Lenny Bruce was a comedian before he was a chapter in the history of American obscenity law. Because so much of his myth is wrapped up in matters that weren’t cause for laughter, it’s easy to forget this. We know him as a free-speech martyr, as a man wrongly persecuted for offending the powers that be, as a pioneer pushing Americans to talk freely about sex, religion, drugs, and race. His name’s still invoked every time somebody gets in trouble for “objectionable” comedy. But since his death from a morphine overdose on August 3, 1966, Bruce has become the Bob Hope of hip American comedy, a man whose work is respected but irrelevant. When’s the last time you watched Fancy Pants? When’s the last time you actually listened to Lenny Bruce?
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Leonard Alfred Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, was born in 1925 on Long Island. His parents broke up the year he was born; he was raised by his mother, Sally Marr, a comic herself. A teenage runaway, he worked on a farm before joining the navy during World War II. When he became a comic after the war, he ran with the hard-core Borscht Belt tummlers: Buddy Hackett, Jack Roy (the future Rodney Dangerfield), Jan Murray, Phil Foster, Georgie Starr, Will Jordan, Alan King. These were the first wave of nightclub comics after vaudeville, the first guys who tried to get laughs with nothing more than a suit and a microphone.
Bruce often played to the bands at such places, because the patrons were preoccupied with the dancers. He picked up on the routines of LA jazz musicians, and that included heroin. In “The Lawrence Welk Story,” about a junkie jazz musician working for Welk, Bruce found a hipster idiom to match his Borscht Belt goofiness. “I can tell by your eyes you’re a good boy,” Bruce says in a pitch-perfect impression of Welk’s accent, “because they’re so small.”
Bruce certainly wasn’t the only comic working blue at the time; Buddy Hackett and Redd Foxx were also using foul language in their acts. In his liner notes for the box set, Paul Krassner argues that Bruce’s problems had less to do with his swearing than with his discussion of religion in bits like “Religions, Inc.” or “Christ and Moses,” in which he mocked New York’s Catholic leadership; Catholic cops began looking for any excuse to run him out of town. A 1962 Variety article explained that “the prosecutor is at least equally concerned with Bruce’s indictments of organized religion as he is with the more obvious sexual content of the comic’s act.”
“Unfortunately not,” he replied.
Let the Buyer Beware has many brilliant moments, but it reveals a comedian who was never able to develop his game beyond his early innovative club routines, the way that Richard Pryor did in his concert films, Woody Allen did with Annie Hall, or Bill Hicks did on Bruce’s own turf. Just when things were coming together for Bruce in the early 60s, he fell apart. What’s on Let the Buyer Beware is as good as it ever got.
