Word: comedian
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...historical figures he unconditionally revered: Jesus. The Christ analogy can be pushed too far (Jesus was not a junkie, though he was a Jew), but there's no question that Lenny was relentlessly and unfairly hounded by the judiciary system. Record producer Phil Spector, who championed the comedian in his last year, claimed that Lenny "died from an overdose of police." Think that's an exaggeration? Well, Martin Garbus, one of Lenny's many lawyers, quotes a prosecutor in the the Manhattan D.A.'s office as saying, "I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy...
...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...
...label that stuck to him ? "sick dirty Lenny" ? had its drawbacks. Frequent arrests, for example. But the advantage of being outspoken was that he could speak about anything. Most comedians marched to a very conventional tune. A few, like Sahl and Dick Gregory, specialized in political satire; a few others, like Redd Foxx and Belle Barth, did "blue" material, at least by 50s standards. (Today it would barely be aqua.) Lenny's satire was more ferocious than Sahl's, his language saltier and more freewheeling than Foxx's. This combination of topic and tone, and the fact that nobody else...
...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...
...Lenny Bruce did care if he was connecting with his audience. To a comedian silence is death; and he wasn't quite Zen enough to dig the sound of no hands clapping. In 1959, talking with Paul Krassner, he defined a comedian as someone who stood in front of an audience and got a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds. But his routines weren't a collection of jokes; they were skits, theater pieces that got laughs from the asides as much as the punch lines. And each bit was populated with two, three, many characters. It was like...