The show begins, and Russell Brand comes among us, pressing flesh all the way back to Row P and – who knows? – healing a few lepers in the process.
This is Messiah Complex, Brand's new tour, now opening in the UK after a run Stateside, and the title is freighted with self-irony. Brand knows he'll be met with adulation, and he loves it – hugging his fans, flashing smiles for the cameras. But rather than just eat the cake, he wants to show us it's hollow inside. Celebrity has replaced religion, says Brand, before asking: what should we be filling that gap with instead?
What follows is a show that's far more satisfying than Brand's previous standup outings, which focused almost exclusively on himself and his stories of narcotic and sexual excess. There's no shortage of those tonight but they're secondary to an argument Brand is making about heroes and values and the vapidity of how we live now. The argument doesn't always add up but it's advanced with ardour and a bracing lack of piety, and Brand gets the balance right between imparting hippie-leftie wisdom and sending himself up.
The heroes he talks about are familiar from many a teenager's bedroom wall: Gandhi and Guevara, Malcolm X and Jesus. Brand gives an account of each, pointedly drawing attention not only to their virtues but also their feet of clay. Later, he shows us Gandhi being used to sell computers and Che advertising Mercedes-Benz. But this was a man who believed in communism, about which Brand is unfashionably enthusiastic. Discrediting it because the Russians used it wrongly, he says, is like blaming Steve Jobs because Brand uses his iPad mainly for porn.
His point is, in a world where $40bn could eradicate poverty, and $21tn is held by the rich in offshore accounts, we need another Malcolm X, and a radical change in our values.
It's not an intellectually consistent argument – he has a pick'n'mix attitude bordering on the contradictory towards traditional belief systems. And it often detours via florid sex talk, as Brand tells us how much he worships women (the vagina is "the best metaphor for God there'll ever be", hohum), and needless apology for all "the clever things" in the show.
But these are easy to forgive in a set that elsewhere takes aim at the hidden ideologies of the media (how dare it be called "the news" and not "some news"?) and the futility of putting people on pedestals. It's great to see arena-level standup that asks us to think as well as laugh – but which nevertheless keeps the laughs front and centre, as when Brand ridicules a portrait of Jesus wearing a crucifix necklace ("spoiler alert!") or looks at Fox News' hostility to immigrants through a cosmic lens: "Keep still on the rock floating through infinite space!" Where once he used to navel-gaze, now Brand has his sights set on the boundaries of the known universe. It's a big improvement.
Today and tomorrow, Manchester Apollo (0161 273 6921)
