Lenny's children
(thanks
Judy | Salon.com 2004)
40 years after Lenny Bruce began his dark descent, here are the top 10 true
heirs to his outlaw legacy.
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By Dan Kois
"Dear
Judge Murtaugh," the letter began, and after that initial misspelling,
went downhill from there. Bruce asked that he be named the attorney of record
for the trial. He asserted that
Bruce
was at the end of his rope. The cops and the courts seemed to be on a vendetta
against him. No nightclub would book him. He would soon be convicted of obscenity
by the
We
remember Bruce today for his struggles with the courts of
Much
of Bruce's act was deliberately not funny, especially late in his career, when
his courthouse misadventures took over his nightclub shows. ("The Lenny
Bruce Performance Film," the only widely available video of his work, is
a painful chronicle of one of his final performances, spent on a point-by-point
rant against Murtagh's opinion.) But his early routines, as captured on "Let
the Buyer Beware," reveal a rapid-fire performer who combined outrageous
ad-libbing with carefully honed bits and shtick. Bruce was tireless in pointing
out hypocrisy -- in religion, in sex, in race relations. He cursed a blue streak,
eager to exploit four-letter (and 12-letter) words for their shock value while
simultaneously trying to "liberate" those words from their gutter
status.
And
listening to him today raises the inevitable question: Who is fighting the battles
-- for good and ill -- that Lenny Bruce fought 40 years ago? Bruce's trials
helped assure that anyone can say "cocksucker" on a nightclub stage,
but who among contemporary artists is pushing the boundaries of correctness,
making people angry, and exposing hypocrisy? Here's a list of the 10 best that
are out there now, and a guide to where you can catch their incendiary humor.
10.
The Upright Citizens Brigade (Matt Besser/Amy Poehler/Ian Roberts/Matt Walsh)
In their Comedy Central sketch show, the Chicago-trained quartet combined a
healthy distrust of authority with a taste for unlikely juxtapositions, calling
to mind Bruce's riffs on cops, judges and polite society. But it's with the
opening of their own comedy theater in New York (where, full disclosure, I occasionally
perform) that the UCB has demonstrated their debt to Bruce most clearly, by
making the theater a summer haven for protesters and protest comedy. The theater
offered water and shelter to RNC protesters last month, and recent shows like
"The Real Real World: The White House" and Adam McKay's satire "George
Bush Is a Motherfucker" obscenely skewered public figures with a vigor
Bruce would've appreciated. (For a show schedule, go here.)
9.
Louis CK
A former writer for "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" and "The
Chris Rock Show," CK's stand-up comedy focuses on the darker sides of sex,
family and society. In this way he's reminiscent of Bruce, whose comedy sought
out the darker side in almost any issue -- and often went way over the line
separating dark from pitch black. Plus, one would never suspect from CK's fringe
of unruly red hair and goatee that he's the crackpot behind "Pootie Tang."
For a taste of
the shifty ferocity of CK's humor, listen as he talks about how easy it is for
people to make fun of "white trash" -- "Everybody laughs at them.
Do you know why everybody laughs at them? Because they're poor, that's why.
What's funny about them is that they're starving to death" -- and hear
the audience howling with laughter. Are they laughing at the sheer meanness
of his humor? Or is he slyly turning the audience into the very people he's
really making fun of? (For a show schedule and humor tracks, click here.)
8.
Chris Rock
Bruce didn't shy away from race relations; several of his most plangent bits,
including "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties," assailed
white liberal racial guilt. Years later, Chris Rock would call to mind Bruce's
race talk with this riff: "There ain't a white man in this room that would
change places with me! And I'm rich! That's how good it is to be white. There's
a one-legged busboy in here right now saying, 'I don't want to change. I'm gonna
ride this white thing out, see where it takes me.'" (Rock's fourth HBO
special, is out now on DVD.)
7.
Eddie Izzard
In 1999, Izzard -- best known as the manic stand-up behind the shows "Dress
to Kill" and "Glorious" -- played Bruce in a revival of Julian
Barry's 1970 play "Lenny" in London. Reviewers praised Izzard in the
role -- particularly for undercutting his own lighter spirits and injecting
the role with the darkness and desperation Bruce himself brought to the stage.
While Izzard's own jokes are far more innocuous than Bruce's (for a sample,
go here to listen to his riff on
"chickens"), their coming out of the mouth of a burly transvestite
gives them a bit more zing. (For upcoming tours and appearances, go here.)
6.
Sacha Baron Cohen
On HBO's "Da Ali G Show," British comedian Cohen combines Lenny Bruce's
willingness to deliver discomfort with Andy Kaufman's devilish persona-swapping.
