Was Lenny Bruce ever funny? I’ve heard him praised for his offensiveness and his battling the law and censors, but did he have any funny bits? Books I’ve perused on him are big on facts but short on anything particularly funny he said.
Was he just “that comedian that swears” or did he have a lot of good funny that was overshadowed by his “offensiveness.” I’m really interested to find out if he was really funny or just funny because everyone was stoned or on goofballs back then.
Those in the is-funny-because-he-was-just-funny camp: if you could provide web links or comments to review that would be a big plus
FWIW, I heard about 45 seconds of one of his stand-up bits somewhere; I don’t remember where. His bit went something like this:
“In the Village ya got yer dikes; in SoHo ya got yer queers; in Brooklyn ya got yer Jews; and in Harlem ya got yer niggers. All dem queers and all dem niggers fuckin’ each other and the Jews not carin’ so long as they had their WASP friends turning on the lights on Saturday night blah blah blah…”
The crowd was in hysterics.
I didn’t get it.
Maybe in the 60’s this was terribly funny; or maybe the crowd was laughing because they’d never heard anyone use those words on stage. I dunno.
First, I think this really belongs in Cafe Society, not GQ.
Second, although humor is highly subjective, I think that most folks would agree hat Leny Bruce was funny. I’m too young to hve heard him the first time around, but he apparently was a successful stand-up before he started getting outrageous in his act. They even built an animated cartoon around one of his routines. But you can hear for yourself – his stuff was recorded, after all, and you ought to be able to either get an old copy or a new re-issue.
Or you can experience his routines second-hand. Watch or read the p;lay Lenny, or rent the Duston Hoffman movie of the same name. (As with Amadeus, the play and the movie are completely different animals). A lot of the stuff, in the play at least, isn’t composed of offensive stuff.
If you’ve never seen the animated short film parodying the Lone Ranger, that incorporates Bruce’s stand-up routine, you’ve missed one of the funniest moments in American comedy.
Lenny Bruce was recorded and filmed. Since this is a subjective question, I recommend you go take a look at those fine works instead of asking us.
But since you are asking, I would submit that there is one scion of Lenny Bruce who has far surpassed Bruce’s own notoriety and success. If you listen to both, I think you will agree that Howard Stern has adopted much of Bruce’s timing, pacing, and subject matter.
Stern is widely regarded to be funny. But not by everyone, particularly in the past few years when the schtick has begun to wear thin.
I would conjecture that comedy very rarely ages well. It’s too oriented towards “the moment” in time, that audiences years later are rarely connected to the subject well enough to “get it” in the same way that contemporary audiences (of the time) would have. Lenny Bruce seems to fit this bill very well, and I can name tons of others who were once considered comedic geniuses, but now the bits they are famous for don’t sound particularly hilarious. Look at early TV comedy (the “variety show” type rather than sitcoms, which tend to be more universal), and see how poorly it aged. Other than universal humor (slapstick, say, of the Three Stooges variety), not much stays current, and hence, funny.
Lenny Bruce was funny to me when I first heard a record in 1982. He had good timing, and his satire of how uptight everyone was in the early 1960s was still spot on in the Moral Majority era.
Like Sofa King said, he was copied; I’d say that he started the whole social satire genre. Besides Howard Stern, George Carlin, John Hicks, Bill Maher, and all the comedians of that sort would be out of jobs if it weren’t for Lenny Bruce.
I’m not a true expert on Bruce, but I believe that virtually all of the recorded material from him is from the last few years of his career (and life). By that time he was having huge problems even finding venues willing to book him, and most of his appearances were staged with policemen in the wings waiting to arrest him if he said anything out of line.
It’s certainly true that by the end his act had degenerated into a literal reading of transcripts from his court cases, but that has little or nothing to do with the Lenny Bruce of the 1950s. As a comic, he stayed away from the one-liners typical of comics of the era, and many of his routines are long stories that depend on voices and sounds for their effect. That makes him very hard to quote, although some of the routines preserved are fine indeed. But that Lenny is almost entirely lost, and all we have are memories to go on.
Well, almost. A long out-of-print book, The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. by John Cohen transcribes hundreds of pages of his routines. It’s been 30 years since I read it, so I’m not going to make any claims about the humor, though.
I had a copy of this book, but I gave it away to a friend when I moved. I’ve never actually seen any of his comedy performances and have only heard a couple bits, but I found the transcripts of his work highly intelligent, entertaining, and just plain funny. I’d love to see him during his heyday.
