Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce occupies a curious place in 20th century Jewish culture. The man who more or less invented stand-up comedy, who took borscht belt humor out of its cozy Catskills confines and into the swankiest urban nightclubs, is celebrated today as a modern-day hero, though in reality, his day to day life was anything but heroic. Was it his drug addiction that brought him down, or was it the puritanical culture of late 1950s America that sealed his fate?

His tragic death by overdose in 1966 followed five years of arrests and judicial harassment for testing the limits of the Constitution’s protection of free speech. Bruce used his Jewish identity both as a comic foil and a weapon aimed at society’s ills. He railed against racism and hypocrisy, blazing the trail for a generation of Sixties comic icons and inspiring such contemporary figures as Sarah Silverman and Larry David.

I discovered Lenny Bruce in college, and over the years I've listened to every one of his routines on albums and live concert recordings. Initially I was amazed by the number of Yiddish expressions and Jewish references he incorporated in his comic spritzing. Later I was blown away by Bruce’s ability to convey so many ideas simultaneously, which he accomplished by employing the rhythms of jazz, turning his comedy into a kind of musical speech.

Stephen Whitfield’s groundbreaking book, In Search of American Jewish Culture, uses Bruce’s iconic routine, Jewish & Goyish (New York is Jewish—Montana is Goyish, and so forth), as a window through which to understand contemporary Jewish Identity. An even closer look at Bruce’s Jewish significance is provided by David Kaufman in his delightful book, Jewhooing the Sixties.

Both of these books were on my mind as I attended an academic conference on Lenny Bruce at Brandeis University in 2016. The conference was coordinated by Professor Whitfield, who asked me if I might sing something to provide a break in the spoken presentations. But what should I sing? Something funny, serious, Jewish? The answer was obvious…