Celebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight

Our case study of charismatic celebrity comedian Russell Brand’s turn to political activism uses Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the process of celebrity migration across social fields. We investigate how Brand’s capital as a celebrity performer, storyteller and self-publicist translated from comedy to politics. To judge how this worked in practice, we analysed the comedic strategies used in his stand-up show Messiah Complex and undertook a conversational analysis of his notorious interview with Jeremy Paxman on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. We argue that Brand was able to secure political legitimacy by creatively constituting himself as an authentic anti-austerity spokesperson for the disenfranchised left in United Kingdom. In order to do so, he repurposed his celebrity capital to political ends and successfully deployed the cultural and social capitals he had developed as a celebrity comedian to secure widespread engagement with his media performances.

Self-assessments of memory correlate with neuroticism and conscientiousness, not memory span performance

Self-report measures of cognitive problems may have value, but there are indications that scores on such measures are influenced by other factors such as personality. In an online correlational study, 523 non-clinical volunteers completed measures of personality, digit span, and the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire. Self-reported prospective and retrospective memory failures were associated positively with neuroticism and negatively with conscientiousness, but not with digit span performance. These findings are consistent with other indications that conscientiousness and neuroticism may underpin self-reports of cognitive problems.