On Music
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Stand-Up Shaman As recently as two years ago, when he appeared at the Blue Angel on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, Lenny Bruce was still the sharp-tongued,...
...Thus, Bruce sees the Lone Ranger, his tightly clenched mouth covered with a surgical mask, shooting Dr...
...Odd as it may seem, it was my impression that everyone went home feeling much better...
...As the show went on, it became obvious that the one-time Broadway comic was now an underground man, funnier than ever, but also angry, tragic and completely exposed...
...sizing it up like a drunk casing a B-girl, Bruce drawled: "Ya good-looking —yeh—ya got lotsa bread—goodlooking chicks always got lotsa bread...
...Bruce is, in fact, America's first verbal jazzman, and he may turn out to be the founder of an important indigenous folk art...
...In a scene from a 1930s Hollywood prison movie, a Negro in the death-cell exuberantly shouts, "Ya don't mind dying when ya got a natural sense of rhythm...
...That's a hooker syllogism...
...Walking briskly out on the floor, impeccably groomed and dressed in a chic Italian suit, he would run off his routines with professional aplomb...
...Of the shamans, Geza Roheim once wrote: "[They] make both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of the society . . . they are the lightning conductor of common anxiety...
...The audience of downtown hipsters and Park Avenue sophisticates responded with uneasy laughter: "Was he implying that they were...
...In another bit, Norman Thomas is awakened in the middle of the night with the startling news that he has been elected President...
...Ehrlich's silver bullets at a world universally contaminated with venereal disease...
...a whitecollar drunk, sadistic rage leaking through his mask of casualness, trying to get a drink in a bar...
...It was something of a shock, therefore, to see Bruce come on the floor of the Village Vanguard last month stiff-legged and stooped, his attire nothing more stylish than a crumpled black raincoat, his oncehandsome face a pale mask of dissipation framed in the long black sideburns of a Brooklyn tough...
...They fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality...
...his true title is "shaman...
...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Stand-Up Shaman As recently as two years ago, when he appeared at the Blue Angel on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, Lenny Bruce was still the sharp-tongued, fast-moving stand-up comedian...
...Commencing with his recent arrest for obscenity, he went through every taboo topic: sexual perversion, sadistic lust, drug addiction, masturbation, racial hatred, religious bigotry—even the impotence of politics...
...It is this effect of cathartic release that really defines Bruce's function...
...His material consisted of elaborate parodies of Show Biz and satirical images of American society: Shelley Berman matching his effeminate malice against the elemental violence of a Chicago gangster...
...In 50 desperate minutes, packed with wit, malice, humor, blasphemy and poetry, Bruce evacuated the total content of the American repression...
...The rapidity and agility of his mental movements—swift, sure thrusts along invisible lines of association —put him in the company of those other masters of free-associative spontaneity, the Bop musicians...
...and the famous bit about "How to Relax your Colored Friends at Parties...
...Bela Lugosi is scolded by an indignant building superintendent, who complains that Lugosi's kids go around sucking everyone on the neck: "You people are gonna have a lot of trouble wherever you live...
...and then allows himself to be talked into taking a strong stand against a minority group—midgets...
...Essentially, he is neither comic, satirist nor prophet...
...the poor old man mumbles confusedly, "Did I run...
...Quite apart from the potency of his material and the sharpness of his perception, Bruce's language, triple-distilled from every dialect of the American underground—jazzman, showman, gangster, hipster and whore—and his dazzling command of the stock imagery of American movies, radio, television and night clubs raise him far above the level of any cabaret performer ever seen in this country...
...His new slogan is "Smack a midget for Norm...
...Even more startling was his approach to the audience...
...And in exploring this vast sewage system of human evil, he often attained a surrealistic clarity of vision...
...By the end of his performance at the Vanguard, the audience— whose laughter was described by one writer as "the confusion of moan and guffaw, edged with hysteria"—was in the condition of an analysand after a harrowing but illuminating session...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 5
