Word: bruces
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...very end, he could be so stoned he could barely hold a mic, let alone an audience's attention.) Krassner asked Lenny how these lectures on the law squared with his old 15-25-second rules, and he replied, "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce." That might sound pompous, but, truly, Lenny had become sui generis ? his own genre...
...personal stake in Lenny Bruce for nearly a half-century. I first heard about him in 1959 from the cartoonist Arnold Roth, who was a crucial contributor to the Harvey Kurtzman magazine Humbug, and who lived in Philadelphia, as I did. With a kindness that I think back on with gratitude and bafflement, he befriended this gauche but eager 14-year-old and, in the genial tutorial that was our conversations, recommended that I listen to Lenny's albums...
...albums ? Interviews for Our Time and The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ? and Lenny, with a hipster snap of his fingers, quickly became my first stand-up crush. I was hooked by the humor, its breadth and pungency, even if I didn't always pick up on the references. Sure, I knew that Orval Faubus was Arkansas' segregationist governor, and I laughed when Lenny had him ignorantly approving of his daughter's engagement to Harry Belafonte ("Nice Italian boy, eh?"), but the allusions to 30s movies and the talent agency MCA sailed over my head. That didn't matter...
...middle-class Catholic family, since the only record player was in the dining room, where anyone could hear or overhear the LPs, and nobody gave me an angry shout to turn that junk off. So, by applying contemporary community standards (our house), I'd rule that Lenny Bruce was not obscene...