The Lipster

Today, Russell Brand makes his debut bid for No.1 on the soaraway pop charts with a song called Inside Of You. It’s not really him though, no Sir, that would be really embarrassing, but while pretending to be someone else, a posturing rock ‘n’ roll pompadour called Aldous Snow from the fictional group Infant Sorrow, who star in the film released this Friday billing itself “the ultimate romantic disaster movie”, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Inside Of You is the ballad The Darkness didn’t stick around long enough to invent wherein Aldous serenades his laydee, “teach me how to glow/while I’m moving inside of you”. Except it’s sounds like he’s singing “teach me to grow”. To which the only reasonable response can be, “oh no, not again...”

The history of pop is littered with the bloodied carcasses of our beloved funnymen, at the very apex of their career, being bludgeoned to critical death via their all-too-telling obsession with personal pop-perv fantasies. The concept was invented, perhaps, by Lenny Henry in his ’80s hey-day, bestowing upon the nation his growling Barry White send-up palaver Theopholus P. Wildebeeste, the medallion-swinging buffoon in leather pantaloons given to indiscriminate use of his chat-up line: “Have you got any African in you? Would you like some?” Within seconds, 10 years of agreeably respected light entertainment tomfoolery crashed to the floor like a crystal chandelier dropped from a crumbly ceiling.

Then came Steve Coogan who, evidently, looked but did not learn as his invincible mid-’90s period shaped by Paul/Pauline Calf and Alan Partridge temporarily disintegrated with the arrival of Tony Ferrino, the silk-shirted, limp-moustached Portuguese Euro Hunk who brought us the 1996 single Help Yourself, with the b-side ‘Bigamy At Christmas’. Only Alan Partridge himself, surely, saw the funny side.

By 2002, Ali G was the funniest man in Britain, Madonna’s best new pal and Sacha Baron Cohen was getting credited with genius-level satirical prowess. Just the time, then, to bring us Ali G Indahouse: The Movie and the single from its soundtrack, Me Julie, featuring Shaggy, which featured this lyrical dazzler: “You know me love-a you truly/From me head down to me goolies/You turn me on with your big babylons”. Overnight, several years of world-class interviews demolishing the minds of the pompous and the prejudiced evaporated in a puff of ganja smoke.

Comedy songs, by comedians, are a terrible idea, then, unless you are Chas & Dave and we’re still in the 1980s. Approaching his single like nervous rabbits, we can only hope our still-beloved Russell Brand has studied the form and learned from previous masters. And looking at his form sheet, so far, unfeasibly enough, it’s looking good. Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes from “the guys who brought you The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up" and the trailer is definitely amusing. (And if the film is huge in America, Russell Brand will become the Leona Lewis of Comedy. Sort of.) The single, meanwhile, comes with a black and white video and appears to be nothing to do with the film, where Russell, in his leather breeks, is encouraged to make the traditional pompadour berk of himself.

In the video, however, he’s a great deal more plausible as a genuine rock ‘n’ roll star that he is on TV, his idiotic raven’s nest hair replaced by a tumbling barnet he himself would call “all lovely”. It might be a feeble song, a namby-pamby ballad sung straight through his exquisite nose, but Russell Brand may just be about to prove himself not only the best-looking comedian of his generation (and arguably the funniest), but by some distance the smartest…