Lenny Bruce
Another problem is that for years the quality of the available recordings of Bruce in performance simply hasn’t been very good. Bruce was a natural club comic, but his studio albums sound dull and stifled; his concert discs catch him deep into his late phase of self-involved street philosophizing. There are also some excellent but hard-to-find appearances from 50s TV, a hilarious animated cartoon of his “Thank You Mask Man” routine made by John Magnuson in 1968, and one 1967 performance film that finds him sad and tired. For years, that’s been it.
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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.
Let the Buyer Beware reaches all the way back to these early days, starting in 1948 when Bruce went on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts with a prescient bit, “The Bavarian Mimic.” It starts with some tired impressions of Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, and Peter Lorre–you roll your eyes at how painfully obvious they are–but Bruce then spins the joke by imitating a Bavarian mimic he claims he saw during the war, doing a hilarious gibberish caricature of a hack impressionist. As the movie-star voices cut through the layer of accented quasi-German, Bruce perfectly captures the tone and rhythm of stand-up shtick at the time. Even at 23 he was announcing the major themes of his career. “The Bavarian Mimic” is comedy about comedy–it hips the audience, makes them step back to see how lame that kind of act is. Though he hadn’t invented this concept it set him apart from his buds at Hanson’s, who were doing the sort of material Bruce was sending up.
In the early 60s, Bruce’s act and the law began feeding on one another. “Pretty Bizarre Show,” in which he used the word “cocksucker,” got him arrested in San Francisco in 1961. Subsequent routines like “To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb” and “If Your Body Is Dirty, the Fault Lies With the Manufacturer” added to his rep as a filthy comic. He milked his notoriety, making more than $100,000 a year from his albums, television appearances, and club dates. He played Carnegie Hall in 1961. Predictably, the squares came down on him: Winchell called him “America’s number one vomic.” But hipster critics also saw a facileness in the way he attracted legal trouble and then made it part of his act. Woody Allen signed petitions supporting Bruce’s First Amendment rights, but as to his comedic gifts he later wrote that Bruce was “decent, but not great. I think that many middle-class people and squares followed him very avidly because he was–at a time when it was forbidden–talking dirty, and clearly on dope. And a huge amount of his audience were straight middle-class people who thought they were doing something wicked, that they were suddenly ‘in the know,’ that they were suddenly hip or rebellious. . . . I found him talented but pretentious.”
In 1964 Bruce was appealing one of his cases in New York before Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black justice on the Supreme Court. In a rather dense moment of hubris, he compared his plight to that of a “nigger in Alabama who wants to use a toilet.”
Because it tracks his decline, the set’s sixth and final disc highlights some painful moments; listening to Bruce parse legal points on the phone with his lawyers is to hear a drowning man gasp for air. On “My Name Is Adolph Eichmann,” recorded in 1962, he resurrects that Bavarian accent to play the Nazi war criminal, demanding that his accusers justify Hiroshima if he has to answer for the Holocaust. It’s not funny. It’s oversimplified satire, an attempt to wallop the audience with ugly irony.
