Lenny Bruce died 40 years ago this month. That hasn't stopped him from being a huge influence on, and liberator of, comedians such as Eddie Izzard and Tommy Tiernan, writes Philip Watson
The great US comedian Lenny Bruce, the hipster comic lauded as an "oral jazzman" and "one of the seminal forces of American culture", played only one run of performances on this side of the Atlantic. He arrived in London in 1962 with a reputation as the man who had revolutionised stand-up. Instead of performing prepared jokes on predictable subjects, he specialised in free- associating stories and skits on subjects such as religion, sex, drugs and politics. It was a confrontational style that had landed him in trouble with reactionary commentators and the authorities. He had won approbation and hero worship among liberal intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and hip insiders, yet Bruce was also dubbed the "sickest of the sick", "the man from outer taste" and "America's number one vomic". Just before arriving in London he had been put on trial in San Francisco on charges of obscenity.
Britain was not exactly ready for him. Young comedians such as Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller had certainly caused a stir at the Edinburgh Festival with Beyond the Fringe, a satirical show that for the first time tackled such sacred cows as Queen Elizabeth, Britain's prime minister and Shakespeare. Its success had led Cook to set up the Establishment, a small private club on the first floor of a former Soho strip joint, which was where Bruce was to perform.
But the UK in 1962 was still in the grip of postwar Conservative austerity; this was pre-sex, rock'n'roll and rebellion. In his autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, Bruce lampooned Britain and the prevailing mood: "England is a country in India. The men have two jobs - they're either in the RAF or they're accountants . . . who do everything in scroll. They wear scarfs and caps all the time and they have bad teeth. The Windsors are about 200 years old by now. Those who live in farm areas are lewd, lascivious people that are always strangling children."
The four-week run was controversial to say the least. His strongest supporters were Cook and his cohort, who were thrilled and awed by Bruce's fearless and freewheeling brand of sharp-tongued, foul-mouthed comedy. Miller wrote in the New York Review of Books that Bruce was "a great stage artist, a soloist of unbelievable virtuosity". And the celebrated British drama critic Kenneth Tynan proclaimed: "Bruce is the sharpest denter of taboos at present active . . . a true iconoclast . . . who breaks through the barrier of laughter to the horizon beyond where the truth has its sanctuary."
Not everyone shared these views. During his performances there were protests that ranged from cries of "shame" to glasses thrown at the stage, even fist fights. There were regular walkouts, and not just by shocked middle-class "stiffos", as Bruce referred to them.
The playwright John Osborne, who had written the original angry-young-man drama, Look Back in Anger, walked - as did the Irish actress SiobháMcKenna. On her way out, Cook thanked her and her boisterous party for finally leaving, causing one of her group to grab Cook by the tie and punch him in the face.
Bruce was dark, dangerous and derisive, and he made Cook and his Oxbridge friends look like a comfortable cabaret. They suddenly seemed stuffy, old-fashioned, square. "If Beyond the Fringe was a pinprick," said Tynan, "Mr Bruce was a bloodbath."
By the end of his engagement Bruce was being hounded by an outraged press, and he was rushed out of the country. A year later, after he had been arrested again on obscenity charges and busted for drugs, Cook applied for permission to bring him back to London. On arriving at Heathrow he was swiftly deported, the British home secretary declaring that allowing him to enter the country "would not be in the public interest".
A few days later Bruce flew to Dublin and was driven to Belfast, entering the UK by the "Irish back door" route. On arriving in London, however, he was deported again. He was also invited to take part in the 1963 Edinburgh Festival, but he was again refused entry to Britain. He never did return.
The United States' new religious leaders are holding a sales conference in the plush New York headquarters of Religions, Inc when a phone call comes in from Pope John XXIII. Bruce plays Oral Roberts, a televangelist, who takes the call
"Yes operatuh, yes, all right, ah'll take the charges . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Hello, Johnny! What's shakin', baby? Meant to congratulate you on the election . . . That puff of white smoke was a genius stroke - kept it in the papers faw six days . . . Great! . . . We got an eight-page layout in Viceroy magazine - 'The new Pope is a thinking man'. Ah'll send you a tear sheet on it . . . Yeah, yeah . . . Same old jazz . . . When you comin' to the coast? I can get ya The Steve Allen Show on the 19th¨ . . . Jus wave, thass awl. Wear the big ring . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Okay, sweetie . . . Yeah . . . Yew cool it too . . . No, nobody knows you're Jewish!"
Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Long Island, New York, in 1925. His father, Mickey, was born in England, but the family emigrated in 1905. His mother, Sally, was a stage performer and comediawho, after his parents divorced, when Lenny was five, became a strong influence in his life. Sally took her son to a burlesque striptease show when he was just 11, and later encouraged him to work on stage, helping him develop his material and hone his delivery. Throughout his career, his Jewish mother was his close friend, associate and confidante.
