LENNY
– VALERIE KOHLER-SMITH
It needs to be asked: If Lenny Bruce was to appear today how would he
be received? Particularly in America. Would the Alt-Right try to
claim him as one of their own and declare him to be an avenging angel
of the First Amendment? Or would they see him as the complete
opposite of all they hold dear and as an example of cultural Marxism
in action, and therefore unleash the hounds of ultra-conservatism
upon him in much the same way as they did in the Sixties? You might
hope the latter but in this day and age you never can tell.
Lenny Bruce was a pioneer of modern-day, observational stand-up
comedy and effectively paved the way so that others might follow. And
of course, they did. Without Lenny Bruce we would have no Richard
Prior, no Bill Hicks, no Jerry Seinfeld, Stewart Lee or even probably
no Ted Chippington. It was Lenny Bruce who suffered the slings and
arrows of the self-appointed moral guardians of American society so
that others after him might be allowed to be funny. Lenny Bruce
suffered so that we might one day laugh.
Lenny, written by Valerie Kohler-Smith is the novelization of
the film based on Lenny Bruce's life starring Dustin Hoffman as the
much-beleaguered comic. Written in 1974 it's a book very much of its
time, written in a New York vernacular very specific to the
Seventies. It doesn't pertain to be anything other than what it is,
it simply fulfils its role and does its job. As such, it doesn't take
anything away from the Lenny Bruce story but neither does it add
anything. The best bits, in fact, are when it quotes directly from
some of his spiels. For example:
'You know who I'd love to get in front of the House Un-American
Activities Committee? Daddy Warbucks.' (Daddy Warbucks being a
fictional character from the comic strip Little Orphan Annie).
'Senator: Now Daddy, will you tell this Committee what's really
going on at your place with you and that little Orphan Annie and the
weird little dog that keeps going 'Arf'? Are you really her Daddy? Uh
huh, that's what I thought. OK, you've been having sex parties, isn't
that it? Well tell me Warbucks, how come she has no eyes? Her eyes
are always rolled back in her head. That's ecstacy, right? “Oh
Daddy – oh, Daddy, Daddy,” and the dog keeps going “arf”.
'Arf' means 'next', right?'
Or when he talks about President Eisenhower and how the button to let
off The Bomb is on the fly of a Boy Scout, or about how it's just as
well Jesus wasn't killed in the last fifty years as we would have had
to contend with a generation of parochial school kids running around
with little gold electric chairs around their necks. Or when he's
being self-depreciating: 'You know it's really weird. Everything
that strikes me as being funny is based on all this destruction –
this despair and all. But, you know, if the whole world were well,
tranquil and all, without the violence? I mean come on - where would
I be? I'd be standing on an unemployment line somewhere. Like I say,
I'm a hustler. As long as they give, I'll grab.'
As with everything in life, if you're a comedian you need to find
your own special trait, your own style. You need to find your own
voice. Your shtick. For years, Lenny Bruce performed in clubs
to an ever decreasing audience who had come primarily to watch the
strippers, and not to hear a collection of old jokes they'd already
heard a hundred times before. He'd finally reached rock bottom where
he knew he could say anything to an audience – anything that came
into his head – because he knew that nobody was listening anyway.
Until, that is, he suddenly began attracting a new kind of audience –
the beatniks.
Word was getting around that here was one of their own, a comedian
who this new generation could actually identify with. The clubs he
was playing were soon wall-to-wall with them and with their eyes on a
good return on their investment, other much larger club owners were
soon bidding large sums of money for him to play for them. Lenny
Bruce was suddenly 'in'.
With his new found fame and his new found audience there came the
kind of attention from a section of the audience from which there was
to be no benefit, neither guffaws and laughs or even financially from
them paying to come and see him. Lenny Bruce had come to the
attention of the police. At almost every performance they started to
show up, standing at the back in uniform or out of uniform at a
table, sipping an orange juice whilst scribbling copious notes down
into their police notebooks. At the end of a show they would sidle up
to him, take him by the arm and say “You can't say that word in a
public place, Lenny.”
“What word, Officer?” Lenny would reply “I said a lot of
words.”
“You know what word,” the Officer would tell him “You said a
lot of crap, smart boy. You think you can go around saying that any
place you want? It's against the law.”
“But I didn't do it or anything,” Lenny would tell them “I just
said it.”
The word was 'cocksucker'.
During his lifetime, Lenny Bruce gained a lot of famous friends and
supporters – Frank Zappa, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer,
Paul Newman, Gore Vidal, Hugh Hefner and so on but also a lot of
enemies in high places. By the moral guardians of America he was
hounded, harassed, arrested, jailed and banned. He was even barred
from entering Australia and the UK as an 'undesirable alien'. So much
so that in the end no club could afford to put him on as it would
almost certainly put them at risk of losing their license. In the
end, destitute from the endless legal fees and being unable to
perform anywhere, Lenny overdosed on heroin and died alone at the age
of 40.
Valerie Kohler-Smith's novelization is a good enough place to start
with Lenny Bruce but perhaps it might be just as well to watch the
actual film? Even better, there's a lot of recorded material and live
clips of Lenny Bruce available now on YouTube and there – getting
it straight from the horse's mouth – is the best place to
investigate him. Bearing in mind how old all this stuff is, a huge
amount of his spiels, routines and monologues are still standing the
test of time and are still extremely funny.
Pioneer. Godfather. Legend. Lenny Bruce.
John
Serpico
