Rebel with a Caustic Cause

The Lean young man in Ivy stepped into the spotlight on the small stage of The Cloister in Chicago. "We have some celebrities with us in the audience this evening," he said. "Sitting ringside are two boys in show business who got their start right here in the Windy City--the wonderful Loeb and Leopold.

"We're also privileged to welcome the star of the show that opens here two weeks from tonight. The management is sparing no expense in bringing him to you. Let's have a big hand for the lovable Adolph Hitler."

Most of the audience realized with these opening lines that this was no ordinary club comic and that they were in for a very unusual evening's entertainment. If any question remained, the first sketch answered it.

"I'd like to take you now to the headquarters of Religions, Incorporated," he said, "where the Dodge-Plymouth dealers of America have just held their annual raffle and given away a new 1959 church. Seated around the table are the religious leaders of the country, including Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Father Divine, Danny Thomas, Jane Russell. ... The chairman speaks: 'Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, this year we've got a tie-in with Oldsmobile. Now I (continued on page 66)Rebel(continued from page 21) realize that you can't get out there on the pulpit and hard sell Oldsmobiles. But I was thinking, why couldn't you, every now and then, throw in a few little lines like, Drive the car that He drives. You know, you don't have to lay on it, just zing it in there, then jump to the Philistines or something.'"

In a single performance, comedian Lenny Bruce may find humor in such sacred and profane subjects as religion, homosexuality, funeral homes, race relations, dope addiction and matricide ("John Graham Green is a guy who blew up a plane with 40 people and his mother," Bruce reports, "and for this the state sent him to the gas chamber. Proving that the American people have lost their sense of humor. After all, anybody who blows up a plane with 40 people and his mother can't be all bad."). The Bruce repertoire of "sick" monologs, gags, dramatizations and mimicry is as apt to shock and outrage as amuse. Yet he is not really an outrageous comic. Lenny Bruce is a free-wheeling iconoclast who pokes fun at some of the sickest aspects of our society. His Religions, Incorporated, for example, isn't anti-religious, it is his way of indicating the tendency to turn religion into Big Business. Bruce recalls warmly the audience of graduate ministers from the Berkeley, California School of Ministry before which he appeared a few months ago; Religions, Incorporated was their favorite routine and the one that provoked the most laughter.

"Remember a year or so ago," he asks, "a kid in Long Island was stuck in a well? They finally got him out, and the doctor who attended him sent his parents a bill. So dig what happens--everybody starts screaming, 'What a fink that doctor is!' You know, what right has a doctor who went to school for 12 years and spent a fortune for his education to charge us poor people for service rendered? Anyway, the whole country doesn't sleep for a week worrying about whether this crook of a doctor is going to steal a fee. In the meantime, you pick up any metropolitan paper and you see, 'Negroes can't live here, Orientals can't live there.' Always emotionalism over the wrong things.

"Anyway, so much public pressure is brought on the A.M.A. that they call in this poor doctor and they say, 'Look, you can't get paid for that job, but we'll make it up to you. We'll give you a new disease for next year. We haven't done the grippe for a while. We'll pull a switch on the grippe and give it a new working title ... something exotic ... uh ... Asiatic Flu. We'll call up Parke-Lily and get some new pills. For symptoms we'll try, let's see ... nausea, headache, loss of appetite. How's that? Forget the well job and the disease is yours.'

"So the doctor is taken care of, and the country breathes easier again, because now they know that that bill won't have to be paid after all. However, there's just one thing ... the child will have to be returned to the well."

Misplaced public emotionalism is a favorite Bruce target. He has built biting routines on the commercial carnivalism that sometimes accompanies a disaster like a mine cave-in ("Get away from there, kid, quit kicking dirt in the hole!") and the recent trial of the American soldier for killing a Japanese woman ("So sorry. Verdict has been change from life in prison to two weeks at Waldolf-Astoria.").

Hollywood's puerile tolerance films bug Bruce, too: "The scene opens in a schoolyard. We see Juan Rodriguez, insecure in his torn leather jacket, with all those clean, polished Anglo-Saxon types. He speaks to the other boys and we see democracy in action on the streets of a big city: 'Leesen to me, you guys. One theeng I cannot forget ees that I am a Spanish keed. OK? Pheel here is a Jewish keed. OK? And here is a colored keed and an Irish keed and an Italian keed--and, my friends, in thees country we all have to stick together--and beat up the Polocks!'"

