful book: ‘history suggests that he is unlikely to
remain out of the public eye for long – though exactly what form his next escapade will
take is impossible to predict’ (p. 114). Retreat into involved fatherhood ostensibly out-
side of the overtly political sphere would have been an unsurprisingly safe bet.

References
Arthurs A and Shaw S (2016) Celebrity capital in the political field: Russell Brand’s migration
from stand-up comedy to Newsnight. Media, Culture and Society 38(8): 1136–1152.
Brand R (2013) ‘We no longer have the luxury of tradition’: But before we change the world we
need to change the way we think. New Statesman 142(5181): 24–29.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum Publishing.
Driessens O (2013) Celebrity capital: Redefining celebrity using field theory. Theory and Society
42(5): 543–560.
Book review 5

Dyer R (1998) [1979]) Stars. London: BFI Books.

Ewen N and Zeglen D (eds) (forthcoming) National populists: Right wing celebrity politicians in
contemporary Europe Celebrity Studies (Special Issue, Celebrity Studies).
Harmer C (2017) Spiritualized market subjectivity and new resistances: Russell Brand’s concept
of revolution. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31(1): 43–54.
Littler J (2016) A constellation of anti-celebrity. In: 3Rd Biannual Celebrity Studies Conference,
Amsterdam, 28–30 June.
Street J (2004) Celebrity politicians: Popular culture and political representation. The British
Journal of Politics and International Relations 6(4): 435–452.
Wahl-Jorgensen K (2019) Emotions, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wheeler M (2013) Celebrity Politics: Image and Identity in Contemporary Political
Communications. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hannah Hamad
Cardiff University, UK