For two decades, Russell Brand seemed to possess a talent that few public figures ever master: the ability to shed one skin and slip, almost unnoticed, into another. The provocative stand-up became a television star, then a Hollywood actor, then a YouTuber and political campaigner who, in the 2010s, took up left-wing causes around inequality, later drifted towards Covid conspiracies, and in 2024 declared his support for Donald Trump. That same year he was baptised as a Christian in the waters of the River Thames, a scene staged, like so much of his life, for an audience. On Thursday, however, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London, after a three-week trial, found him guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault.

It is a label that no amount of reinvention can easily soften, and as he faces the prospect of prison, attention has turned to an uncomfortable question about where his fame came from. The answer, many critics now argue, is that the very behaviour forming the backdrop to the prosecution was also the engine of his rise. Brand first thrilled audiences as a sexual libertine, an insatiable and shameless womaniser whose act, with its backcombed hair, drainpipe black jeans and graphic stage routines, made excess the central joke. Over the decade of his offending, venues sold out and broadcasters including MTV, Channel 4 and the BBC competed to sign him.

Even his own barrister described the humour as a product of its time, a style once seen as radical. Barely a generation later, much of it looks like misogyny in a comic's costume.