Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925

Subject: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 07:45 PM

Leeny Bruce was born on October 13th 1925. How do you think he influnced modern culture?

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 07:47 PM

Modern what?

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 07:51 PM

Well guest 7:47- language, comedy, censorship. Now Lenny was someone who knew about censorship.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 07:55 PM

He'd a found out here for sure.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 08:35 PM

I think his routine about how society sets up a police force,then doesn't want it to tell THEM what to do is the best.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: bobad
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 09:28 PM

Lenny would have been 81 tomorrow, somehow I don't think that anyone who functioned at the frenetic pace at which he did would have survived to that age irregardless of the needle and the damage done.

His comedy and social satire blazed the trail for much of what passes for, but seldom equals, that genre today.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 09:31 PM

shouldn' this be in BS?

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 09:56 PM

Shouldn't we ban anonymous GUESTs?

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Wesley S
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 09:06 AM

I remember a movie called "Lenny" starring Dustin Hoffman - but it seems to have disappeared. You never seem to see it on the late show or any of the 5,324 cable channels available. If so - I've missed it.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Wolfgang
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 09:31 AM

I've seen that movie. It was brilliant.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 10:58 AM

"Shouldn't we ban anonymous GUESTs?"

Fucking right.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 12:35 PM

Probably Albert Goldman's biog of Lenny made me interested in becoming a performer more than any other single thing. His fascination with the world in which Lenny moved is etched into every single line. His phrase 'the bravery of the showbiz footsoldier' inspired me.

Bruce himself was virtually incomprehensible to me. His transcribed and recorded 'schtick' is stuffed full of Jewish phrases, fifties culture references, contemporary slang,obscure Americana - by the 1970's when I started paying attention you needed a glossary.

However as an icon, he was of paramount importance.
Someone challenging enough for the Americans to prosecute and the English to deport.
A discurssive and descriptive style of humour - so different from the dull obvious mother in laws knickers gags that made up the fare of The Comedians TV Show. The Americans were ahead of us, and Lenny was the avant gard of the Americans.
Witty, educated, left-wing leaning, hip, aware, racially integrationist, bohemian, creative, outward looking - he was the antithesis of all the thumbs we were under in the 1970's, and sad to say he was in the exact opposite direction from the insularity and racial uniqueness that English folk music movement was so consciously seeking.
To me he was a heroic figure - probably a notion he would have laughed at the absurdity of.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 06:43 PM

Bruce was so far ahead of his time. He laid the groundwork for people like Pryor, Carlin, Cambridge, and Gregory.   All brilliant satirists and comedians. Unfortunately you now also have people (mostly on Comedy Central and many clubs) who use smut for shock effect with no point whatsoever.

I have some Lenny Bruce material on recordings and a few of his routines I was able to play on my radio show---notable the Southern Used Car Salesman commercial for Fat Bobs Cars. He could do dialects very well. He skewered all the bigotry in that one. Another was the hypocrisy of racism where people said--"...would you want your sister to marry one?.. His punchline to that routine was--(paraphrase)"..your sister will jump over 10 Charles Laughtons to get to one Harry Belafonte and you will jump over 10 Kate Smiths to get to one Lena Horne".

Sadly the court cases pushed him over the top and he became unfunny and then drugs took him for good.

A bit of trivia---do you know his first TV appearance? Scroll down--










Arthur Godfrey's talent Scouts. His mother introduces him and he does impressions--Peter Lorre, Bogart, etc;

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Barry Finn
Date: 13 Oct 06 - 07:25 PM

Lenny wasn't just ahead of the Brittish,

"The Americans were ahead of us, and Lenny was the avant gard of the Americans."

he was ahead of us Americans too. It took a couple of decades for the rest to catch up. It's a shame that censorship killed the greatest comedian of those times. We were stuck with the bathroom humor & comedy that couldn't climb out of the toilet. He was a social statement who had the knack for making us look at our society's dark sides & then have us laughing at it with eyes wide open.

There should be a place for him in the stars.

Barry

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 05:51 AM

The film Lenny, was interesting from several aspects.

It was directed by by Bob Fosse who (as with Cabaret) got the nighclub atmosphere exactly right.

Willy Rushton and Peter Cook, who had seen Bruce work at The Establishment Club in London were interviewed at the time of the film. Both conceded it was a fine performance from Dustin Hoffman, but both added it was damn-all like the real Lenny Bruce.

Photographs of Bruce show a face with heavy lidded eyes - more like Robert Mitchum in appearance.

Dustin delivered the lines of those routines like a mischievous puck like sprite, whereas Bruce's onstage persona was very much the coolest dude alive.

