'Buyer Beware' is a lesson in the life of Lenny Bruce
What would Lenny Bruce do? If he were Howard Stern, with the FCC breathing down his neck, what would Lenny Bruce do? If he were Janet Jackson, what would Lenny Bruce do? Would he claim that the most televised breast in the nation's history was "an accident"?
Bruce fought the censorship wars 40 years ago, and he lost. A pioneer satirist whose stand-up comedy was branded "sick humor," his reward for speaking his mind was first notoriety, then infamy, and finally, utter ruin. The justice system, at least, couldn't get enough of him: By the end of his career, the crowds that most reliably turned out for his shows were local police forces waiting to arrest him.
Born Leonard Schneider in Long Island in 1925, he began performing in 1947, after being discharged from the Navy. He honed his act in what were then called burlesque clubs and by 1960 was playing Carnegie Hall. His first bust for obscenity came in 1961, and the years from then until his death from a morphine overdose in 1966 were a catalog of difficulties -- arrests for obscenity and narcotics, international bannings, illness, houndings, excoriations.
There was, of course, nothing "sick" about his humour at all -- it was rudely healthy, and he exercised it constantly in his running battles with racism, hypocrisy, and organized religion. If ever there were a bridge between the lifestyle experiments of the Beat Generation and the ideological fire of '60s radicalism, it would be Lenny Bruce; dandyishly wreathed in nightclub smoke, he imagined a future of barbarous honesty.
The Bruce legend is about to get another boost with the release on Tuesday of a six-CD box set and accompanying book called "Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware" (Shout! Factory). It's an exquisitely produced, comprehensive package, bulging with previously unreleased material -- a history lesson for the uninitiated and a goldmine for the fan.
We hear Bruce at every stage of his career; as a neophyte, cracking them up with his Peter Lorre impression on a radio show called "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," in 1948; as a pro, shimmering with Old World excellence on "The Steve Allen Show," in 1959; and finally as a poet with a persecution complex, asking a club technician for "one red light, a single red light" to set the mood for his far-from-humourous monologue "I Am Adolf Eichmann" in 1962.
Who are the heirs of Lenny Bruce? As to his style, there are none. Bruce was hip, and the idea of "hipness" -- of a heavy-lidded, possibly opiated poise that regulates outside interference and at the same time expresses its own deepest truths with a minimum of effort -- has all but evaporated. It's hard to be hip these days, when stand-ups come clanking onstage like heavyweight champions, pumping their fists to hip-hop or metal.
The first shock, listening to "Let the Buyer Beware," is the gentleness of his delivery. Expecting a loudmouth, some sort of comedic bomb thrower, snarling profanities and lobbing his taboo-busters into the middle of crowded rooms, we are startled to find ourselves addressed by a small, whimsical, musical voice, accosting the audience with a litany of racial and ethnic epithets. This was one of Bruce's most celebrated routines. After scanning the audience he would escalate the name calling until the babble of epithets became absurd.
The tendency of his act was not toward insult but toward homily; he wanted to elevate, to edify. Like the more illustrious Beatniks, he occasionally affected a strange half-English accent, to signal that he was a real aristocrat of perception, and his punchlines were often accompanied by the soft exhortation "dig!"
Naturally, he had his hardness too. If he hadn't been Jewish he could have been Irish. In one segment on "Let the Buyer Beware" he spots some plainclothes policemen in the audience, the night after his first arrest for obscenity, and has a Joycean verbal paroxysm. "Was that the cat who busted me last night? He made 27 novenas and went to nirvana. Searched his soul and threw up!"
No one today sounds remotely like Lenny Bruce. On the other hand, every comic who ever used a four-letter word on his or her HBO special is in his debt, because Bruce fought tooth and nail against the attempt to shut him down. The struggle destroyed his career and -- worse than that -- it blew his cool. The hipness, the ducal polish wore away to reveal something harried and wild-eyed, and much less funny. As the shadow of prosecution fell over him, the law (which he pronounced "lore") was his obsession: He became a home-schooled lawyer, a zealot, mutteringly immersed in the dank theology of the penal code.
At his later shows he would read aloud from the transcripts of his various trials, to general yawns and bewilderment. The immaculate craftsman who once defined a comedian as someone who "should get a laugh every 25 seconds for a period of not less than 45 minutes" was now getting none. Like Richard Nixon, he began to tape everything -- every set, every phone call -- and some of the previously unreleased material on "Let the Buyer Beware" is drawn from this self-surveillance; culled, as it were, from a paranoiac's archive.
But in the end he was right about everything: He had been singled out, and they were making an example of him. "Lenny Bruce stands up against all limitations on the flesh and spirit, and someday they are going to crush him for it," predicted the (New York) Post in 1964, and the only inaccuracy was the word "someday." A year later Bruce was declared bankrupt, and a year after that he was dead. In 2003 Governor George Pataki awarded him a posthumous pardon for a 1964 obscenity charge. Can Lenny Bruce now rest in peace? Forty years on, the word which triggered his first obscenity bust cannot be printed in this newspaper; a picture of a charred corpse, however, might be on the front page. He's not rolling in his grave: He's spinning like a drill bit.
