Lenny Bruce?

[Virgo76]

Anyone here know much about Lenny Bruce? What's the best biography on him?

[Famous Mortimer]

His autobiography is pretty good, you might want to give that a go first.

[gepree]

YouTube has an interesting Lenny Bruce 1 hour Standup from 1965.

[dissolute ocelot]

His autobiography is pretty good, you might want to give that a go first.

How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, his autobiography, is a great read. There are a couple of films too, the documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, and more debatably the 1970s biopic Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, which is a bit hagiographical (and perhaps not the best factual account) but still the work of very talented people. In books, The Trials of Lenny Bruce by Collins and Skover, which focuses on his legal battles rather than being a proper biography (but is still very entertaining), seems to be the most respected book. There are now other books, but not sure if any is worth reading (I'm not familiar with Albert Goldman's bio but it seems to have a better reputation than most of Goldman's books which are utter shit).

[Gulftastic]

Is the portrayal in 'The Marvellous Mrs Maisel' anything approaching accurate?

[Shit Good Nose]

YouTube has an interesting Lenny Bruce 1 hour Standup from 1965.

AKA The Lenny Bruce Performance Film, released theatrically in 1967.  This either runs quick or has been cut by just over 10 minutes.

At that point in his life he was barely doing comedy, at least in the traditional sense, and this is more of a semi-serious monologue, in which he spends a big chunk of it analysing the obscenity charges brought against him.

[Dusty Substance]

The Bob Fosse/Dustin Hoffman biopic is very good. Not sure how accurate it is to real events but it's a good starter.

[Virgo76]

Thanks. Some good tips there.

[Astronaut Omens]

Unlike the semi-serious monologue above, the routine below, "The Palladium", about a struggling stand-up comedian who travels to London, gives a fair idea of why people enjoyed him as a funny man. The legend of him as taboo-busting truth-telling martyr is not wrong, exactly, but it does overlook his proper comedy chops, which are very apparent in this, to my ears, still pretty contemporary-sounding routine- a lot of Maria Banford's stuff about the absurdities of showbiz, for example, seem to echo some of the ideas here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo750ByNnc8

[the science eel]

(I'm not familiar with Albert Goldman's bio but it seems to have a better reputation than most of Goldman's books which are utter shit).

it's HUGELY entertaining.

His autobiog is great too, yeah. A joyous read.

[fucking ponderous]

Little Bruce??

[Ptolemy Ptarmigan]

Oh yes.

[Flouncer]

His autobiography is pretty good, you might want to give that a go first.

I remember when I was about 14, we had a substitute teacher for English Lit one day. She set us some work and said, "Once you've finished that you can read something." So I finished the work with about fifteen minutes to spare, and I took How to Talk Dirty and Influence People out of my bag and started to read it. The teacher clocked it and barked at me to put it away! I protested that it was just an autobiography, but she said, "I know what it is - you're not reading that in here!" I wasn't trying to be clever or owt; it was just what I happened to be reading at the time.

I used to go round to my uncle's house and I'd borrow his books; the Hitchhiker's Guide series, Spike Milligan's war diaries, that sort of stuff; he had Bruce's autobiography and a book of "unexpurgated routines" and the autobiography caught my eye, probably because of the title. I found it pretty impressive, that this forty year old paperback with yellowed pages could have such a disquieting effect on a teacher - I instantly realised just how cool Lenny Bruce is!

I haven't read it since then, though I remember it being funny and charming - the bit about him nicking a priest's gown and going round collecting for a fictional leper colony with his missus sticks in my mind. I might buy a copy and revisit it.

[Famous Mortimer]

There's a short animated film of one of Bruce's routines, "Thank You Mask Man", available on Youtube. "Problematic" could be used to describe it.

[Flouncer]

There's a thread about that, somewhere. I can remember Neil analysing it in detail.

[McChesney Duntz]

Goldman's book, albeit laced with the cheap exploitative shock tactics which became his trademark and marred by frequently embarrassing attempts to assume the hip argot of his subject and his milieu, is undoubtedly the only worthwhile thing that schmuck ever put out, largely because he left the bulk of the research to an actual journalist[nb]Lawrence Schiller, whose path also led him to cross paths with Marilyn Monroe, Dennis Hopper in his post-Easy Rider delirium, Norman Mailer, Gary Gilmore, the Manson family and O.J. Simpson, among others - dude's still around and I bet he's got some stories to tell. [/nb], actually admired the artistry of the guy he was writing about, and, most importantly, had genuine insight and interesting things to say about him[nb]Once you hack away the layers of character assassination from his Elvis and Lennon books with the same hatchet he used to write them, it's clear that he didn't know shit about music.[/nb]. Some incisive critical analysis there, as well as vividly-drawn sketches of the Carnegie Deli spritzer scene of the 50s (Joe Ancis!) to go with the grubbier salaciousness puled out by the author (especially, inevitably, in the later chapters). As with How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (my father's copy of which[nb]It not only had that title, but it was a Playboy Press publication - for a precocious nine-year-old, that was some forbidden fruit just screaming to be pulled off the vine.[/nb] set me down the road of lifelong Bruce obsessiveness), I keep acquiring copies of the thing when I run across old editions in used bookshops, 'cause that's just who I am.

The Swear to Tell the Truth documentary is damn near the definitive biography of the man, however, blowing past the aforemented flaws of the Goldman book and the self-mythologizing fabulism of Bruce's own autobio to capture who he was and what he was about (and busting a few of the major myths as it goes - it wasn't really his "obscenity" that caused him to be hounded to his grave by the authorities). It's never been commercially available, but I managed to download a copy when someone briefly slipped it onto YouTube a couple years ago, and I'd be happy to share it with the class once I'm back in the vicinity of my laptop, if anyone's interested.

As for, y'know, his actual work: the old Fantasy LPs are worthy, but predictably bowdlerized and pasted together from different performances, quite obviously. Same goes for most of the many posthumous albums that spilled out through the sixties and seventies, though at least the censorship is much less in evidence. Your best bets would be Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall, one of the few full-length performances captured from his early-sixties artistic peak, and, for the real heads, the massive, wide-ranging Let the Buyer Beware six-disc set, lovingly compiled and programmed by the late great Hal Willner. It's all well worth your time, though it's probably best at this late date not to expect to bust a gut laughing and instead enjoy the ebbs and flows of his thought process like the verbal jazzman he was. (Bit pretentious, that, but he brings it out of me, so fress my tuchus. Or something like that.)

[McChesney Duntz]

Is the portrayal in 'The Marvellous Mrs Maisel' anything approaching accurate?

No, not really. Though his daughter Kitty seemed thrilled by the characterization (and visited the Maisel set a few times), so maybe I'm wrong about that.