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.