How To Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography by Lenny Bruce

A couple of months ago, I read a book that contained a selection of transcripts from the live performances of the trail-blazing and culturally significant stand-up comedian, Lenny Bruce. I enjoyed it very much, and went on to spend several hours listening to many of the easily-available audio recordings of his work. Though there was a lot of overlap between what was typed up into that book and what was released as “official” recordings, there was enough difference (and there remains enough material available) to entertain and engage at length.

As I wrote in my comments/thoughts on that book, Lenny Bruce was dogged by controversy and police/governmental harassment, regularly being arrested, fined and put on trial for the crimes of “obscenity” and, slightly later, drug possession. Although he was successful and popular and well known, by the end of his life and career, he had been pushed out of the mainstream film and television work he had previously had, he had been barred from performing in numerous venues and several cities, and ended up low on funds, low on friends, and dead by overdose at 40, with his body photographed and circulated by the paparazzi for all the world to gloat and laugh over.

Lenny Bruce was acclaimed and important, and his legacy has continued to be seen and felt in the many, many decades since his death. There have been many high-budget documentaries, a 1974 Dustin Hoffman-starring biopic, as well as reprints of books and – the reason why I became intrigued to look him up – he is regularly spoken about by all the subsequent generations of comedians as the individual the artform (yes, it’s an artform) owes a lot (the most?) to.

Bruce is seen as the person who established standards of the form, who developed and trialed and fixed problems and expectations and created, legitimised, opportunities. He was someone who took being funny seriously, and made other people take seriously the business of being funny. And some people – too many people – fucking hated him for it.

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This book is an autobiography, originally serialised in Playboy magazine between 1963 and 1965 (the sixties were weird). Bruce died in 1966, so although he wasn’t right at the end of his career by the end of the timescale covered in this book, his decline and his arrest record were already growing apace. There wasn’t quite the sense, reading this, that Bruce had given up, but there was a very real and very growing sense that the walls (the arrests, the press intrusion, the puritanical public opinion) were closing in…

The book spends a lot of time exploring Bruce’s childhood, youth and early parts of his career, which included stints in the military, a stint working on a farm, with these activities interspersed with recollections of early relationships and sexual experiences. This is all engaging, fun, funny and often cheeky, but – really – the book only goes beyond being an enjoyable picaresque romp once Bruce has become a celebrity and begins to be attacked…

There’s nothing, really, in Bruce’s material that would be considered truly shocking today, and though there is occasional language used that would not be palatable, this comes across as archaic terminologies (this was a long time ago!), rather than evidence of a hateful agenda… Throughout his performances and the writing included here, Bruce projected clear and targeted opinions against bigotry, against cruelty, against prejudice and against ignorance. He wasn’t a reactionary chasing easy laughs by mocking the minoritised, his work (that I’ve encountered) was – when it wasn’t self-deprecatory – poking fun near-relentlessly at the small minded, small c-conservative… His work was against someone scared by difference, someone intimidated by the unknown, someone unwilling to question their own prejudices and someone riven by repression, hidden rage and a comfort with meanness and repressive government policies.

Bruce, then, was a public figure promoting critical thought and critical engagement with culture and politics, he was someone speaking against – often in ribald and direct ways, but also often in playful, silly ones – politicians, against the police, against organised religion, against mass media, against specific people in the entertainment industry, against institutions, against businesses, against places and cities and against venues and audiences he’d previously played to… His jokes were withering and layered and the evidence of their competence is that they still work today, and that their intended targets are often still things that need effective mocking today.

Bruce’s work was satire – not just political satire, but social satire, too. It’s not just the blunt racists he mocked, but the self-proclaimed well-intentioned liberals; it was the corrupt, but also the zealous, it was the hypocrite, but it was also the dickhead… He wrote and performed a lot, producing hundreds of hours of work. Some of it is still available to listen to, watch and read. But the majority of it is not.

When things turned, when this successful celebrity satirist began getting resistance, it comes across – in Bruce’s telling – as almost farcical. “Obscene” – in legal terms, at that point – meant “pornographic” and so the initial trials collapsed very quickly, because Bruce was not conducting a show that descended into most of the audience sticking their hands down their pants… But eventually things shifted, and specific words, removed of context, were used to justify – in more conservative judicial districts – slightly more damage against the comedian… And then – whether it was prescription medication (as Bruce claims throughout this book) or if it was something more illicit, the regular arrests for drug possession began…

Associations with a drug user, with someone hated by the police and by the church and by the government and by several prominent public figures, led theatres and venues to drop contracts, to cancel gigs… And Bruce’s career faltered, began to wither and then – before he could build it back up (he would have been in his early forties for the Summer of Love and all those the subsequent years much more forgiving of the lewd…) – he was dead.

It’s a tragedy, it’s someone being broken by a system that set out to break him.

And that’s how Lenny Bruce tells it. Who, yes, was the person it was all happening to, but (also) he was the person it was all happening to.

This is a book with some really big laughs in, it is consistently very funny…

Sometimes they’re specific, cheeky, light laughs… sometimes they’re important laughs drawing attention to injustice, inequality, hypocrisy… and sometimes, too, there are moments of seriousness, about ageing and experiencing the world differently, early in the book, but then also all the detail about his later life and personal/professional collapse.

I’ll watch one of the (many) documentaries about Lenny Bruce, soon, and maybe that Dustin Hoffman biopic if I can find it.

I enjoyed this a lot. From 60 years ago, but it all still felt relevant. Which, alas, maybe it shouldn’t…

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NB: The book seems to be out of print at the moment, but so out of print that most of the first results when you search for it take you to full online versions of it. Worth a read, if you screen-read, for sure…