At 17 Bruce joined the US navy; he served in Europe during the second World War. Towards the end of war he precipitated his exit from the forces by pretending to be homosexual; in the autumn of 1945 he was given a dishonourable discharge. Deciding that his future lay on the stage or in movies, he adopted a matinee-idol look and started doing impressions of film stars in clubs around New York.
At first he was nervous and cliched, and had no material of his own. But he started to hang out with the new-style comics, inspired Jewish showbiz guys who liked to improvise and use hip lingo, underworld argot and Yiddish slang. He got into jazz and being cool, being the hipster intellectual. As Albert Goldman, biographer of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, writes in his book Ladies and Gentlemen - Lenny Bruce!!, "Lenny learned to be funny - to see funny, think funny, talk funny. Funny guys were the guys with an original point of view, a private language, a sound. The Jewish equivalent of the black jazzman. A hero."
He then learned to translate this private world to the stage, to develop it into a public performance. He learned the tricks of stand-up: the timing, the rhythm, the dexterity, the dialects, the words. He learned to handle risk and rejection. He learned how to make a show sound spontaneous and fraternal, as if he were addressing you personally.
In 1953 he went to California, where he tried to make it as a screenwriter and actor in Hollywood B-movies. Mostly, however, he worked the burlesque and strip clubs of Los Angeles, and soon his act became raunchier, sexier, angrier, freer. The cruder the club - Bruce called them "toilets" - the more creative and crazy his act became. He would talk about sexual fantasies and perversions; one night he walked on stage naked. The genesis of the Bruce cult was formed. He was becoming infamous, "sick", the comedy rebel with a cause.
He played a club called Ann's 440 in San Francisco in 1957 and was officially "discovered". It was the period in the city of the Beats, poetry, jazz and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, of nonconformity and abstraction, and Bruce's debunking of politics and religion - he'd recently developed the "Religions, Inc" sketch - and of the hypocrisy of US social and sexual mores, chimed with the times.
"They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic - and sick he is," wrote the influential San Francisco critic Herb Caen. "Sick of the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his humour meaningful . . . There are shirts that need unstuffing, egos that need deflating, and precious few people to do the sticky job with talent and style."
He started to get club dates around the country, and (cleaned-up) television appearances followed. His act became even more antagonistic, shocking and uncompromising. In one sketch he played a former Catholic priest named Fr Flotsky, who had left the Church because he couldn't stand the confessions. "What a bore! Ridiculous, man," Bruce would shout. "One out of 50 is sexually stimulating, but the rest - whew! It's the same trite crap over and over, week after week."
In 1961 he performed to 3,000 people in New York's Carnegie Hall, and he was at the height of his art and powers. Goldman describes it as "the greatest statement of his new unstructured humour that he had yet made. It may have been the finest all-round performance of his career. Brilliant, vivid, spontaneous, variegated, moody, honest, fantastic and incredibly candid." It is a performance that is still available on CD.
Two years later, the mass-circulation Playboy magazine serialised his autobiography over six issues, and the underground cult had become almost mainstream. Except that the show was pretty much over for Bruce by then. The law, the system and the drugs had caught up with him.
Although he could be tormented and aggressive on stage, people who knew Bruce referred to him as gentle and compassionate. "Lenny was very easygoing, good natured, never got excited, never got angry," said his mother, Sally, in 1989. "He always wanted to see things nice."
It was a charm that, combined with his modern, edgy, film-star good looks, had a considerable effect on women. Throughout his life he was an archetypal playboy and committed womaniser. After his shows ended it was party time, and Bruce used to boast that his goal was at least "one girl a day". He dated several famous women, including Faye Dunaway.
Even during his five-year marriage to the woman he always proclaimed to be the love of his life, a beautiful red-haired stripper called Hot Honey Harlow, whom he described as "a composite of the Virgin Mary and a $500-a-night whore", he was active in the Los Angeles swingers and orgy scene.
He was also hugely compulsive and self- destructive. The jazz life that he so readily adopted in the 1950s was steeped in drugs, and Bruce was more devoted than most. As well as various amphetamines and hallucinogens, he was soon hooked on heroin. For most of the decade from the mid-1950s to his death, aged 40, in 1966, from a morphine overdose, he was an obsessive junkie with a runaway habit; at one point in 1959 he was spending $600 a week on junk, the equivalent today of many thousands of dollars.
His addiction led to financial losses, illness, reckless behaviour, police and FBI surveillance and, most damagingly for his career, arrests and convictions. He was busted for drug possession in Philadelphia in 1961 and again in Los Angeles a year later, and faced the possibility of a 10-year jail sentence. Declared an addict, however, he was sentenced to confinement at a state rehabilitation centre, which he narrowly avoided by making repeated appeals.
It was a criminal conviction, though, and it would have been the end of his career - had he not already been fighting to clear his name on other charges of "appealing to prurient interests" and "performing a lewd show".
At a club in Chicago he was arrested for offending the Catholic Church; at his trial in the city he faced a Catholic judge, prosecutor and jury, who appeared on Ash Wednesday with black smudges on their foreheads. Brendan Behan remarked at the time: "That scares me - and I'm Catholic!"