With such seemingly intolerant humor as this, Lenny Bruce preaches tolerance and only the prude and the bigot fail to get the message. On stage, Bruce takes on some of the mannerisms of Mort Sahl, though his material is less cerebral and a good deal further out. Like Sahl, whom he considers a close friend, he has a penchant for milking sacred cows and he sprinkles his speech with Freudianisms like "Oedipus complex," "sibling rivalry" and hipster argot like "bread" (for money), "ball" and "cool it." He also favors "freaky" and "fink" and occasionally somewhat bluer words, though he insists his reputation as a blue comic is undeserved, and club owners for whom he has worked tend to agree: "A sick comic, yeah," say Skip Krask and Shelly Kasten, of The Cloister, jokingly, "but not blue."

Mort Sahl, whose favorite prop is a newspaper, likes to retell Lenny's reaction to the news headline, "Flood Waters Rise. Dikes Threatened": "It's always the same," said Bruce. "In time of emergency, they pick on minority groups."

Like Mort, Lenny's current nightclub career began on the West Coast and he is almost unknown in the East. This is actually his second career as a performer. He got his first chance on the Godfrey Talent Scout Show, doing take-offs on Hollywood Nazi films, so popular in the Forties. From there he played the old New York Strand and similar spots. "But I bombed," he says. "I was ready for them, but they weren't ready for me." Audiences, however, are growing hipper and the "inside" comic is the order of the day in the little clubs across the country. Lenny Bruce is just a little more inside -- or a little further out, depending on where you're standing -- than any other comedian working today. He is an extremely sensitive performer and his audience can make or break a show. "I think most good comedians are insecure," says Lenny. "They're up there on that stage looking for acceptance and love. If I haven't managed any rapport with my listeners in the first ten minutes, I'm dead. But when I'm swinging and I feel that warmth coming up at me, I'd like to ball the whole audience."

Bruce's background could have easily been lifted verbatim from the jacket copy about the author of some current best seller. Born on Long Island, he and formal education had had it after grammar school. He worked on a farm, joined the Navy, saw action at Anzio and Salerno, came home, then worked his way to Asia and back aboard freighters. "In those days," he recalls, "my burning ambition was to write a kind of seagoing Studs Lonigan. I figured that with my Navy experience, I should know more four-letter words than James Farrell." But the only tangible thing he brought back from his sea service was a large tattoo on his arm that he got in Malta, though he says, "I smoked Marlboros when I was six and it grew up."

The weird Mr. Bruce is 34 and a bachelor. "I was married once, but it didn't last," he explains on the stage. "This sounds like a typical comic routine, but my marriage was broken up by my mother-in-law. Actually, my mother-in-law broke up my marriage. One day my wife came home early from work and caught us in bed together.

"Sex can be a serious problem in a marriage. Have you seen these magazine ads with the chick sitting up in bed and her husband sacked out beside her, and the caption says, 'He Didn't Even Kiss Me Goodnight.' And it's a pitch for High Potency Rybutol. Then it says, 'Night after night, my husband would come home tired and irritable, and he wouldn't touch his supper. He'd just sit around for a while and as soon as his head touched the pillow, he'd go off. But I wasn't suspicious. I knew I had a good man. Until one night I opened up the top drawer of the bureau and I found a wig and lipstick and high heels.' This man was nervous and irritable and never touched his supper, but after taking High Potency Rybutol, he is now touching his supper. Doesn't ball his old lady, but he's touching his food. Pretty sick." (concluded on page 78)Rebel(continued from page 66)

Lenny usually performs in a rather quiet Brooks Brothers manner, but in his impression of Holy Roller Oral Roberts he flails his arms, stomps his feet, and waves a snake before his audience. His impersonations are excellent and always worked into the act, as when he depicts Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula and Family as a group of itinerant actors between bookings ("All right, Junior, comb your face, drink your blood, bite Mamma goodnight, and go to bed.").

