Jet-lagged, fresh out of a job, and now with two scandals to call his own on both sides of the Atlantic, Russell Brand swaggered onto the stage of the Largo theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday night looking remarkably unfrazzled by it all.

He then proceeded to launch into a comic routine that included switching on the house lights to see which audience members he wanted to have sex with, and making offhand jokes about punching women in the face, pimping them out, and urinating on them.

For the most part, it was extremely well received.

Yet in spite of all the usual obscene flourishes, Brand carefully avoided any discussion of the events that led to his resignation last week as a £200,000 per year BBC Radio 2 presenter.

The first of only two hints at the enormity of the scandal he had left 5,500-miles away in London came as he stripped off his jacket to wolf-whistles from the grungy-but-hip crowd. “This ain’t erotica!” he scolded the crowd. “This ain’t burlesque!” Eyebrow arched, he added: “An activity I’ve come to question of late...”

Of course, it was probably only the Brits in the audience — and there was a good number of them — who got the reference to Georgina Baillie, the comedian’s former sexual conquest and a member of the burlesque troupe known as the ‘Satanic Sluts Extreme’.

It would after all have taken a reader of the UK press to know that it was Brand’s crude on-air answering machine message to Baillie’s grandfather — the beloved 78-year-old Faulty Towers actor Andrew Sachs — that provoked the outrage that resulted in his resignation, along with the suspension of his co-prankster Jonathan Ross, not to mention the departure of Lesley Douglas, Controller of BBC Radio 2.

Needless to say, none of this made the news in LA, where an imminent presidential election has understandably left prank phone calls originated on another continent seem a little extraneous, to say the least.

Besides, Howard Stern has been doing much the same thing for years, to the great amusement of the nine million or so Americans who pay a monthly subscription to hear his show via Sirius satellite radio.

That’s not to say that Brand’s profile isn’t rising in the US.

His disastrous/brilliant hosting of the MTV Video Music Awards—during which he called President Bush a “retarded cowboy”—has given him a valuable toehold in American popular culture, as has his recent movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which took a very respectable $62 million at the US box office ($103 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo).

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