Lenny

After several years of laughing along with the masses, I slowly began to wonder what was so funny. I was among those who loved to trek out to the local comedy clubs and giggle along with the latest new talent. You down your 2 drink minimum, settle in, and then laugh till you have angina. The more I thought about it, the more depressing it became. People forked over not inconsiderable amounts of money to watch someone prance on a stage and tell jokes. Non-stop. One often crass story after another. The audience is expected to keep pace with laughter. No time to ponder or savor, it's on to the next smutty anecdote. Barely time to breathe. You must laugh, whether your funny bone is tickled or otherwise. If you don't, something must be wrong with you. Even worse, you'll be singled out and ridiculed for being a stick in the mud. Sometimes, comedians die on stage. Their act will bomb profoundly: the deadly silence, the half-hearted laughs, the hecklers. 

This is not limited to novices; even veteran comics experience this. Cringeworthy, even if you're watching from the safety of your living room. Even more cringeworthy (and intriguing)-I suspect many of these individuals enjoy this masochism. They crave failure as much as they do accolade, perhaps even more. Like the gambler who loses big-depressed but compelled and energized. What happens with success? Disappointment. Watch the finale of Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT sometime. It very effectively conveys this type of soul, how after winning big, the gambler's face is riddled with visible despair. I'll bet many comedians, when their audience is doubled over in appreciative laughter, are similarly deflated. A major sickness. Had someone had a heart-to-heart with someone like Rodney Dangerfield, I would wager his off the record analyses of himself would reveal my hypothesis. Maybe he is not a great example? What lurks under the goofy facades of Carrot Top or any of the current crop of funnymen and women? 

Lenny Bruce was a different animal. He was very open about his fatalism. He built an entire act upon it. The evidence was right there: he read his own criticisms during his shows. He wasn't even trying to make people laugh anymore. "All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the breadline -- right in back of J. Edgar Hoover," he once said. This would come towards the end, but this destination was fairly obvious even from the beginning. Dustin Hoffman's brilliant take in director Bob Fosse's 1974 LENNY elucidates this very great pain. He additionally understands that Bruce was more of a provocateur than a funnyman. He was never suited to the post-vaudeville one-liner, tired mother-in-law jokes. If you watch some original footage of the man, you'll realize that his timing and delivery wasn't really that sharp or funny. 

Lenny Bruce was a social commentator in decades when such honesty was not appreciated, perhaps even grounds for arrest. Lenny Bruce indeed scuffled with the law in the 1950s and 60s over the use of words so commonly heard just a few years later in mainstream cinema. He verbalized his leftist views with great vinegar, unapologetically. Calling him a "comedian" may be a stretch, but he was funny at times, if not in that gut-busting way in which we're supposed to laugh when the borscht-belters grab the microphone. Hoffman deftly recreates several historic performances, seen in memory through recollections by his stripper wife, Honey (Valerie Perrine), and agent in glorious B & W. Fosse takes a documentarian's approach, almost flawlessly presenting the restless Bruce through his early Catskills shows all the way to his death in 1966. 

Aside from one melodramatic, almost 50s-ish scene, LENNY is a focused bio. Fosse, a tortured artist himself known for his Broadway extravaganzas (happy) and films (pitch black, see also CABARET, the semi-autobiographical ALL THAT JAZZ, and STAR 80), does an especially effective job of rendering the close of Bruce's life. Having gone to seed, unable to appear onstage without audiences filled with instigators and cops, Lenny resorts to merely reading copies of the Constitution and various free speech manifestoes. He wasn't there to make people laugh, but like some of his contemporaries and later kindred spirits, perhaps he was craving the rush of failure. It was out there, but if he was enjoying that, it was not discernable. 

"I'm not a comedian anymore. I'm Lenny Bruce."