San Francisco Chronicle
January 4, 2004
Page E - 5

 

Lenny Bruce had the last laugh

David Kipen

Lenny Bruce -- whose 1964 New York obscenity conviction Gov. George Pataki finally vacated two weeks ago -- satisfied at least two definitions of genius. First, a genius is somebody who breaks all the rules only after learning them thoroughly. This was certainly true of Bruce, who spent years as a stand-up tummler, honing his comic timing on Borscht Belt impressions so feeble that timing was pretty much all he had.

By the time he bombed out of the Catskills circuit and started playing strip joints, he was polishing his offhand, improvisational delivery to a high shine. Bruce could get laughs with nothing. He did it on rhythm, on emphasis, on technique alone.

Then, inspired by the strippers with whom he shared a bill, Bruce started exposing himself -- at first physically, according to some accounts, but soon personally, and with mounting confidence. The "blue" language he'd formerly saved for late in his riffs, as a surefire punch line, started shifting forward. The objectionable had become his subject.

Where his jokes used to end, now they were only beginning. He had finally found material to match his technique.

Here's where the second definition of "genius" comes in: somebody unimaginable in any other medium. David Lean is a good example, because his marriage of word to frame -- and of each frame to the one after it -- would have been wasted anywhere but in the cinema. Or look at James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald: They're all born novelists, as anybody who's ever read their plays can attest.

In the same way, Lenny Bruce was a pure comedian. His words are inseparable from his delivery. The routines simply don't work on the page. Anyone who doesn't believe this should read John Cohen's "The Essential Lenny Bruce" sometime. A posthumous compendium of Bruce's most famous bits, the book is about as funny as the nightclub transcripts entered into evidence to convict him.

Bruce's best routines are truly unprintable because the printed word can never do them justice. This, alas, leaves folks who never saw him live, haven't seen footage of his act and haven't even heard his records more or less wondering what the fuss was about. Here, as in few other places, is where a gifted critic comes in handy. Ralph J. Gleason covered the jazz beat for The Chronicle through the '50s and '60s, and if a band ever had as much trouble staying on the beat as Gleason did, audiences would have laughed it off the stage.

Anything before a live crowd was fair game for Gleason, which is how he came to preview Bruce's hungry i gig in these pages on June 21, 1959. "Lenny Bruce," he wrote, "charges madly against almost every taboo of our society in a frequently successful attempt to shock us into another look at ourselves. ... On stage Bruce says things -- and makes us laugh with them and at them -- which would earn you a left to the jaw if you said them at a party. ... Like Kafka, Holden Caulfield and Duke Custis (narrator of Warren Miller's 1959 novel "The Cool World"), Bruce is fighting a world he never made but unlike them he has a clear vision of the enemy. He has the all or nothing daring of the jazz musician (his humor is similar to jazz in many ways) and like Charlie Parker he gives the feeling he doesn't care for the consequences, all he's interested in is right now."

With reviews like that, Gleason did as much as any critic to make Bruce's name, and Gleason knew it. When the Village Voice intelligentsia tardily took up Bruce's cause in 1964, Gleason rightly sniffed, "Welcome aboard, fellows, it's nice to have some company. It's been kind of lonely out here on a limb all these years." When Bruce died of an overdose in 1966, Gleason's obituary for him was one of only a few keepers. "What was Lenny Bruce really like?" Gleason wrote. "They've asked me that for years. Well, he had one of the greatest minds I have ever known, so fast it took your breath away. He had the perceptions of a true artist and courage of a martyr, which he would have hated to be. He was Christ-like in his principle of forgiveness." If that's a man you don't recognize from the recent coverage attendant on Pataki's pardon, chalk it up to misplaced hagiography and short memories. Chalk it up, while we're at it, to hollow tributes like Pataki's own. Pataki declared that "freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror."

Thanks, Guv. In the eyes of the state of New York, apparently, it's taken less than four decades for Lenny Bruce to go from convicted criminal to patriotic emblem, as suitable for wrapping oneself in as the American flag. At a distance of 3,000 miles, the Pataki pardon presents a slightly different picture. From here, it looks more as if -- even now, buried in a northern Los Angeles grave these 37 years -- Lenny Bruce can still show up a hypocrite without half trying.


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