Last month -- on August 3rd to be exact -- we marked the 38th anniversary of the death of Lenny Bruce. Thirty-eight years. That’s two generations, which means your average young person today hasn’t a clue who Lenny Bruce was or what he represented. How to explain Lenny Bruce to the uninitiated? That’s a hard thing to do, because there’s nobody around these days who’s even remotely like him. How should he be described? Freedom fighter? Philosopher? Prophet? Comedian? Bruce was all those things. He was also someone marked by the government to be taken down and made an example of, a divorced man carrying a torch for his ex-wife, and a heroin addict.
I recently commented to a friend, “The thing I love about Lenny is that he was so sweet,” and my friend replied, “All junkies are sweet -- that’s why they need heroin. They’re missing the protective shrink wrapping the rest of us have that buffers us from the abrasions of this unkind world.” As tough as Bruce was, he was fatally na•ve and he was fragile, and that’s why it’s painful to reflect on that night he lay bankrupt, strung-out and dead in his Los Angeles house -- a house that had been repossessed by the bank and was no longer even his. Why was the press allowed to film his nude body as he lay there? Where were his friends and family? Why were the powers that be so determined to silence him?
The whole story is laid out in Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware, a six CD set released this month on Shout Factory. Produced by Hal Willner, who fell in love with Bruce when he was an eleven-year-old boy and happened to hear one of his records, Let the Buyer Beware includes classic bits, rarities, and previously unreleased recordings culled from Bruce’s personal collection, which is under the stewardship of his daughter, Kitty Bruce. Because Bruce began taping all his shows, phone conversations -- everything -- once the law began hassling him, the collection assembles more than 200 hours of material.
Willner’s done a magnificent job of editing it all into a coherent story (which runs approximately seven hours), but before you dive in, you might want to check out the two film documentaries about Bruce that are currently available; Lenny Bruce: Without Tears, released in 1972 and directed by Fred Baker, and Robert Weide’s Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, released in 1998. Both contain a generous amount of performance footage, and to see Bruce work is to love him. In an interview with Nat Hentoff filmed shortly before Bruce’s death, Hentoff brings up the financial aspect of Bruce’s career, and Bruce immediately points out that money “isn’t why I’m up there.” Hentoff asks, “so why do you do it,” and Bruce replies, “to have fun -- I really dig being up there.” Bruce really was born to be onstage, and that’s what makes him so much fun to watch. At turns mischievous, tender, and scathingly honest, he’s an irresistibly seductive performer.
Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in New York in 1925, Lenny was an only child who was largely raised by his mother after his parents divorced when he was five. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Navy and was stationed overseas during World War II, and following his discharge in 1946, he moved to Hollywood to study acting. It was in L.A., between the years 1953 to 1955, in cruddy little clubs with names like Strip City, the Bamboo Room, and the Cup & Saucer, where his native genius came into full bloom. Bruce started out as a conventional comic doing set bits, but when he found himself on the strip circuit he figured he had nothing to lose by being as freeform as he wanted. He began interacting with his audience, and addressing the issues of the day -- civil rights, the war in Vietnam, organized religion -- and that’s when his trouble started.
Bruce was arrested for the first time in 1961 in San Francisco, ostensibly on grounds of obscenity, but there were plenty of comics around at the time doing blue material. There was nobody else talking about the church, however, and that’s really what drove the campaign against him. Bruce refused to water down his act, and the harder they leaned on him the deeper he dug his heels in. He began being arrested on a regular basis, clubs became increasingly reluctant to book him, and in 1963 he wasn’t even allowed to enter Britain -- mind you, this is the country where Augusto Pinochet was welcomed by Margaret Thatcher following his arrest as a war criminal in 2000. What was it about Bruce that was so threatening? If you’d like to know, check out Let the Buyer Beware; forty years on, what Lenny Bruce had to say still packs a punch.
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