Skip to main contentIntroducing infamous comic Lenny Bruce before an interview aired in 1959, Studs Terkel opined, "Lenny Bruce is the type of comic that needs to be seen and heard."
That quote and the interview that follows are found on the recently released anthology Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware, which contains both the wonder and the downfall of the comic's searing, short-lived standup career, painstakingly documented in this enormous six-CD set. As the anthology's liner notes and the unreserved laughter that pads Bruce's diatribes attest, those who sought out his brash shows and were willing to really listen witnessed a man who took all that was taboo in post-World War II America--religion, sexuality, racism, drug use--and stripped it of pretension, exposing the sacred as silly. Those who only heard inflammatory cues like "cocksucker" and "nigger," on the other hand, regarded Bruce's honest criticisms of the status quo as a threat to civility, labeled him a delinquent, and did whatever they could to shut him down through censorship and arrest.
Let the Buyer Beware, conceived by Bruce's daughter Kitty Bruce, details much of his tumultuous career from 1958 until the artist's death of a morphine overdose in 1966 with a breadth that is both intimidating and awe-inspiring. The sheer magnitude of the collection hints that producers Hal Willner and Marvin Worth were too attached to Bruce's material to edit it down to a manageable size, and there are some repeated and unnecessary bits here. For the most part, though, the seven-and-a-half hours of material culled from Bruce's albums, long-forgotten tapes and other previously unreleased acts proves its necessity, as Bruce's bits map out the many and sudden shifts of his life and his onstage persona.
In other words, there's a complicated history here, and it's being told, in real time, by the man who was living it. Nowhere is this more apparent than during Bruce's back-to-back shows at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop in 1961. Bruce was arrested following the first show for using the word "cocksucker" during his act. Let the Buyer Beware includes that bit and then some from that show, followed by a short bit from Bruce's 1966 album, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, called "Blah Blah Blah," which recounts in hilarious detail his experience in court. Immediately after that track on the CD is a long selection from Bruce's next night at the Jazz Workshop, where he tries to sniff out the "heat" in the crowd.
Bruce's material, as documented here, is unmatched by those like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Bill Maher, who have walked the path he paved, embracing the inflammatory to comedic effect. Bruce wasn't only a great comedian--he was a thinker who believed that in order to change the world, you had only to change the way people thought about words. Anyone who would have continued to listen to his act after he said "cocksucker" that night in San Francisco would have heard this, just as anyone who sits down with this tome of comic history will. "I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem," Bruce went on to say. "There are none."
(Shout! Factory, $69.98)
See reviews of new DVDs from comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor in View from the Couch, page 67.
WWeek 2015