Happy Birthday, Lenny

It’s the birthday of comedian Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Schneider in the town of Mineola on Long Island, NY in 1925. He became a comedian at a time when comedians told jokes methodically, with a set up and a punch line, over and over. Bruce just stood on stage and talked about things like politics, society, religion, and race; and he free-associated on those topics to make people laugh. He said “I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.” And he said “All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.” And he said “The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.”

This was the moment
that an obscure yet rapidly rising
young comedian named Lenny Bruce
chose to give one of the greatest
performances of his career. ...
The performance contained in this album
is that of a child of the jazz age.
Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity,
Candor and Free Association.
He fancied himself an oral jazzman.
His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker,
take that mike in his hand like a horn
and blow, blow, blow everything
that came into his head
just as it came into his head with nothing censored,
nothing translated, nothing mediated,
until he was pure mind,
pure head sending out brainwaves
like radio waves into the heads
of every man and woman
seated in that vast hall.
Sending, sending, sending, he would finally
reach a point of clairvoyance
where he was no longer a performer
but rather a medium transmitting messages
that just came to him from out there —
from recall, fantasy, prophecy.
A point at which,
like the practitioners of automatic writing,
his tongue would outrun his mind
and he would be saying things he didn't plan to say,
things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up —
as if he were a spectator at his own performance!

Albert Goldstein

from the liner notes THE CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT (1961)