The Essential Lenny Bruce: His Original Unexpurgated Satirical Routines, edited by John Cohen

They say that if you wanna learn how to be funny, you gotta read.

No they don’t. Nobody says that.

Although humorous writing exists, sure, the written word is deemed to be the abode of the po-faced, with witty or playful writing expected not to evoke laughter and guffaws, but wry smiles and – at best – the occasional chuckle. 

Obviously, as you’re a reader of TriumphOfTheNow.com, you’re sure to be a connoisseur of wit and artfulness and slick, sleek, creativity. You’ve read raucous and hilarious take-downs of trash, you’ve read cheeky and playful asides while scott manley hadley loses textual focus, and you’ve also probably read some of the earlier/in-worse-psychological-health posts where scott manley hadley publishes things they probably shouldn’t (lol).

Yes.

You know humorous writing.

But do you laugh out loud, my readers, my fans, my people?

No. A comment every couple of weeks (mostly derogatory) and occasionally a rebuke from someone I wrote about unflatteringly… But no laughs. No laughs.

But this book, yes. This book got laughs from me.

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I’ll be honest, I had zero knowledge of the work of Lenny Bruce before I was recently gifted this book (and a version of his autobiography published in the same Panther edition), and though I would have maaaaaybe remembered that he was a comedian had I been in a life or death trivia situation (which could happen!), I might have guessed instead he was an actor, or possibly a jazz musician… certainly someone who was famous, yes, but a long time ago.

In a way, yes, Lenny Bruce was a jazz musician of comedy. This is stated as an opinion in the introduction to this volume, sure, yes, but it does hold up!

Contained in this book are typescripts, excerpts, from many of Bruce’s live performances: some sections are a few lines, a single joke, others are routines that cover pages and pages and would have been 15/20 minutes of a show…

What isn’t included in this book is the transcript of a single specific show, or of any specific scripts used at multiple performances.

Because Bruce wasn’t a comedian who performed near-identical sets as he built up shows, but was instead a comedian who (at least it’s what’s claimed here!) never performed the same show twice.

Though jokes and references and moments did recur, of course, there is a frequent implication of improvisation, which is what lots of highly competent and rehearsed stand-up comedy aspires to, though, with Bruce seemed to have been a much more genuine thing.

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A long time ago I read a book that contained transcripts of some Stewart Lee live shows, where he’d added some footnotes to clarify details or contexts, and also (if I’m remembering correctly) noted where and how he would riff a little with the audience. That book functioned very differently to this.

That Stewart Lee book contained what was, essentially, a script (a score?), and though some of his performances might drift a little further away than others from that script, the shape of a “show” that he would make would be one that would, fundamentally, be the same throughout the time it was touring.

And that’s how many – but not all – comedians now operate. They work on jokes until they have an hour/90 minutes/longer, which can then be filmed and distributed and the material, essentially, retired.

But that wasn’t what Lenny Bruce was doing – he wasn’t building towards a flawless hour for the Edinburgh Fringe or two interval-hugging 45 minute sets that would fly at regional arts theatres. No. He was the show.

The comedian was the show. Not the comedy the comedian was doing.

Bruce wasn’t performing his best bits, he wasn’t building around a central conceit… He was – from my understanding of having read this book and now listened to several hours of (very often overlapping) audio recordings of him – riffing. Always riffing. And some riffs he came back to, and some riffs were riffs about riffs he’d previously riffed, and other riffs weren’t. 

He uses a lot of imagined conversations and would often play with voice to indicate a conversation (which works better not on the page), and he also sometimes performs with musicians and would sometimes invite the musicians to take part in sketches. But mostly, yes, mostly, he’s flying and dancing into flights of fancy and seeing what happens and what works. Moving on before things have an opportunity to fail.

And, yes, there were lots of moments here where I had absolutely no idea what was happening… particularly when Bruce was talking about politicians and celebrities of his day, a bit of context would have been helpful, but most of the time (when these bits were longer) it was possible to work out who and what was being mocked, though there are gags where names are used as punchlines and these bits, yes, these bits I often didn’t get.

But what does he talk about? What does he riff about?

A lot about politics and politicians, a lot about culture and the arts, a lot about race and racism and anti-Semitism. Bruce was a Jewish person from New York who changed his name and performed all over the United States, and a lot of his  material is about the ideological clashes between those various internal cultures. Attitudes to money, to social interactions, to sexism and education and the Arts… He riffs on relationships and divorce and dating, but more than anything, more than anything (at least here!) he returned over and over again to a defining and personally significant idea: repressive censorship.

Yes, Lenny Bruce was a popular comedian working in the 1960s, yet he was plagued by – and according to the (very brief!) biography at the end of this book, hounded to penury and addiction and an early death – by criminal accusations and charges of obscenity. Jokes about religion, jokes about sex, jokes about race, jokes about politicians, jokes about the police… Reading this collection through here, yes, there are a couple of moments when Bruce uses particular words that most of us don’t use any more, but the overall, the conspicuous, the overwhelming sense of this collection is that he isn’t doing anything any harder or harsher or worse than the mildest milquetoast liberal comedian would do today.

The occasional slur aside, this isn’t material or an ideological viewpoint that would be out of place in contemporary mainstream political comedy!

Yes, it’s more inventive and interesting than the more trite end of that, but Lenny Bruce is very much approaching the serious topics and ideas he explores from, ultimately, the kind of ideals and ideas that are meant to be the broadly accepted social consensus today: discrimination is bad (and stupid), and that people should be free to live their lives as they want to, when those decisions don’t impact on others.

There’s nothing here that feels confrontational or shocking, there’s nothing here that feels scandalous even – the things he mocks Catholics for are much tamer than most of the things Catholics would get mocked about now, for example… His writing about racism in America is entertaining and perceptive, his skewering of norms is witty… and it was also recognisable and relatable – he was popular, he was famous, he was well known.

He was a victim of the kind of limiting of free speech that that that—

Arrrgh igot into a roll but I gotta stop!!!

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I enjoyed it! I’ve enjoyed listening to some recordings of him. I’ll read his autobiography soon and add more thoughts on Lenny Bruce when I reflect on that.

Thank you, byeeeee