HOWZAT

Last night’s almost two-hour performance at the 280-seat Largo theatre — located opposite a neon-lit strip club and tattoo parlour on La Cienega Boulevard — was designed to allow him to rehearse material for his forthcoming one-hour stand-up special on America’s Comedy Central channel.

Brand’s delivery — that familiar cross between thundering thesp and obscene Dickensian chimney sweep — was clearly an enjoyable novelty to the Angelenoes, especially once he had slowed it down enough so that they could translate and keep up.

The show didn’t all go smoothly, however. Almost before Brand could tell his first joke, one of the legs of his stool broke. A few minutes later, he trod on his microphone cable, unplugging it in the process.

The material itself seemed primarily designed to put his off-colour jokes into the context of his persona — and perhaps this is part of the Brand masterplan, a carefully planned second act after the ‘hullabaloo’ at the VMAs.

He talked about his self-absorption, joking that he Googles himself so many times a day, he needs only tap the “R” key on his keyboard and the website automatically performs a search for his name.

He talked about his sex addiction, asking one male audience member if he was in a relationship with the woman next to him. “She’s yours,” the man replied.

That was when Brand told him to punch her in the face, to “prime her up” for being pimped out to him. Written down, it sounds appalling. In the context of the show, in which everything is exaggerated to absurd effect, Brand somehow manages to get away with it.

He did the same with a joke that involved an explanation of how a man might find himself urinating on an underage girl — this being a reference to the recent child pornography trial of R. Kelly, during which he was found not guilty of all 14 counts.

By far Brand’s most successful material involved him reading out some of the e-mailed death threats made against him by irate Americans after the VMAs. For at least ten minutes straight, the entire audience was convulsed with laughter. In another equally hilarious section, he read aloud an article published about him in the Daily Mail, making asides as he went along.

When the show was finally over, the crowd quickly dispersed, with more than a few female audience members sticking around outside, smoking cigarettes.

“I hurt my stomach in there, I laughed so hard,” said Lisa Koprinik, a 27-year-old fashion buyer, who made an hour-long drive from Orange County with her friends to see the show—all on the strength of Brand’s performance as British rocker in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Ms Koprinik didn’t know anything about the Ross-Sachs scandal, but her friend, Tiffany Fox, 26, a YMCA worker, had mugged-up beforehand. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “Don’t they have freedom of speech over there? People need to stop crying about it.” She added that Brand was “kind of captivating — even when he’s not being funny. And he’s not exactly bad to look at.”

But is the approval of 280 audience members in one of America’s most liberal cities enough to ensure wider success throughout the country? Can Brand relax knowing that he doesn't really need his £200,000 a year BBC job?

That might indeed be the case. Thanks to Howard Stern and the frequent ‘roasts’ of comedians on the Comedy Central channel — where the jokes are often strong enough to make even the Brand-Ross call to Andrew Sachs sound polite — there’s a ready-made market for the British comedian’s fare.

And it’s a market supported by advertisers, not an ethically conflicted taxpayer-funded organisation such as the BBC.

Still, there were moments during last night’s performance when you got the impression that Brand was trying to relearn his boundaries.

For example: he frequently stopped the show to ask the audience, semi-seriously, if what he was doing was "acceptable" for his television special. And then there was the second time he mentioned the scandal that cost him his job in Britain.

"I won’t be talking about that for quite a while," was all he managed to say.

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