During the early 1980's I used to blow all my Christmas gig money on a long holiday in January in Spain every year. Working one of the clubs was Ray Martine (star of the TV programme Stars and Garters in the 1960's). Ray had hung out a lot with Bruce in his New York days - first meeting him at the gents outfitters where he had sold Lenny a suit.

I urged Ray to write down his memories, as I had no idea what to ask - but I was utterly fascinated at the story he had to tell. However Ray was bored with showbusiness by this point and jaded in his thoughts towards it.

One of the worse things about the corporate nature of the entertainment industry is that these seminal figures like Lenny Bruce are getting more and more inaccessible to us. Witness the abusive threads about Ewan MacColl - almost entirely based on misunderstanding of this complex but very genuine artist.

Alan Bennett said of the poet John Betjeman, that he was fascinated with that most remote of historical periods - the recent past. I think many of us are, but unlike Betjeman we lack the ability to communicate our fascination.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Mrs.Duck
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 07:22 AM

Well he obviously didn't influence my culture since I know not of whom we speak!

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 09:54 AM

He influenced and inspired loads of people on the folk scene -probably more people on the English folk club scene than in America.

By the 1970's the folkmusic of England had been become hopelessly dissociated from the sensibility of most English people. Folk musicians wanted to play jigs and reeels, which nobody danced. Singer/songwriters were writing endlessly about the first world war, which hardly anybody remembered. Writers like MacColl were left wing idealists in an age when the Trade Unions didn't seem to have much idealism about them.

Social comment came from Mike Eliot, Jasper, Connolly, Harding, Brimstone - the folk comedians. The folk clubs gave them the listening socially aware audiences that the traditional comedians' venues like working mens clubs did not. Eventually the folk comedians went on to influence mainstream modern comedians like Alan Davies , Jack Dee, Ben Elton, and the late Bill Hicks.

Lenny Bruce was culturally grandaddy of all that. 'The Godfather of Schtick'. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him on his Shot of Love Album.

Lenny was a comedian's comedian.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 10:08 AM

It's an age thing Mrs Duck.

eric

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Barry Finn
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 09:20 PM

Hi weelittledrummer

"He influenced and inspired loads of people on the folk scene -probably more people on the English folk club scene than in America."

I knew of Lenny in my mid teens which was pre folk for me by only a very few short years. I got hip to Lenny from my father & he eventually passed on to me a couple of his LP's. It seemed all my father's friends liked him & knew of his 'schtick' but then my father lived in NYC before moving back to Boston but I only knew a few of his NYC pals. From all I knew Lenny seemed to appeal way more to the 'Jazz' & the 'Beat' crowd (which my father was a part of both) than to the 'folk' crowd, here in the US. That's just my take on it.

Barry

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Sorcha
Date: 14 Oct 06 - 11:25 PM

I don't have any Lenny recordings but I've read a lot of his stuff. Wish I could have seen him do it....I love the Catholic Church Bingo Raffle.

Subject: RE: Lenny Bruce's birthday Oct 13 - 1925
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Oct 06 - 12:42 AM

yes indeed Lenny used to hang around with jazz musicians, played jazz clubs as a preferred venue. his vices and definition of cool were from the era of be bop music.

He wan't a hippy - the folk/rock thing. He was hip - the jazz thing.

Lenny liked to pretend a veneer, an awareness of middle class sophistication and education in his stage act - but middle class values left him cold. His heart was at one with the hustlers and jazz players, and showbiz wannabes - thus the Arthur Godfrey talent show that someone mentioned.

No, when I said he had had an influence on the English folk club movement - I wasn't really talking about the music. God alone knows what he would have made of Martin Carthy. Although maybe Martin knew him - they must have both been gigging London at the same sort of time.

Lenny (both Bruce himself and the film) influenced a lot of English guys into thinking that it would be good to do something similar in England. There already were folk club acts who used comedy as part of their act. But the new phenomena was really that comedy acts like Hale and Pace started coming into folk clubs looking for a hip, intelligent socially aware audience that wasn't available to them anywhere else.

Before long these guys were the hottest acts on the folk club scene. Eventually the tv got to hear of the more lucky and successful ones, and the whole thing morphed into the alternative comedy scene. People formed comedy clubs, which still outstrip the folkscene in popularity. At the time of writing - a medium sort of comedy act can charge about three times more than the highest paid folksinger, and works for half as long.

A couple of years ago - I was talking to a member of Brownsville Banned, who were my favourite folk club comedy act from the 1970's. He was saying, we were just abit too early by about a year or so ....before the alternative comedy circuit got going.....

But when I recall the atmosphere at their packed folk club gigs of that era. I really can't think of anything I've liked better in a folk club.