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THE SICK HUMOR OF LENNY BRUCE
Fantasy 7003, 1959
LP rip (128 kbps mono) by Dick Baker, January 2015
Side One
1. Non Skeddo Flies Again
2. The Kid in the Well
3. Adolph Hitler and the M.C.A.
Side Two
1. Ike, Sherm, and Nick
2. Psychopathia Sexualis
3. Religions, Inc.
We are living in a culture of conformity, the sociologists keep telling us as
they pore over statistics that indicate college students are conservative this year.
That may be. But sometimes it seems as if the sociologists miss a few points such as
Bob and Ray, jazz musicians and the well-honed wit that is bringing the Comedy of
Dissent these nights to various clubs in the person of Lenny Bruce.
Lenny Bruce is an example of something new in our society. He's a comic right
out of the jazz world. Unlike Mort Sahl, himself a razor wit flavored with a liberal
dose of jazz orientation but self-confined to a political and national affairs horizon
with forays into a limited social strata bounded on one side by hi-fi and on the other
by the psychiatrist's couch, Lenny Bruce ranges throughout our society. Armed with
the anarchistic wit and salty speech of the jazz musician, Bruce does his satirical
bits in a multitude of voices as contrasted to Sahl, who is a stark, stand-up comic
monologist.
Bruce's whole orientation is that of the jazz musician, and knowing this is
fundamental to understanding and appreciating Bruce's humor. Like the jazz musician's
view, Bruce's comedy is a dissent from a world gone mad. To him nothing is sacred
except the ultimate truths of love and beauty and moral goodness--all equating
honesty. And like a jazz musician he expects to see these things about him in the
world in a pure form. He takes people literally and what they say literally and by
the use of his searing imagination and tongue of fire, he contrasts what they say with
what they do. And he does this with the sardonic shoulder-shrug of the jazz man.
He is colossally irreverent--like a jazz musician. His stock in trade is to
violate all the taboos out loud and to say things on stage (and on this LP) which
would get your nose bashed in at a party. But his outrage at society is not
represented by shrill screams or loud protests. He does not pose. His is a moral
outrage and has about it the air of a jazz man. It is strong stuff--like jazz, and it
is akin to the point of view of Nelson Algren and Lawrence Ferlinghetti as well as to
Charlie Parker and Lester Young.
Bruce improvises the way a jazz musician does. His routines on this album, for
instance, are never done the same way twice but move like a soloist improvising on a
framework of chords and melody. He takes a hard look at middle-class America with its
Babbitts, its Lodges, and its Elmer Gantrys. He stabs the motion picture business
with brutal parody and he punctures the hypocrisy in religion, politics and other
areas with an arrow tipped with poison.
Lenny Bruce is a social commentator, as is the jazz musician. It is an
interesting point for speculation as to why his comedy of dissent has flourished in
the jazz clubs. He terrifies other comics--the usual ones--by his material, in the
same way the jazz musician terrifies the hotel bands and the mickey mouse tenor men.
He is a threat. If he is real, he gives them the lie by his very existence.
For almost two decades the night clubs have wallowed in a sea of sentimentality
and pious corn and bathroom jokes. That's why Joe E. Lewis is such a relief. He is
real and so is Lenny Bruce.
The jazz musician is a rebel with humor, if with a cause, and there is no more
effective putdown of the political speeches, the incongruities in the news, the
fatuous posing of the tent show religious carnivals than that which goes on in the
conversation of the jazz musician and the humor of Lenny Bruce.
It's ribald. Yes, and even sometimes rough. But it's real. You have to earn
the respect of the jazz musician, he doesn't give it because he's told to. And this
attitude, a modern manifestation of the original American "show me," is Bruce's
strength. He's a verbal Hieronymos Bosch in whose monologue there is the same urgency
as in a Charlie Parker chorus and the same sardonic vitality in his comments as in
Lester Young's reflections on a syrupy pop tune.
The jazzman may be anti-verbal, as Kenneth Rexroth says; if so, he has Lenny
Bruce to speak for him with power.
--Ralph J. Gleason--Editor of Jazz
Of course, all the locales, personages, and organizations on this album are the
product of Lenny Bruce's fertile imagination, and any resemblance to persons, places,
and groups living or dead is purely coincidental, cela va sans dire. Timeo Danaos et
dona ferentes.
Cover photo by Bill Thomas posed by a professional model.
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