As Ali G, a clueless British rapper, or as Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakh journalist,
Cohen interviews unwitting subjects like Buzz Aldrin, Jim Baker and Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, forcing them into rhetorical corners by force of cluelessness.
In doing so Cohen's not afraid to make himself look bad and his targets look
worse: Witness the wince-inducing recent episode in which Borat got the patrons
of a Tucson, Ariz., bar to enthusiastically sing along with him: "Throw
the Jew down the well/ So my country can be free/ You must grab him by the horns/
And then we have a big party," which sparked an investigation by the British
FCC and raised the ire of the ADL against Cohen (who happens to be Jewish).
Lenny Bruce -- who noted that not only did Jews kill Christ but "we'll
kill Him again when He comes back" -- would surely have approved. (HBO
is airing reruns of the recent season of "Da Ali G Show" at various
times; check schedules, or HBO's Ali G home page.)
5.
David Cross
One-half of the team behind HBO's "Mr. Show" and a cast member on
FOX's "Arrested Development," Cross brings to his stand-up a jittery
energy and an impatience with hypocrisy that easily call Bruce to mind. A 1999
bit in which he railed against airlines' Miles for Kids program -- in which
customers donate their frequent-flier miles so that sick children can take one
last trip -- is Brucean in its fury. Cross imagines a holding pen of terminally
ill children inside the airport and plays a smiling idiot of a gate agent who
refuses to board most of them: "Oh, there are empty seats on the plane,
but you'd have to pay for those tickets, because nobody donated his miles. I'm
sorry. Airline policy." ("Arrested Development" airs Sundays
at 9:30 p.m. on Fox. For Cross' schedule and information on his comedy recordings,
including the recent "It's Not Funny," click here.)
4.
Sarah Silverman
"Relations between black and white would be greatly improved if we were
more accepting of our fears and our feelings and more vocal about it,"
Silverman said in interview in the Forward last year. "When my comic friends
who are black [and I] joke about race and say racist shit to each other, it
makes it silly, and easy to laugh at." To that end, Silverman -- one of
the creators and stars of Trio's new "Pilot Season" -- wryly spouts
material that, in the hands of a less sure comic, would seem truly offensive.
No, screw that -- even in Silverman's hands, her jokes are truly offensive,
and that's what would make Lenny Bruce proud. Among her many Brucean moments
was the one that earned her the ire of Asian-American media watchdog groups
in 2001. Called to jury duty, Silverman asks a friend how to get out of it.
"My friend said, 'Why don't you write something inappropriate on the form,
like 'I hate chinks'? But I don't want people to think I was racist, so I just
filled out the form and I wrote 'I love chinks.'" ("Pilot Season"
will rerun in its entirety Sept. 25 and 26 on Trio.)
3.
Aaron McGruder
McGruder's comic strip, "The Boondocks," appears in about 300 newspapers
every day, and as Bruce did with stand-up comedy, McGruder is reinventing a
staid pop-culture medium as a forum for rabble rousing. And just as Bruce's
anger eventually took over his act, so has McGruder's taken over the strip;
in recent months, "The Boondocks" has been so vitriolic toward the
current administration as to barely qualify as entertainment. When McGruder
is funny, he's hilarious, but even when he isn't, he's mad as hell. Particularly
reminiscent of Bruce in its mixture of the personal and the political was last
October's series in which Caesar and Huey developed a plan to save the world:
Get Condoleezza Rice a boyfriend. "Maybe if there was a man in the world
who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it."
(Read "The Boondocks" here.)
2.
Rick Shapiro
Of all the comics on this list, Shapiro is the one whose style most overtly
apes Bruce's; the wiry, black-clad
1.
Howard Stern
Sure, Stern hardly makes the pop-culture meter move these days. Sure, his show
has become a parody of itself, with a constant parade of saline-enhanced dim
bulbs lining up for a cheap Web site plug in exchange for a few slaps on the
ass from the King of All Media. Sure, Stern's barely even funny. But remember
what Lenny Bruce said: "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce." Similarly,
Howard Stern is no longer a shock jock. He's Howard Stern. Howard Stern, the
man who cost Clear Channel $1.75 million this spring; Howard Stern, the man
who openly rips both George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey on the air; Howard Stern,
just about the only celebrity actively fighting the FCC's new indecency rules,
the contemporary equivalent of those New York vice cops furiously scribbling
in their notebooks at Lenny Bruce's Cafe Au Go-Go shows more than 40 years ago.
Like him or hate him -- and I myself can't stand to listen to more than three
minutes of his show -- you have to admit that, more than any other public figure
out there, Stern is following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce. Like Bruce, he's
furious about the hypocrisy of those attacking him; like Bruce, he's obsessed
with finding justice; and like Bruce, his career is coming to a flaming end
before our eyes. (You can hear him here.)