I don’t for a moment think his comedy was based completely on shock value. There is poignant social commentary underlying most of his routines.
I understand that comedy is subjective that’s why I didn’t mention that I’ve actually heard him from MP3 and was pained by it - too “stream of conscious” for me. I didn’t want to come across as bashing him, however - a few MP3’s do not a career make. He may have been funny, but I can’t find any evidence otherwise - and he seems to be ONE part of the 60’s that hasn’t been beaten into the ground yet (well, metaphorically
I believe some recordings of his were recently reissued on CD.
I recall listening to some bits of his on Las Vegas. They were indeed quite funny, but also very thoughtful – which I think puts him in a rather distinguished class of comic.
Well, to start with, I object to the title of this thread. To just let it go would be to agree that he was, in fact, offensive. I never once found myself offended by his work. I was, and to some extent remain, offended by the hypocricy and vehemence of the people that went after him in the courts. When a child can see people actually die on T.V., like on the news reports on the war or the shooting of Oswald, how are their delicate sensibilities being protected by persecut… I mean prosecuting a nightclub comic that said “shit”?
And to whether or not he was funny, the answer is yes. For examples, please read his autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People”, and listen to his concert albums. I specify his concert work, like the Berkeley Concert and the Concert at Carnegie Hall, because the stuff on his other albums are the result of what the record company was willing to release. Not a true representation of his art.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think George Carlin’s bits from the 70’s are still funny today, allowing for the fact that we’ve all heard some of them a million times by now.
Lenny Bruce is considered a hero and a great comedian because he was a leftist, and since the left controls Hollywood and most media, they glorify their heroes and hype up their legend. That’s why JFK, a failure in almost every respect whose ineptitude nearly started nuclear war and whose weakness allowed the Berlin Wall and communist excursions the world over while he consorted with mobsters’ molls, constantly comes up on presidential ratings polls in the top 10. That’s why Hillary Clinton, who would have accomplished nothing without her husband’s coattails is the most admired politician in America and Sarah Palin, who persevered on her own without personal wealth or shady real estate deals, is vilified.
In America today everything is polarized, from Tom Tebow to Avatar and everything else in pop-culture, claimed by and promoted by or vilified by either the left or the right and claimed by one side or the other. Bruce comes down on the left, so be benefits from their control of his story. Lady Thatcher was conservative, so lefties, who control the hollywood “truth” about people are free to demonize and slander her, as they did Reagan.
But don’t try to produce a Kennedy movie without permission of the leftist gate-keepers.
Another good example is the leftist portrayal of the Tea Party vs. OWS. Luckily, the leftist pop culture machine has pushed this crap for so long, most Americans have learned to filter it out. The problem is, sometimes it takes a while for the lies and hype to crumble, and in that interim disasters like Captain Wonderful’s election to the presidency can occur.
You can be sure Hollywood will airbrush his deficiencies when it’s time to for his hagiographic retrospectives (as they attempt to do now, as the left-wing media writes the “first draft of history”).
It is encouraging that the truth about Princess Precious is coming out slowly, despite their obfuscations these past 4 years since he came to prominence, even lefties like Chris Matthews cannot deny the truth.
While Bruce was indeed funny, his main influence was the style and presentation of his comedy. It was a huge break from the Henny Youngmans, Jackie Masons, and Milton Berle’s out there, and showed that stand up comedy to actually be, to borrow a phrase from Mel Brooks, Stand up Philosophy.
He changed the way comedy could be delivered, and paved the way for Pryor and Carlin, just to name a couple.
I like his quotes and think he was probably generally funny, but I’ve heard his 1961 Carnegie Hall show that was said to be the best of his life and didn’t so much as chuckle. But then again, have you heard the other comedians of that age? I’ve grown up listening to great comedy but if I lived in '61 and had only heard “Take my wife, please! [rimshot]” Bruce would have probably knocked me out of my seat.
What the…?
Oh, just realized this thread was 7 years old, resurrected for that political gibberish above.
I’ve seen some of his routine (on television I’m not old enough to have seen him live), and while some of it is certainly dated I’d say he could be pretty funny. Here’s part of his routine I thought was pretty funny but I’m paraphrasing heavily and changing the names because it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
“Let’s say you take the most racist klansman in the world and give him a choice. He’s going to be stuck on an island for five years and gets to bring along one woman. His choice is between bringing Halle Barry and Janet Reno along as the only woman he’ll be seeing for the next five years. Suddenly race doesn’t seem to be such an important issue.”
