Eric Bogosian
How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
August 10, 2006.
As long as I can remember, I've liked the work of Lenny Bruce. I liked him before I'd even heard of him, before I'd heard his routines. How is that possible? Because Lenny was always there. His dark, sexy, idealistic, smirking humor was there when my parents were drinking martinis, doing the cha-cha and flirting with their suburban neighbors.
It was there when I was driving cross-country, chain smoking joints, eating black beauties, and grooving to Coltrane and Hendrix on the eight-track. It was there when I was doing the punk rock death trip in thee dark canyons of Manhattan.
Lenny was there through it all, the spirit of hipness past, present and future. Saint Lenny, I should call him; he died for our sins. As the pendulum slowly shifts, we are back in such conservative times as those that spawned him in the first place, and so now is the time to read him.
Attitude is what Lenny Bruce is all about. He was the genius of attitude. If you dig Lenny, you dig the attitude. Lenny was one of the bridges existing between post-war African-American culture and the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s. Just as the Rolling Stones and the Animals ripped off R&B, or MTV absorbed rap music, Lenny hooked into the jazz mentality.
Growing up in the suburbs, I got to know Lenny through his albums and primarily through How to Talk Dirty. This book was part of a secret collection of sacred texts that unlocked the doors of hipness and rebellion. In 1970, if you were hip to Lenny Bruce, you were hip. As the years have gone by, Lenny has become more an icon than a force. Everyone has an idea of what Lenny Bruce stood for, but it is vague and general (he was, you know, dark, cool, hip). (I am often compared to Lenny Bruce. People even say I look like him. I say, I dont look anything like Lenny Bruce, I look like Dustin Hoffman in the movie Lenny).
If you're like me, Lenny has been an influence, good and bad. By the mid 70s, the Lenny-as-martyr mythology was solidly in place (Albert Goldman's cynical biography Ladies and Gentleman, Lenny Bruce!! and the Julian Barry play Lenny only served to make the foundation more secure). The Vietnam War had become an experience in the past tense and little did anyone know that America was soon to be engulfed in the postmodern fantastic antics of the Reaganites. In the 70s, the idea of the 60s got cleaned up and polished. Everyone had long hair, everyone had been against the war, men were becoming more sensitive, black people were wonderful, it was cool to be gay, yadda yadda yadda (as Lenny would say). In the 70s everyone wanted to be cool. And no one wanted to grow up.
The new attitudes turned out to be mostly veneer, but we believed that we believed them. And presiding over our glorious and heartfelt beliefs (untested by lifes problems) were the saints of the New Attitude. Among the saints were, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Abbie Hoffman, Lenny Bruce. Basically a lot of white men. White men on drugs with groupies (plus ca change..)
Central to the philosophy of the New Attitude was the notion that a big bad daddy Government was suppressing and repressing all of us. (Easy to believe after Vietnam and Watergate). We wanted more and better political action (without the complexities of politics) and we needed more and better freedom (without the dangers of overdose, venereal disease, or poverty). Money was out, lifestyle was in. We wanted a brave new world that was founded on utopian principles; where there would be no hypocrisy; where love would rule and wars would be banished. Where everyone would be nice to each other, and we could be high all day, and no one would work at anything they didnt feel like doing and no one ever got sick or died.
We just had to get away from Big Bad Daddy. We had to get out of the house. And we wanted the keys to the car.
Lenny was a worker. He wanted it (to quote his character Buddy Bob the car salesman). And he gigged and he gigged in toilets, jazz clubs, everywhere, and anywhere. As he said himself, he was only too happy to sell out. That meant appearances on TV. But he didnt mesh with such a tidy commercial environment. He developed jazz habits: enjoying one's work, doing it for the sake of expression and fun, exploring new ground, taking chances. These were jazz laws, and Lenny brought them to comedy. (Also check out Lord Buckley, Jonathan Winters, Redd Foxx). He also brought the attitude of minority culture with its endless self put-down and riffing about the Man and its conspiratorial posture of the inside joke, using codes and phrases (Lenny somehow melded black and yiddish vernacular).
