Word: bruce
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...used to say that he was being crucified," comedian Mort Sahl recalled, "and... I'd say, ?Hey, man, but don't forget the resurrection.'" Lenny's trials spanned the last six years of his life; his resurrection took much less time. In the spring of 1967 the movie Lenny Bruce, a filmed record of a 1965 Basin Street West gig, showed those who had never seen him "live" the highs and the lows, the electricity and the longueurs, of a Bruce performance. That summer, Lenny's face was on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club...
...Around 1971 two movies appeared (including the Fred Baker documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears) and two New York plays (including Julian Barry'sLenny). In 1974 Bob Fosse's highly praised movie version of Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman in the title role, came out, as did a fat, contentious biography by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! My friend Gary Carey wrote an excellent book, the 1975 Lenny, Janis & Jimi, about three charismatic performers who died of drug overdoses. (Even in that sad showbiz trend, Lenny was first.) A few years later, Bob Dylan released the ballad...
...millennium dawned, and his spirit was still not stilled. Foremost among the artifacts was The Trials of Lenny Bruce (Sourcebooks, 2002) by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, a comprehensive, smartly written overview of Lenny's mixture of "black music, white powder and blue comedy" legal troubles; the book comes with a 74min. CD, narrated by Nat Hentoff and featuring many of Lenny's most notorious bits. In fiction, Jonathan Goldstein's Lenny Bruce is Dead is mum about its putative subject, but as a free-form monologue it's firmly in the Bruce tradition...
...There's a six-disc CD set Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware (Shout! Factory, 2005), edited by Hal Willner and Marvin Worth, that wraps all the familiar bits and much previously unheard material in a handsome 80-page book. It's a must for any advanced Bruceophile. And two years ago, Comedy Central chose the 100 all-time greatest stand-up comedians. Lenny was #3, trailing only Richard Pryor and George Carlin, two social critics who (as Carlin notes) wouldn't have had the careers they did if Lenny hadn't made unfettered comedy possible...
...have detractors, who could get more rabid than Lenny ever was. In 1961, comedian Shelley Berman told TIME, "I don't dislike him, but people needed Lenny Bruce for the same reason they needed Hitler." (Hmmm. I don't think Lenny's four-letter word was Jews.) And Jean Shepherd, whom I cherish as a radio monologist, later railed against the Lenny Bruce threat ? of the hip people lording it over the square ? saying it was "a new kind of Jew burning, I think it could lead to a new kind of gas oven." (Goldman, Bruce's biographer, wrote...