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Rating: First of all, Thank You, Noble Lenny...
“Dear Mr. Bruce,
the other night I attended one of your shows because, having read about you, I was curious to see if you were indeed the sharp critic of our common hypocrisies that I had heard about. I find you to be a sincere man and I am writing to acknowledge this. One is never “liked” when being caustically sincere, whether from the stage of a night club or from a pulpit, and it doesn't surprise me to know you've run into trouble. This letter intends to express my personal solidarity with you, it's an opinion on your show. First of all, I firmly deny that it is obscene in its intentions. The method you use has many affinities with those of some social critics (prophets or artists, not academia). There are pages by Jonathan Swift and Martin Luther that are still considered obscene because those authors overturned the easy and deceitful language of propriety and resorted to the vulgar, crude idiom of ordinary people to demonstrate the emptiness and madness of their time. (It has been said, and the jest contains a good deal of truth, that many pages of the Bible are not fit to be read in church, for the same reason).
It is clear to me that your intent is not to excite sensuality nor to vilify, but rather to shake us and awaken us to the reality of social hatred, the various absurdities surrounding sex, life, and death... and move us to compassion and sanity. It is clear that you are fiercely outraged against our hypocrisies (yours as well as mine) and against that honeyed common sense that passes for wisdom. Such outrage should be shared by every self-respecting person. Your comments are addressed to adults and, to me, they reveal a man who is inflamed with passion for the dishonesty and injustice that lie under the cloak of current prejudices and accepted mass psychoses. They are addressed to adults, and adults do not have, should not have, a need to be protected from the truth in whatever form it is presented to them.
God bless you”
I love this man, we would have certainly gotten along. And Lenny would have been a true debaser. Let's be clear, an incredible balls breaker with a fair amount of arrogance, presumption, and narcissism... like a ConteCarlosalgolpuntinines... madooooooooo!!!
Never banal, always direct and sincere, without many fusses or beating around the bush, damnably raw and unfiltered... someone you can trust even when it seems he's giving it to you... right there, so to speak.
To consider Lenny Bruce a comedian means to have understood nothing. Probably it was part of the strategy because “if he's just a comedian it means he's just talking nonsense to make people laugh”. Instead, Lenny didn't make people laugh, Lenny made them think, or at least he should have made them think. And thinking is not good, people should not think. They should, possibly, believe they're free and worry as little as possible. It has always worked like that.
Lennon, Morrison, Zappa, the Beat Generation, Lester Bangs etc etc... all amateurs compared to him (and me). This guy in the post-war period was the first and unlike any other, to lay bare the hypocrisy and absurd contradictions of American society.
Witty and irreverent, he demolished the prevailing falsehoods regarding religion, sex, racism, capitalism, and everything that wanted to be “moral”. Unfortunately, he worked in small nightclubs, he didn't speak to tens of thousands of people... but he hurt and scared the fake Yankee propriety like no one else.
And in this biography he left us - before dying at just 40, initially published in Playboy in installments at the request of his friend Hugh Hefner (belisim!) - Lenny continues to tear everyone and everything to pieces while recounting his life. From a “chaotic” childhood, to enlisting at just 16 on the USS Brooklyn cruiser during the Second World War, the experiences with Noble Ladies, marriage and divorce, the shows... above all, the endless arrests and trials. A life dedicated to the battle for truth and a demand for respect of the First Amendment of the American Constitution and freedom of speech; all those who came after have to thank him if today they can express themselves “freely” (HUGE quotes, no one is free)
About religion then... but I won't spoil anything else, I'm not worthy... better to hear it from him. Besides obscenity, vulgarity, and defamation, his problems with the law were mainly for blasphemy against religion. This is why the initial letter written by Reverend Sidney Lamier is probably the most beautiful review of Lenny Bruce.
The tragedy is that everything Lenny said more than half a century ago is disgustingly current. The human being manages the impossible feat of continuously worsening... but I'm sure he knew that.
Not to mention “a sick comedian” as cowardly defined by the powers that be... they are indeed the ones who are sick and unhealthy.
Happy reading, I “envy” the Noble who has yet to read it.
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