Public Servant Lifestyle

Forty years on from his early death in 1966 and Lenny Bruce is still arguably America’s most controversial comedian. Persecuted by the authorities – and even deported from Britain – Bruce’s ground-breaking free-associating live act proved to be both the making and the breaking of him.

Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce a DVD anthology, is released by Best Medicine (VDI Entertainment’s new comedy imprint) and brings both John Magnuson’s Lenny Bruce Performance Film - the only full-length Bruce performance ever committed to film - and Fred Baker’s documentary Without Tears to DVD for the first time in the UK. Complete with a host of exclusive extras, this special edition release shows why Bruce is widely held to be the originator of stand-up comedy as we know it today.

"I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do." - Lenny Bruce.

In Performance Film, Bruce appears at San Francisco's Basin Street West in 1965 in what was his penultimate live performance. Having been arrested several times during his career for obscenity, Bruce directly tackles the issues around his legal difficulties and his fight with the establishment. This rare live performance also contains some of his most famous stand-up “bits.”

Fred Baker’s Without Tears documentary tells the story of the rise and fall of Lenny Bruce (1925-1966), how he achieved fame and was then impoverished and broken by the system. Without Tears includes a series of clips from live shows, television appearances, and nightclub performances towards the end of his career.

Colourful History

Born Alfred Schneider in 1925, the boy who would become Lenny Bruce joined the US Navy aged 17 but, following some active service in Europe, successfully extricated himself after convincing a team of Navy Psychologists that he was experimenting with homosexual urges. In 1951 he was arrested for impersonating a priest collecting donations for a leper colony in British Guyana.

Bruce paid his comedic dues in the mid Fifties in America’s post-war burlesque houses, warming audiences up for the strippers with one-liners (often accompanied by a drummer) in the style of the hackneyed Catskill comics that he would later reject so emphatically.

It was at this time, inspired by some of the hipper comics he shared bills with that Bruce started to develop his own unique style. Taking his influence from the modern Jazz scene burgeoning at the time, and perhaps also the growing beat poetry movement eventually epitomized by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, Bruce started to experiment and improvise on-stage. It was here that the seeds of Bruce’s revolutionary contribution to the art of stand-up comedy were sown, and it was at San Francisco’s Ann’s 440 Club where, in 1957, he was officially 'discovered'. Future Bruce biographer Albert Goldman encapsulated Bruce’s style best perhaps, saying that Bruce “fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take his mic in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated...”

Censorship

Bruce challenged his night-club audiences with rants and comic routines based on topics that were previously unexplored in this arena. Nothing was off-limits. Lenny’s schtick blasted politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, drugs - you name it: whatever sacred cows you had Lenny had them in his sights. This outspokenness and disrespect for censorship caused him problems with the authorities and religious groups who were to plague him as his fame grew. He was arrested and jailed several times during the course of his career for obscenity until he was finally blacklisted from nearly every nightclub in the country and banned outright from performing in several US cities, as well as the whole of Australia!

After one critically acclaimed 1962 run at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club in London, Bruce was then subsequently refused re-entry to the UK. In 1966 he performed for the last time 'whacked out on amphetamines' and finished his set naked and a mess. His performance that night had centered on his constitutional right of free speech and, when a friend asked him afterwards why he had turned his back on comedy, he replied, “I’m not a comedian anymore. I’m Lenny Bruce.”

When Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose at forty, legendary record producer Phil Spector led the controversial funeral to which the mourners were asked to bring noise makers and packed lunches.

Lenny Bruce has continued to inspire and is referenced by several recording artists including Bob Dylan, Nada Surf, Nico, R.E.M., Simon and Garfunkel and Chumbawumba. Dustin Hoffman played Bruce in the 1974 film Lenny and Eddie Izzard portrayed the comedian in the 1999 revival of Julian Barry’s 1971 play - on which the subsequent film was based.

Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce is out now, on DVD (RRP £12.99) on the Best Medicine label.

More information available in DVD / Home Video, Humour