(A couple of years ago I paid homage to Lenny by dropping by one of his favorite spots in San Francisco, the Hungry i. It is now a strip joint and when I poked my head in the door, the woman at the counter said 'can I help you with something?' I said, 'I just want to take a look at the place, someone I know used to play here'. She said 'whats his name?', I said 'Lenny Bruce', she said 'what instrument does he play?')
The attitude of rebellion and new-found freedom was genuine for a young Jewish guy in the late 50s or a black in the 60s. It was becoming OK, even cool, to admit to being Jewish or black. (Lenny mentions that in the armed forces, as late as WWII, being a Jew was almost always noticed and remarked upon). As minorities, these groups, brought together in Lennys jazz-yiddish lingo, had genuine gripes. The civil rights battles were heating up down south. The stereotyped Southern Racist or Northern Full-of-Shit Liberal were perfect targets for Lenny's underdog politics. And a perfect expression of rebellion for the millions of well-to-do suburban youth who wanted out of Daddy and Mommy's house so they could do their thing.
The saints of the Church of Attitude built a solid foundation of idealism for my generation with their full-tilt pacificism, their love of life, their belief in tolerance for all people, their put-down of hate. To be truthful, if you dig deeply enough, amorality lies under the ideas of Lenny Bruce. Albert Goldman pointed out in his biography that even though the libertine hippies of the 60s championed Lenny Bruce, Lenny did not dream of a wold of anarchy where everybody did whatever he or she wanted. No, Lenny dreamed of a world of love and order where justice prevailed. He died with that dream on his lips. And in his death, like so many rock stars after him, he was sainted.
Lenny discovered as he developed (and his autobiography marks the beginning of the highest plateau Lenny occupied during his short life) that full-blown idealism in his art was his secret weapon. By riffing the same way that he and his buddies did privately backstage or in cheapo coffee shops, but before a paying audience, he could blow peoples minds. People wanted to hear more of the New Attitude. They wanted to question organized religion, sexual moves, capitalism, and war. The economy was expanding yearly and people wanted to shake off their dusty clothes and take a bath in idealism. Kennedy was elected on a platform of adolescent high hopes just as Lenny was reaching his peak, and Lenny found it appropriate to endorse Camelot. With this presidential candidate, even Lenny sheathed his sword.
And that sword was sharp. Lenny set the all-time high standard for an entertainer, observing and dissecting his own society and culture. Like a surgeon he probed and sliced, always on the lookout for inconsistency or misguided emotion or jingoism or greed or vanity. He attacked our self-satisfaction and our well-meaning hypocrisy. And he did it through funny stories and characters. Because he was always experimenting he often went astray of substance, but no one has hit the bulls eye the way he did. His description of Jesus and Moses visiting Saint Patricks Cathedral or his impersonation of a white liberal entertaining his colored friend or his simple description of the Lone Ranger's loneliness are classic. And as sick or funky as he was, he spoke his words with love and generosity.
We, the 60s generation, copped all this good stuff. But, we also inherited some dubious stuff. Because if you're going to adopt the attitude of a bunch of backstage, marijuana-smoking beatnicks, you're going to inherit a few flaws.
First of all, these bohemians had a real commitment to noncommitment; they had a mania for irresponsibility. This was part of the New Attitude as well, and a part that was harmless, even constructive at the time. In How To Talk Dirty, Lenny blithely describes rip-offs and hustles, white lies and put-ons, goof-ups and escapades, promiscuity and intoxicated bouts more fitting to the behavior of a teenager hanging out at Coney Island than that of a 38 year old with a wife and a daughter. Photos from that time show Lenny repeatedly getting arrested with a look on his face like Get this! Life's just a joke, right?
If you have an affection toward Lenny as I do, then perhaps you want your dose straight, without the mystification and blurriness that come with the passing down of a legend. So here he is, Lenny in his own words, words that mean almost more today in this age of Jesse Helms and George Bush than when they were first uttered. I love Lenny Bruce because he put himself out there. Because he wasnt perfect, but he tried. Because he was vulnerable.
He was a big kid, but a big kid with a heart and a mind and a mouth. He gave us a great gift, a vision we may never attain, but one we must never lose sight of: a world of love.
-Eric Bogosian
December 1991.
This was published as the introduction to the book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce.
