THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
DYING LAUGHING THE SCREEN Bob Fosse's new film Lenny leaves us no doubt that the life of comedian Lenny Bruce (Dustin Hoffman) was fated. The whole structure of Fosse's movie implies this, for the...
...His whole show that night caps off his career the way the punchline caps off the routine about "nigger" and "kikes...
...If we would all just come out and say such words as he does, he assures the audience, they would lose their power...
...The further he pushes this attack, the more nervous twittering there is in the room...
...It's the serious note, the social message, that makes it perfectly all right to go ahead and laugh at the rest...
...In one of the routines, for instance, he singles out every "wop," "kike" and "nigger" he can spot in his audiences...
...In like manner, the serious note on which Lenny's career ends is supposed to make us accept everything else in Fosse's film...
...I'm no comedian...
...Now everyone in the audience breathes a sigh of relief and indulges in the laugh he's been hoping for...
...As in all grand tragedies, the knack that brings success also brings ruination...
...As Fosse sees it, the compulsion that leads to Lenny's downfall is his comedy...
...What his comedy really brought out in the open, then, or at least up on the stage, was not hypocrisy in America so much as that mutual fear of embarrassment comics and audiences had always shared...
...Then comes the punchline, which is that he's trying to defuse words...
...The posthumous lilt to the praise they all have for Lenny keeps us constantly aware that his death is approaching...
...Each clip from this monologue is inserted into the film's biography of Lenny at a moment when what is going on in his life will seem to illustrate perversely what he is saying at the night club...
...What Lenny did was to make this fear a part of comedy itself...
...The result of all this, in Fosse's film as perhaps in Lenny's own life, is to give Lenny's sense of humor a certain momentousness it doesn't deserve...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...Along with the three interviews, Fosse splices in as well a club date Lenny is doing sometime toward the end of his career...
...What his comedy led to, rather than any noticeable social redemption for his audience, was Don Rickles...
...This juxtaposition makes it appear that he needed all the personal misery just to keep the comedy routines going...
...Between this and a few other gimmicks Fosse uses, we feel by the time Lenny's career goes on the rocks that the whole course of events has been absolutely inevitable...
...The whole structure of Fosse's movie implies this, for the film opens with an interview with Lenny's wife Honey (Valerie Perrine) done some time after his death, and throughout the movie this interview and others done with Lenny's mother (Jan Miner) and his agent are spliced into Lenny's story...
...The effect is that of hearing the epilogue delivered by the chorus after the catastrophe has occurred...
...His kind of improvisation constantly threatened to go too far, to say something that wouldn't be funny anymore, and thus he got the audience at his mercy in a way comics had always hesitated to exploit before...
...What's remarkable about the punchline is that it's the one thing in the routine that isn't supposed to be funny...
...The one dread that every comedian before Lenny had tried to suppress was the fear of not getting a laugh-the mutual fear of both comic and audience that the comic will die up there and embarrass everyone in the audience to death too...
...Behold, it is indeed a fallen estate of the sort of man of high rank who, Aristotle tells us, is a fit subject for tragedy...
...In the end Lenny's life has the same sort of punchline as his comedy routines...
...In order to reinforce this impression, Fosse repeats the flash-forward on a smaller scale in one crucial sequence where an automobile accident is anticipated with images of the wreck as Lenny drives towards its occurrence...
...The only influential thing Lenny did was to introduce a new sort of delivery in stand-up comedy...
...At his last club date Lenny mumbles incoherently because he's too strung out on drugs to be funny, and finally, getting no response from the audience, he just walks off-stage with the disclaimer, "I'm not funny...
...Essentially this structure the film has is that of a flash-forward, a structure that always gives a fatalistic cast to events because it suggests that the future is somehow contained, or ordained, in the present...
...After Lenny's court battles have impoverished him, Fosse gives us a sidelong glance at his Hollywood mansion, now abandoned and decaying away...
...In order for everything that came before it to be a gag, a put-on, the punchline has to be taken seriously...
...The implication is that he's not a comedian because he's something more serious: the protagonist in a great social drama, the Messiah he looks in the film's final shot where he lies dead and naked with arms outstretched on his bathroom floor...
...As the episodes in his story come closer to the moment at the end of his career when the monologue is being delivered, his comedy seems literally to be using up his life...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 14
