Dirty Sexy Funny

There are edgy comedians, and then there is Russell Brand. The big-haired 33-year-old British comic is beloved in the U.K. for his Johnny Knoxville-style pranks (he once "wanked off" a man in a public bathroom on British TV) and for his darkly confessional stand-up about his wild, druggy days, in which he has said he "smoked abundant marijuana, smack and crack." At times, fans have found it difficult to tell Brand's rock-bottom moments from his best performances: After witnessing Brand fall off the stage, drunk and high, during a dance-music awards show, Boy George theorized in London's 0Daily Express that the whole thing had been an ingenious slapstick routine. Sober for the past few years, Brand is becoming a favorite with American audiences, thanks to his hilarious turn as rehabbed rock star Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall — a role that wasn't far from Brand's real life. (Now there's an Aldous Snow sequel on the way — with a gloriously off-the-wagon Snow.) But first, in his biggest U.S. splash, Brand will host the MTV Video Music Awards in L.A. on September 7th. He's ready for his close-up: "I ran into Chris Rock yesterday, and he said, 'Go in hard — no one cares about anything except you have to have a good beginning.' So I might open with a song. And I might take my shirt off and have lipstick on my nipples."

We heard that while you were filming commercials for the VMAs with Britney Spears, you were telling her shocking things you wanted to do to her.
I did describe one very basic sexual technique, which I think she would have hugely benefited from — just standard clitoral stimulation whilst achieving an upward, diagonal motion so that you can induce anal and clitoral stimulation simultaneously. But I wasn't able to demonstrate, so it was a dismal failure.

You've had a fraught history with MTV. When you worked for the network in the U.K., you were fired for showing up to work dressed as Osama bin Laden — on September 12th, 2001. What were you thinking?
I was taking loads of crack and heroin. And I was a little bit excited because I'd been talking about Osama bin Laden for ages before that, right? So it was kind of like when a band breaks that you've liked for ages. I was like, "I told you this guy was gonna be big!" Still, what I did was deeply regrettable. I mean no disrespect to the thousands who lost their lives in that terrible tragedy. It was a very, very stupid thing to have done.

You've been pretty open about your history with drugs and bulimia and sex addiction in your memoir, "My Booky Wook." Did you draw on your own life when you were acting as the rock star Aldous Snow in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"?
Yeah. Nicholas Stoller, the director of that film, and Jason Segel, the writer, plundered my life like British archeologists picking through a pyramid: "What else happened? What else did you do?"