Your Mother's Not a Virgin! by John Barbour

Author:John Barbour [Barbour, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trine Day
Published: 2019-02-13T21:54:46+00:00

Remembering Lenny Bruce

While there are many comedians I enjoyed and made it a point to see them all in person, because being onstage alone doing comedy is such a hard, sometimes soul-crushing undertaking, the one I had total admiration for was Lenny Bruce.

There were the masters of one-liners from Henny Youngman to Bob Hope, the hilarious naughty ones from Moms Mabley to Redd Foxx, those who did masterfully structured bits utilizing a phone and an unseen listener like Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart, the political ones, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory, the absolute masters of mayhem in their early days, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the down on their luck ones, Rodney Dangerfield and George Gobel, the angry, articulate ones, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, the unpredictable eruptions of the comic geniuses, Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams. And those who roared on stage like Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett. In my mind the list is much longer, and I smile as the names race by like the too-fast credits at the end of a TV movie. But there was only one Lenny Bruce. He was the only comic I ever saw, along with Bill Hicks, who had sex appeal. That may sound like a weird thing to say about a comedian, but it’s true.

If you look at any of the names mentioned above, with the possible exception of Dean Martin, who was a handsome singer, you can’t imagine any woman tossing their room keys or panties at them. But no matter how unattractive physically a singer is, nearly all of them elicit this kind of response from women. I’ve seen women race after Gene Simmons, whose face would have to improve to be ugly, and Rod Stewart, who looks and sounds like Carol Channing in drag. Perhaps that’s because singers deal with emotions that get to people’s hearts. Comedians don’t get any deeper than the funny bone. Except Lenny.

Lenny died young, but not before he’d made his mark on America. And what a mark it was. With the stack of comedy records I’d gathered to see what was making the comedians successful, it was Lenny’s I kept going back to, especially the early ones: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, with him lying in a graveyard, smiling as he enjoys his picnic basket. The routines were more than classic comedy. They were insights into the human condition. Insights into the Catholic Church, and into the dark side of our culture and politics, all presented in an engaging voice with a hint of New York. He was about five-nine or ten, had deep, dark eyes, black wavy hair, a round tanned face, and always a hint of a smile, like he was going to be doing something a little risky or naughty. Which he did.

Once or twice he was on Hugh Heffner’s Playboy after Dark, but the set was always too cluttered. The only one on television who gave him a real platform, even after his arrests, was Steve Allen. His movie take-offs were hilarious and his impressions spot on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.