Lenny Bruce

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“In The Masturbation Scenes Roth Was Reaching For Wild Effects”

November 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In a 1969 Holiday interview conducted by Alfred Bester, Woody Allen let it be known that he preferred Mort Sahl to Lenny Bruce and J.D. Salinger to Philip Roth. Dumb and dumber. An excerpt:

There were a couple of paperbacks on the make-up table: Selections From Kierkegaard and Basic Teachings of Great Philosophers, the sort of thing you’d expect to see a young intellectual reading on a bus. We discussed books. “I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody said. “It’s strictly a secondary experience. If I can do anything else, I’ll duck it. Maybe it’s because I’m a very slow reader. But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it, but I don’t really enjoy it. The thing itself is boring.

‘The only thing I find interesting today is sporting events. They have everything that great theater should have; all the thunderous excitement and you don’t know the outcome. And when the outcome happens, you have to believe it because it happened. I need something crammed with excitement. I like things larger than life.’

He believes that Stendhal’s The Red and The Black is one of the great fath­ers of modern novels. He says that he hates Terry Southern and had to strug­gle through Philip Roth’s new novel. “I felt there were many passages that could have been done better. In the masturbation scenes Roth was reaching for wild effects; in fact, I feel that Roth was pandering to the public. His attitude was: ‘All right, I’ll give you what you want.’ Salinger didn’t do that in Catcher in the Rye. His whole book was on a much higher level.”

Woody is hipped on the subject of pandering. “I feel the same way about Lenny Bruce as I do about Roth. Bruce was not particularly brilliant. He pandered. He was and is idolized by the kind of people who must invent an idol for themselves. Nichols and May didn’t do that. Mort Sahl doesn’t do that; he doesn’t pander.”

The name of another prominent comic came up. I said, “Now there’s a no-talent for you.”

“He’s very successful,” Woody said quietly.

“And that’s what amazes me; the number of no-talents who are successful.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “These days everybody’s successful, talent and no-talent.”•

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“The First Amendment Is Just For Perverts”

May 6, 2014 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Audio from two old-school UCLA talks by comedians.

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On February 8, 1966, just six months before his fatal overdose, Lenny Bruce gave a rambling talk on campus, hitting on all the large topics he loved: law, church, state and free speech. He got off to a slow start, distracted as he was at the time with his own ongoing legal issues, but before finishing he’d argued with biting wit that churches were like fast-food franchises, science and technology polluted the justice system, Catholic rituals protected child molesters and “a country can only be strong by knowing about the bad things.”

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Long before she was a self-centered Republican lady worried about buying and selling as much crap as possible, Joan Rivers was a great stand-up. (And despite any personal unpleasantness and crassness, she still is.) On November 15, 1972, Rivers did a Q&A with the students, being brazenly honest on varied topics (feminism, Bill Cosby, talk shows, etc. ) and asking rhetorically, “If I was normal, would I be doing comedy?” Very funny stuff.

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“It’s The American View That Everything Has To Keep Climbing”

March 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

George Carlin was about to release his first comedy album in seven years in 1982 when he sat for a Playboy interview. He was wondering at that point if he would have a third act after being a straight comic in the ’60s and a countercultural force the following decade, and ultimately he found it in the role of philosopher and self-designated mourner for a sense of decency and honesty in American politics and media. Carlin has been criticized for this latter stage of his career, accused of being too angry to be funny, but I think it’s as valuable a phase as his 1970s brilliance. It elevated him to greatest American stand-up ever, and no one has quite reached that level since, though Louis C.K. and Chris Rock have their moments. The opening of the Playboy Q&A:

“Playboy:

Back in the early Sixties, when you were still a disc jockey and just beginning to do comedy in small clubs, Lenny Bruce supposedly selected you as his heir—

George Carlin:

Apparently, Lenny told that to a lot of people. But he never said it to me and I didn’t hear it until years later. Which is probably fortunate. It’s difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too.

Playboy:

Because of what Bruce said about you, are you now overly sensitive about being compared to him?

George Carlin:

Yes, and those comparisons are unfair to both of us. Look, I was a fan of Lenny’s. He made me laugh, sure, but more often he made me say, ‘Fuckin’ A; why didn’t I think of that?’ He opened up channels in my head. His genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry. I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I’m not in a league with Lenny, certainly not in terms of social commentary. So when people give me this bullshit, ‘Well, I guess you’re sort of…uh…imitating Lenny Bruce,’ I just say, ‘Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear it.’ I want to be known for what I do best.

Playboy:

Nevertheless, throughout the early to mid-Seventies, with a five-year run of albums and packed auditoriums for an act that viciously ridiculed every nook and cranny of “the establishment,” you really did seem to be fulfilling Lenny’s prophecy. Then it stopped abruptly about five years ago. No more albums; no more college tours. Why?

George Carlin:

I’ve just now completed a five-year period that can perhaps best be called a breathing spell. A time of getting my health back and gathering my strength. That time also included incredible cocaine abuse, a heart attack and my wife’s recovery from both alcoholism and cocaine abuse.

Playboy:

It’s comforting to hear you talk about that breathing spell in the past tense.

George Carlin:

My wife, Brenda, and I are both clean and sober now. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. By the time this interview appears, my first album in seven years will be out. I’m also working on a series of Home Box Office specials, a book and a motion picture. It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical. And I hope I’m now beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it’ll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be…well, that’s for others to judge.”

