The VMAs! Britney Spears! Russell Brand?

Kudos to MTV for hiring Russell Brand to host the VMAs this year. He's a popular comic in the UK, but Brand only has one credit here -- as the crazy guy in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. MTV could tell he was going to be huge and grabbed him early.

Except he wasn't very good.

Which was weird. I thought he was hilarious in Sarah Marshall. And I saw him on Conan one time and marveled at how funny he could make a simple talk show conversation. But his performance on the VMAs was weak. And I'm not talking about, like, Chris Rock at the Oscars, where he was actually hilarious but the wrong people got offended. I'm talking, Brand didn't know his audience, and simply told some bad jokes.

On not knowing his audience -- over half of his opening monologue was dedicated to the presidential race. (At the VMAs?) He talked specifically, at length, about the recent news concerning vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter. How many MTV viewers have even heard about that, really?

On bad jokes -- he called Bush a "retarded cowboy." (1999 wants its joke back.) He also started making fun of the Jonas brothers, which is almost always funny, but his most creative conceit was that they should wear their abstinence rings on their penises instead of their fingers. Um...okay?

The other big story of the night, aside from all the "who's the guy with the crazy hair" conversations, was that Britney Spears is back! Woooo! And not, like, pretend back, like at last year's fubar performance. I'm talking back back, as in, won-lots-of-awards-and-appeared-in-an-opening-sketch-with-Jonah-Hill-that-wasn't-that-funny-but-we'll-pretend-it-was-because-it-at-least-wasn't-embarrassing back.

Head over to MTV.com (because those jerks refuse to enable embedding) to see all the most-talked-about moments.

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