Word: stand-up
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Before he became the Jimmy Stewart--like gentleman of sitcom, Newhart was a stand-up sensation. His 1960 LP, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, went to No. 1 and won a Grammy for Album of the Year. The old bits, in which he would play one side of an increasingly strained conversation, still had their gentle, exasperated wit when he did them, word for word, in a 1992 Showtime special. "I know some of you know these routines by heart," he told his audience, "but it throws me off to watch your lips move along with mine...
...monkeys, several dog breeds and a car tire, plus all varieties of black and white humans. Compulsively confessional, he talks of his cop encounters, his heart attack and his father's death in bed, if you know what we mean. It's a priceless evening with the all-time stand-up shaman...
...Buyer Beware (Shout! Factory, 2005), edited by Hal Willner and Marvin Worth, that wraps all the familiar bits and much previously unheard material in a handsome 80-page book. It's a must for any advanced Bruceophile. And two years ago, Comedy Central chose the 100 all-time greatest stand-up comedians. Lenny was #3, trailing only Richard Pryor and George Carlin, two social critics who (as Carlin notes) wouldn't have had the careers they did if Lenny hadn't made unfettered comedy possible...
...Lenny made plenty of enemies. But in saying what he thought, at great price, he liberated stand-up, and all showbiz behavior. A live performance, for comics and rockers and actors, was henceforth designed not to seduce the audience, to play to the old expectations of charm and propriety, but to confront, challenge, titillate, outrage it. I think only jazz musicians had tried that before. Secure in their improv skills, they dared to investigate the farthest reaches of aural experimentation. And if the ringsiders didn't get it ? if a Charlie Parker was literally playing only to the band...
...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...