Russell Brand takes aim at GQ awards organisers

British funnyman Russell Brand has aimed a scathing rant at the organisers of the recent GQ awards after he was booted out for cracking jokes about Nazis, branding the prizegiving "fabricated fun" dominated by big business.

The actor/comedian was removed from the GQ Men of the Year Awards in London earlier this month (Sep13) after he used his acceptance speech to criticize the evening's sponsors Hugo Boss, the German fashion firm which produced uniforms worn by Adolf Hitler's troops during World War II.

Brand told the audience, "Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis. The Nazis did have flaws, but they did look f**king fantastic, let's face it, while they were killing people on the basis of their religion and sexuality!"

The Forgetting Sarah Marshall star has now opened up about his experience at the awards show in a column for Britain's The Guardian newspaper, insisting he didn't really want to be there and only attended the "because I have a tour on and I was advised it would be good publicity". He adds of the bash, "These parties aren't like real parties. It's fabricated fun, imposed from the outside. A vision of what squares (executives) imagine cool people might do set on a spaceship... The glamour and the glitz isn't real, the party isn't real."

Brand goes on to describe the audience's reaction to his controversial speech, writing, "I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still the silence of others... Subsequent to my jokes, the evening took a peculiar turn. Like the illusion of sophistication had been inadvertently disrupted by the exposure. It had the vibe of a wedding dinner where the best man's speech had revealed the groom's infidelity. With Hitler."

The funnyman insists he wasn't aiming to hurt Hugo Boss, but didn't want to pander to corporate sponsors, adding, "The jokes about Hugo Boss were not intended to herald a campaign to destroy them... They are, I thought, an irrelevant menswear supplier with a double-dodgy history... We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticize the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information."