Lenny Bruce

To listen to Lenny is to hear the voices of the coming comedy zeitgeist. All that is good about modern comedy is credited to what this man did. Leo Benedictus of The Guardian writes, “Lenny Bruce was not the first standup comedian, but he did create what we now mean by ‘standup comedy’. The idea of some guy on a stage, often some guy with problems, who finds himself at odds with the establishment and has only his wits to resist with: that all begins with Bruce. Whether he or the establishment won, of course, is another matter. Today, his assaults on censorship, racism, the Vietnam war and bigotry in general all occupy a triumphant place in the mainstream of western thought (if not always in western practice). At his death in 1966, however, the score was probably a tie.”

Dead at 40 by a drug overdose. Bruce’s short 9-year stand-up career changed the face of comedy in America forever. Bruce is famously quoted as saying, “I'm not a comedian. And I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor. I'm a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.” Delivering the eulogy, featured at the end of the documentary Lenny Bruce Without the Tears, the Rev. William Glenesk says: “He was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner. He was a man—up tight against an artificial world... who shattered its facades, and its hypocrisy, and—if you will pardon the phrase which seems to become a cliche—he saw life as it is.”

There’s a verse in the Old Testament in Jeremiah 12:5-6, where God is speaking to Jeremiah about themes which Bruce would have found familiar: 

“So, Jeremiah, if you’re worn out in this footrace with men,

    what makes you think you can race against horses?

And if you can’t keep your wits during times of calm,

    what’s going to happen when troubles break loose

        like the Jordan in flood?

Those closest to you, your own brothers and cousins,

    are working against you.

They’re out to get you. They’ll stop at nothing.

    Don’t trust them, especially when they’re smiling.”