From 1961 Bruce faced numerous, long-running and costly court cases, most of which were absurd and unconstitutional. He took a principled stand in the face of such harassment and censorship. His humour challenged conventional values and powerful people, but he would not bow to public opinion or popular sensibilities.
His many supporters in the media, arts and academia rallied to his defence. Professors made analogies in court between his language and content and the work of such writers as Aristophanes, Chaucer, Dostoevsky and, particularly, Joyce. There were learned if bitterly contested debates about semantics, social value and artistic freedom.
Ginsberg drew up a petition, signed by such luminaries as Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Paul Newman, John Updike and Robert Rauschenberg, that declared Bruce a social satirist "in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais and Twain". Fans started wearing "Lay off Lenny Bruce" badges and chanting "We love Lenny! We're Lenny's people!" at his shows.
Yet he was often his own worst enemy. He became consumed by the charges brought against him and convinced he was being persecuted. He began to study law, fired numerous leading lawyers and often, disastrously, represented himself. It became increasingly difficult for him to find work, as club owners were often threatened or afraid that they would lose their licences if they booked him; he got further and further into debt. In 1964 he was found guilty of obscenity and sentenced to four months in the workhouse on Rikers Island, in New York, a sentence he again managed to delay and avoid.
Worst of all, his life, as always, spilled into his performances. Whereas his shows were once subtle and revelatory, they were now didactic, sermonising, self-obsessed. One night, at the end of a self-indulgent show during which he spoke almost entirely about his arrests and court appearances, he signed off with a line that was to become almost as famous as his celebrated skits. "I wasn't very funny tonight," he apologised. "Sometimes I'm not. I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."
This month saw the 40th anniversary of Bruce's death, yet his influence on the generations of comedians and stand-ups who have followed cannot be overstated. Many consider him the godfather of alternative comedy, although Eddie Izzard, who portrayed Bruce on stage in London in 1999, goes further: "He is the Jesus Christ of stand-up comedy," he says. Margaret Cho, a radical US comedian, agrees: "We consider him like a messianic figure; he died so we could be free."
After Bruce, entertainers' tongues were considerably looser and their minds significantly freer. In the US, comics such as Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Sam Kinison, Denis Leary, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore and the makers of South Park have all benefited and taken inspiration from Bruce's bravery, integrity and honesty. One of his more direct descendants was Bill Hicks, a daring and provocative comic who criticised the first Gulf War, in 1991, was censored on The Late Show with David Letterman and died, aged 33, of cancer in 1994.
His legacy has also pervaded the work of British and Irish comedians. Cook and Moore enjoyed success with their scatological "Derek and Clive" routines in the 1960s, as did Dave Allen with his mischievous jokes and sketches on the Catholic Church. The Comedy Store stand-ups and improvisers who sparked the alternative-comedy boom in the 1980s also owed a debt to him, whether they knew it or not. And there was a gentle yet indisputable link in the 1990s between Bruce's Fr Flotsky and Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan's Fr Ted. Bruce is often championed when free speech, satire and censorship are debated. In the US he has become a constitutional First Amendment martyr, cited in cases involving rap artists, photographers, civil-liberty campaigners and the pornographer Larry Flynt. In an international climate in which obscenity and censorship are back on the agenda - from the Dixie Chicks' lambasting of George Bush to the furores surrounding the BBC's screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera, Janet Jackson's flashing boob and Danish cartoons - he seems curiously relevant to our often po-faced, politically correct times.
Maybe that's why, in 2003, Bruce was granted the first-ever posthumous pardon in the history of New York State for his obscenity conviction. "This is a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment," said Governor George Pataki. "Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror."
Bruce would no doubt have turned such political opportunism into a comedy routine. It seems appropriate, then, to give the inveterate talker and mould-breaker the last word. "And so, because I love you," he would often say at the end of a performance, "f**k you and good night."
TOMMY TIERNAN
ON LENNY BRUCE
"I first got into him in the early 1990s via Bob Dylan. I had a tape of Lenny Bruce's Carnegie Hall concert, and even though I couldn't understand a lot of the language and references, I was so in awe of his style and his fearlessness.
"I was living in a small bedsit in Galway, and I'd say that I listened to that tape every night for about nine months. At one point, when I was starting out as a comedian, I even tried to be like him. I'd do gigs in which I dressed like him in a Nehru jacket, and that had his pacing.
"Perhaps the strong connection I've made with him is because Irish and Jewish humour seem to have a lot in common. It's something to do with being the underdog, and with the fact that our religions have made pleasure a sin. We also have the same chief concerns, the same big questions about sex, death, religion and family. English humour is more surreal, or silly, or at a remove.
"I don't think his importance has yet been realised, because his style is still 1,000 yards ahead of most of today's joke-tellers. There is simply no comedian around at the moment who has his weight in terms of the assuredness and the depth of his thinking. My style of comedy is different to his, but every time I stand up on stage Lenny Bruce is one of the ghosts who inspire me."