• • •

Lenny likes his characters to use the speech of show business and the hippie, even when they are men in the highest governmental places. When Sherman Adams and Vicuna were two headline staples last year, he envisioned a scene in the White House in which President Eisenhower took Adams to task: "All right, Sherm -- you can level with me, baby, what else did you take?" Sherman suggests that they stage a big news event to help draw the nation's attention away from the controversy: "Couldn't we have a cabinet member shot or something?"

"Call in Nixon," says Ike. "Hello, Nick. Sit down, sweetie. Kid looks great, doesn't he, Sherm? Get him some of that 12-year-old Scotch and the good cigars. How do you feel, Nick? ... Ok, Ike, what's going on? What's the bit? ... There's no bit, Nick. Sherm and I were having a few drinks and we said, let's have Nick up. You know, we're just kicking around some ideas -- Say, Nick, how'd you like to go to Lebanon for a few days? ... How'd you like to go to hell, Ike? ... Is that a way to talk, Nick? After all I've done for you, you have the chutzpah to tell me to go to hell? ... Oh, Ike, I didn't mean it. I'm grateful and all that, but I don't want to go anywhere anymore. Why don't you send Dulles? He's been home for two days. ... That's very nice, Nick. That's a very nice way to talk. That's what babies say, Send Someone Else. But soldiers say, Yes, I Am Glad You Picked Me; I've Got A Hostess Cupcake And An Orange And I'll Go! You'll go, Nick. You'll take your old lady, Pat, and you'll go ... Oh, Ike, I can't go. I keep bombing all over the place. I still have spit on my jacket from Caracas. Everyone hates me ... They love you, Nick ... They hate me ... They love you. You did well in a lot of places... Where? ... Toledo. The B'nai B'rith loved you in Toledo."

• • •

Even as he carefully nurtures his new café career, Bruce is busy in other media, too. He is working on a weekly ABC-TV show in Hollywood called Lenny Bruce Swings. He has etched an LP album on the Fantasy label entitled The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce. His greatest love is probably the movies and he is writing a film called Leather Jacket which he plans to produce and star in. It will deal with a handicapped derelict who dreams of owning a leather jacket and a motorcycle. "It'll be arty, sort of a Bicycle Thief with a motor," he says.

Despite whatever success he may find in other fields, Bruce-boosters feel he is best suited to the intimate offbeat rooms around the country where his very special gift for comic satire is understood and truly appreciated.

"Folks," says Bruce, "we got a lot of nice cars out hyar at Fat Boy's. Let me tell you 'bout a used car, friend -- it's just like a clock or a watch -- you don't know whatcha got till you git it home. But there's one thing you can count on -- any car that moves off the Fat Boy lot has an OK Sticker on the windshield and, buddy, when you see an OK Sticker on a Fat Boy car, you know one damn thing for sure -- there's an OK Sticker on that windshield.

"Now hyar's some of the cars ya'll be seein' down hyar. Nice little Studebaker -- this car was just used once -- in a suicide pact. There's just a little lipstick on the exhaust pipe. Wipe it right off.

"If you like foreign cars, we gotcha little Fuzzvutten here -- this is a German car that was just used a little bit during the war -- taking the people back and forth to the furnace. The motor's real good, but the upholstery is shot. You know, they're real stubborn, those people.

"Now we don't wantcha t'come to Fat Boy's fust. You go on around to those other dealers, and they'll tell you they'll give you this and they'll give you that, and you just write it all down on a little bitty piece of paper. Then you come on down hyar an' you say, 'Fat Boy, I seen you on TV. I been all over this damn town, buddy -- here's the deal they offered me -- now I'm back to you and I want it -- I want it, Fat Boy!' And he'll really give it to you, folks. Been giving it to the public for 30 years. Same location."

Herb Caen, the San Francisco oracle, has this to say about Bruce: "They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic -- and sick he is. Sick of the pretentious phoniness of a generation that mate his vicious humor meaningful. He is a rebel, but not without a cause, for there are shirts that need unstuffing, egos that need deflating, and precious few people to do the sticky job with talent and style. Sometimes you feel a twinge of guilt for laughing at one of Lenny's mordant jabs -- but that disappears a second later when your inner voice tells you, with pleased surprise, 'But that's true.' The kind of truth that might not have dawned on you if there weren't a few Lenny Bruces around to hammer it home."