“The Berkeley Concert” by Lenny Bruce
December 12, 1965
Bizarre/Straight Records; Rhino Records, Inc. © & ® 1989 (R2 70355)
[liner notes by Ralph J. Gleason]
It is typical of the way I which this society misrepresents anything with which it disagrees that Lenny Bruce was always referred to as a "dirty" comic.
The first thing anybody found out about him, if they took the trouble to listen, was that he didn't have to say 'fuck' in order to be funny. The second thing they found out, if they listened a little harder, was that Lenny Bruce was not a comedian at all, as he said himself the night he was busted at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. When he returned to the club after being taken to the city jail, booked and let out on bail, he told the audience "I'm sorry if I'm not very funny tonight, but I'm not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce."
And Lenny Bruce was really, along with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis and a handful of others (maybe Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Allen Ginsburg in another way) the leader of the first wave of the American social and cultural revolution which is gradually changing the structure of our society and may effectively revise it, if the forces of reaction which are automatically brought into play by such a drive, do not declare military law and suppress it.
Lenny Bruce said that this society is insanely paradoxical. That they call it the Hall of Justice but the only justice is in the halls. That the law is beautiful, the only trouble is the people who are in charge of it. He went ahead in his determined, logical, brilliant analysis of the laws and he fought the judges and the district attorneys and the newspapers and the trade press, that incredibly hypocritical house organ for vested interest.
Lenny Bruce was the prisoner of truth and no society will tolerate the voice which tells it the truth about itself because to face the truth is to admin it and be forced to change.
So it is easier to refer to Lenny Bruce as a dirty comic, as a convicted junkie and a menace to youth. What he was, really, was a menace to THEM.
More to come...