Victory For Smoke And Mirrors
"Take away the right to say 'fuck', and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.'"
Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose on August 3rd, 1966. For those who struggle with arithmetic, that's nearly forty years ago. I mention Bruce now only because I watched Bob Fosse's interesting but flawed biography of the comedian the other night and found myself back on the same train of thought I'm usually led to by the likes of Bill Hicks.
You see, without Lenny Bruce, there would have been no Bill Hicks. Indeed, without Lenny, it's unlikely we'd ever have been exposed to the likes of Richard Pryor or George Carlin, either. Nor Denis Leary, who gets a dishonourable mention here simply because he's the most recognisably 'mainstream' of the bunch, despite the fact that he's never done an original routine in his life.
I'm not going to claim to know everything there is to know about Lenny Bruce, but what's important in the context of this discussion is that Lenny was a socially-aware satirist who drew audiences and admirers with thoughts and routines that offended the system and resulted in numerous arrests for 'obscenity'. His outrage at what he saw as the system's injustice led him to fight these claims in court until he could no longer afford to do so. In fact, it was the system that eventually ruined Lenny. By the time he was declared a pauper and could no longer get bookings from clubs fearful of the backlash they'd face for promoting Bruce's 'sick' comedy, his act had evolved into an almost freeform monologue that attacked the sacred cows of the time and made him a hero to figures like Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan.
Bruce, like Hicks, was very funny, though he isn't remembered chiefly for his humour. Instead, he is immortalised for his contribution to First Amendment rights and the free speech movement. Performers aren't arrested for the use of words like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' today, and part of the reason for that is Lenny Bruce. Of course, there is a hell of a lot more to it than one man's decision to make a stand, but his influence cannot be denied.
What's interesting to me, and what brings me back to one of the themes of this blog, is that I believe Lenny Bruce's routines would still be controversial today. Bill Hicks gets compared to Bruce so often because he had Lenny's habit of blurring the lines. That was what made them both so controversial. It's easy to go for shock-value when you're being funny. That's old-hat now. Society looks sternly at the perpetrators while laughing behind its hand. Lenny Bruce pushed those boundaries, and that would make a lot of people uncomfortable even today. He was there to entertain, but he was also a social commentator and a moralist.
When I say we have no real voices anymore, no-one to speak to us and for us, to hold a mirror up to the world and say "take a look at this picture", I'm talking about guys like Bruce and Hicks. Because the media has failed us. To some extent, even art has failed us. Everything's so bland and colourless now. There's a total lack of fire, of passion. Lenny Bruce was one man with a microphone. He wasn't a trend. He wasn't product-placement and vested interests and what we're all going to be wearing next summer. He was a guy on a stage talking. Like Bill Hicks was a guy on a stage talking. No smoke and mirrors, no special effects, no hype, no bullshit. In this age of the MTV attention span and the bigger-better-faster-more approach to 'art', we've lost those performers. In doing so, we've lost a little truth.
In a world of lies and spin, that's a crucial element to be missing, don't you think?
Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose on August 3rd, 1966. For those who struggle with arithmetic, that's nearly forty years ago. I mention Bruce now only because I watched Bob Fosse's interesting but flawed biography of the comedian the other night and found myself back on the same train of thought I'm usually led to by the likes of Bill Hicks.
You see, without Lenny Bruce, there would have been no Bill Hicks. Indeed, without Lenny, it's unlikely we'd ever have been exposed to the likes of Richard Pryor or George Carlin, either. Nor Denis Leary, who gets a dishonourable mention here simply because he's the most recognisably 'mainstream' of the bunch, despite the fact that he's never done an original routine in his life.
I'm not going to claim to know everything there is to know about Lenny Bruce, but what's important in the context of this discussion is that Lenny was a socially-aware satirist who drew audiences and admirers with thoughts and routines that offended the system and resulted in numerous arrests for 'obscenity'. His outrage at what he saw as the system's injustice led him to fight these claims in court until he could no longer afford to do so. In fact, it was the system that eventually ruined Lenny. By the time he was declared a pauper and could no longer get bookings from clubs fearful of the backlash they'd face for promoting Bruce's 'sick' comedy, his act had evolved into an almost freeform monologue that attacked the sacred cows of the time and made him a hero to figures like Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan.
Bruce, like Hicks, was very funny, though he isn't remembered chiefly for his humour. Instead, he is immortalised for his contribution to First Amendment rights and the free speech movement. Performers aren't arrested for the use of words like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' today, and part of the reason for that is Lenny Bruce. Of course, there is a hell of a lot more to it than one man's decision to make a stand, but his influence cannot be denied.
What's interesting to me, and what brings me back to one of the themes of this blog, is that I believe Lenny Bruce's routines would still be controversial today. Bill Hicks gets compared to Bruce so often because he had Lenny's habit of blurring the lines. That was what made them both so controversial. It's easy to go for shock-value when you're being funny. That's old-hat now. Society looks sternly at the perpetrators while laughing behind its hand. Lenny Bruce pushed those boundaries, and that would make a lot of people uncomfortable even today. He was there to entertain, but he was also a social commentator and a moralist.
When I say we have no real voices anymore, no-one to speak to us and for us, to hold a mirror up to the world and say "take a look at this picture", I'm talking about guys like Bruce and Hicks. Because the media has failed us. To some extent, even art has failed us. Everything's so bland and colourless now. There's a total lack of fire, of passion. Lenny Bruce was one man with a microphone. He wasn't a trend. He wasn't product-placement and vested interests and what we're all going to be wearing next summer. He was a guy on a stage talking. Like Bill Hicks was a guy on a stage talking. No smoke and mirrors, no special effects, no hype, no bullshit. In this age of the MTV attention span and the bigger-better-faster-more approach to 'art', we've lost those performers. In doing so, we've lost a little truth.
In a world of lies and spin, that's a crucial element to be missing, don't you think?
posted by Michael at 2:35 PM
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