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“I’ve been uplinked and downloaded”:

“You have to be asleep to believe it”:

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“Lenny Was Called A ‘Sick Comic,’ Though He Insisted That It Was Society Which Was Sick And Not Him”

October 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Lenny Bruce understood that there were few things more obscene than a society full of people making believe that obscene things never happened, since pretending and suppressing and hiding and shushing allows true evil to flourish. The opening of Ralph J. Gleason’s emotional 1966 obituary of Bruce in Ramparts: 

“WHEN THE BODY OF LEONARD SCHNEIDER—stage name Lenny Bruce—was found on the floor of his Hollywood hills home on August 3, the Los Angeles police immediately announced that the victim had died of an overdose of a narcotic, probably heroin.

The press and TV and radio of the nation—the mass media—immediately seized upon this statement and headlined it from coast to coast, never questioning the miracle of instant diagnosis by a layman.

The medical report the next day, however, admitted that the cause of death was unknown and the analysis ‘inconclusive.’ But, as is the way with the mass media, news grows old, and the truth never quite catches up. Lenny Bruce didn’t die of an overdose of heroin. God alone knows what he did die of.

It is ritualistically fitting that he should be the victim, in the end, of distorted news, police malignment and the final irony—being buried with an orthodox Hebrew service, after years of satirizing organized religion. But first, in a sinister evocation of Orwell and Kafka and Greek tragedy, he had to be tortured, the record twisted, and the files rewritten until his death became a relief.

Lenny was called a ‘sick comic,’ though he insisted that it was society which was sick and not him. He was called a ‘dirty comic’ though he never used a word you and I have not heard since our childhood. His tangles with the law over the use of these words and his arrests on narcotics charges were the only two things that the public really knew about him. Mass media saw to that.

When he was in Mission General Hospital in San Francisco, the hospital announced he had screamed such obscenities that the nurses refused to work in the room with him, so they taped his mouth shut with adhesive tape. The newspapers revelled in this and he was shown on TV, his mouth taped and his eyes rolling in protest, being wheeled into the examining room. Words that nurses never heard?

What new phrases he must have invented that day, what priceless epiphanies lost to history now forever. Once, in a particularly poignant discussion of obscenity on stage, Bruce said, ‘If the titty is pretty it’s dirty, but not if it’s bloody and maimed . . . that’s why you never see atrocity photos at obscenity trials.’ He used to point out, too, that the people who watched the killing of the Genovese girl in Brooklyn and who didn’t interfere or call a cop would have been quick to do both if it had been a couple making love. ‘A true definition of obscenity,’ he said, ‘would be to sing about pork outside a synagogue.’

Bruce found infinity in the grain of sand of obscenity. From it he took off on the fabric which keeps all our lives together. ‘If something about the human body disgusts you,’ he said, ‘complain to the manufacturer.’ He was one of those who, in Hebbel’s expression, ‘have disturbed the world’s sleep.’ And he could not be forgiven.”

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“You Work Areas Of Humor That Are Controversial, And According To Some People, Very Sick”

August 26, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1959, Hugh Hefner talks with Lenny Bruce, who had not yet been consumed by heroin and legal troubles.

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Gleaned: The Essential Lenny Bruce

November 15, 2010 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Booked in San Francisco for obscenity. Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Schneider in 1925 on Long Island.

I watched the first episode of Hugh Hefner’s swinging variety show Playboy After Dark from 1959 not too long ago, and it featured a great appearance by Lenny Bruce. Most of the scant film footage of the disgracefully honest comedian doesn’t do him justice, showing him when he was a shell of himself, as heroin and legal troubles took their toll. It’s amazing how much other comics took from Bruce: everything from George Carlin’s obsession with the hypocrisy of words to Richard Lewis’s finger snapping as he delivers his punchlines. At one point, Bruce tells Hefner that “tragedy plus time equals comedy,” a line that is often attributed to either Woody Allen or Carol Burnett. My guess is it’s not Bruce’s line, either, but I bet he’s the one who introduced it to other comedians.

A few years back, I gleaned a copy of The Essential Lenny Bruce, a 1987 paperback compilation of his greatest bits and other fun stuff for Bruceophiles. Some of the material is very dated, but a lot of it reminds why a nightclub comedian was able to scare the hell out of authority figures in the ’50s and ’60s. One brief chapter, entitled “Chronicle,” provides an outline of the final seven turbulent years of Lenny’s life. An excerpt:

May, 1959, The New York Times:

“The newest and in some ways the most scarifyingly funny proponent of significance…to be found in a nightclub these days is Lenny Bruce, a sort of abstract-expressionist stand-up comedian paid $1750 a week to vent his outrage on the clientele.”

June 1960, The Reporter:

“The question is how far Bruce will go in further exposing his most enthusiastic audiences…to themselves. He has only begun to operate.”

September 29, 1961:

Busted for possession of narcotics, Philadelphia.

October 4, 1961:

Busted for obscenity, Jazz Workshop, San Francisco.

September, 1962:

Banned in Australia.

October 6, 1962:

Busted for possession of narcotics, Los Angeles.

October 24, 1962:

Busted for obscenity, Troubadour Theatre, Hollywood.

December, 1962:

Busted for obscenity, Gate of Horn, Chicago.

January, 1963:

Busted for possession of narcotics, Los Angeles.

April, 1963:

Barred from entering London, England.

March, 1964, The New York Post:

“Bruce stands up against all limitations of the flesh and spirit, and someday they are going to crush him for it.”

April, 1964:

Busted for obscenity, Cafe Au Go-Go, New York City.

October, 1965:

Declared a legally bankrupt pauper, San Francisco.

November 1965, Esquire:

“I saw his act…in Chicago…He looked nervous and shaky…wretched and broken…You thought of Dorothy Parker, who, when she saw Scott Fitzgerald’s sudden and too-youthful corpse, murmured, ‘The poor son of a bitch.'”

August 3, 1966:

Dead, Los Angeles.

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