The comic genius who went a bit funny in the head
Benedict Nightingale recalls the talent of Lenny Bruce, now reincarnated as Eddie Izzard
I
saw Lenny Bruce in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, though all I
remember in detail is his opening spiel. On shambled a flimsy, twitching
figure in a grey mac, and confronted us with our supposed ethnic origins.
"There's a spic here, dig that, and some polaks, and three micks,
and all those kikes and wops - oh yeah man, and a nigger. Wanna punch
me, anyone?"
Nobody did. That night he was among friends, who knew that his target was racial stereotyping. In fact, he went on to suggest that America had always needed a minority group to nail with words or worse. Even if the nation's premier socialist, Norman Thomas, won the presidency and ended the persecution of Puerto Ricans, his fellow countrymen would start directing unbrotherly feelings at very small people: "Smash a midget for Norm." And then, as often happened, Bruce retreated into stream-of-consciousness, and a weird burble of hip, Yiddish and Harlem patois came in alternate shouts and whispers from that fungoid face.
Remind you of anyone? Eddie Izzard has himself described Bruce as the founding father of alternative stand-up, and the near-genetic similarities between the two should be apparent when the irreverent transvestite opens as the Jewish-American rebel in Peter Hall's revival of Julian Barry's Lenny on Monday. The casting seems inspired. Izzard is the more surreal, a deconstructionist chatterbox; Bruce was the more socially aware; but I've heard both dawdle from offbeat topic to offbeat topic, then sprint up bizarre tangents, to equally hilarious effect.
Mark you, there are differences. Soon after I saw Bruce he was found dead in a toilet, syringes scattered beside him. At just 41, he had become the victim not only of heroin but of what a friend called "an overdose of police". His 20-odd arrests for obscenity and drug possession had left him with legal bills that bankrupted him, and shunned by the impresarios who had fêted him.
Yet within ten years Lenny was on Broadway, Dustin Hoffman had starred in a movie of the same name, and Bruce was in the pantheon reserved for those unlucky enough both to be born and to die before their time. Tap his name into the Internet today, and you find more than 10,000 pages devoted to him, plus a maudlin song by Bob Dylan calling him an heroic outlaw who "fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts".
Yet to celebrate Bruce because he enabled the likes of Lee Evans to mention the unmentionable is to underrate an artist who still seems highly original. Like Joe Orton, who once said that there was no such thing as a joke, Lenny insisted he wasn't a comedian. Kenneth Tynan called him an "unfrocked evangelist", Eric Bogosian "St Lenny, who died for our sins". He was persistently accused of obscenity, but his answer was that the truly obscene four-letter words were "kill, maim and hurt". And he knew what he was talking about, for he had seen active service in the US Navy.
Yet unsettling laughter was as much a part of his life as of his art. He got himself prematurely but honourably discharged from the Navy by parading, Izzard-style, in a female sailor's uniform. "Bruce, do you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Sometimes." "When's that?" "When they fit." Again, the transcripts of his court cases are often hilarious, with rugged cops asked if they were sexually excited by the word "cocksucker", a judge wondering if counsel would call "Mr Aristophanes" to discuss the nature of satire, and an attorney asking a witness: "Did you see Mr Crotch touch his bruce?"
Bruce's appearance at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in 1962 wasn't without its oddities either. One group sat happily through his defence of onanism as a way to avoid VD, only to explode at his suggestion that pot was healthier than fags: "Susan, Charles, lung cancer, all out!" The actress Siobhan McKenna was riled by his anti-clericalism, one of her escorts biffing Cook on the nose as she left. "These are Irish hands and they're clean," she cried. "This is an English face and it's bleeding," riposted Cook.
The People ran a campaign against Bruce ("America's vilest export") and when he next landed in Britain he was instantly deported. Everywhere he was categorised as a "sick" comic when he thought of himself as a surgeon excising society's hypocrisies. True, some of his hipper diatribes still seem offensive. Is subjecting the child to soft porn really the way to prevent sexual hang-ups in the adult? Was bombing Hiroshima as wrong as the Holocaust? Yet here, too, Bruce had his answer: "Thou shalt not kill means just that."
He was a libertarian absolutist, an anti-puritan puritan, verbally incoherent yet morally coherent. He talked about the idiocy of punishing homosexuals by putting them in all-male prisons, the patronising attitudes of liberal whites towards blacks, the absurdity of calling America free when sixth-generation Americans were banned from southern lunch counters, the implicit atheism of regarding our God-given private parts as dirty. He also mocked "clean" old Eisenhower - "He never kisses his wife, he doesn't go to the toilet, he doesn't even go to bed, he just sits up all night in his clothes, worrying."
But if one wanted an example of the essential Bruce, it would be his description of the visit to New York's St Patrick's Cathedral of Christ and Moses, both of whom he claimed to love. There they are, at the back with the underclass, and there is the great Cardinal Spellman, desperate to evict them and their attendant lepers: "Nuttin' personal, you guys, but why don't you pick up all those noses, feet and arms and split." Blasphemous? Or principled and purposeful? Maybe Izzard and Lenny will help us to decide.
Lenny opens at the Queen's Theatre (0171-494 5040) on Monday