Nearly everybody over the age of 60 remembers comic Lenny Bruce and most under the age of 60 knows his name. The notorious comic was, yes, he was simply outrageous.
Bruce, whose heyday was the 1960s, was funny, to be sure, but his fame, and everlasting popularity, and rascality, was because the bits in his shows were all pieces of humorous societal majesty (well, OK, foul mouthed social majesty).
Lenny blasted everybody and everything.
He could applaud anybody and, just as fast, tear down anybody. You did something good or bad, or indifferent—he had a zinger for you.
Bruce became well known for his social criticism and knock your socks off funny lines – and oh yes, his vulgarity. His wild lines, and his vulgarity, opened the door for people like George Carlin and Mort Sahl. Lately, he has become famous again through constant mentions of him in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel television show.
Now he is back on stage in I’m Not a Comedian … I’m Lenny Bruce, a play that stars Ronnie Marmo, who wrote it, being staged next week (January 11, 12 and 13) at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NBPAC) in New Brunswick.
“I got interested in Lenny because a friend brought up his life history to me and said I should write a new play about Lenny and star in it. I knew a little about him. I was born when he was at the height of his fame. I really knew little about Lenny other than he was dirty and everybody thought he was just outrageous.”
What struck Marmo most was the lack of material about Bruce. “I thought there would be all this stuff to study – books, movies, records. There was very little. “He is the most unknown famous guy in America,” said Marmo. “That’s a shame.”
Marmo obtained most of his information in interviews with Bruce’s daughter Kitty Bruce.
He thinks that the story has almost come full circle, though. Bruce has regained a lot of his popularity thanks to numerous mentions on television shows, Mrs. Maisel in particular.
Bruce’s career was short. He died of a drug overdose at the age of 40 in 1966. “40! What a tragedy,” said actor Marmo. “Imagine the career he might have had if he stayed away from drugs?”
Marmo thought that Bruce’s stature in America, and in show business, should be much greater today.
“I think today he blends right in with the counterculture movement. Today, it’s cancel out the star. Lenny's outrageousness would have made him a big target for those people, but he’d get around all that somehow,” said Marmo, who, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to Bruce.
In the play, Marmo tries to show Bruce as a man who would have been just as big a lightning rod for critics today as he was fifty years ago.
Writing the play was not easy. There was the Broadway play 50 years ago and a shorter play later on, plus an unheralded movie that starred a young Dustin Hoffman. “None was really to my liking,” explained Marmo. “I wanted to show the guy in many ways, not just write a play about a funny comic. I wanted to get into his personality and stories about his early career, I wanted to talk about his family and not just his show business. There was little written about him, though. His daughter, gave me a lot of information on his off stage life, family stories and many personal tales. She really helped me to complete the sketch of the character I was putting together.”
He stopped. “Lenny was a complicated man who worked in complicated times. I tried to show that, the times as well as the man,” Marmo said.
Another pause. “And, oh, I wanted to show people that above all – above everything- Lenny Bruce was funny in all of his social and political ways, I mean really funny.”
Marmo thinks that Lenny was so popular because he was authentic.
“He believed everything that he said,” continued Marmo. “You went to one of his shows and you understood that. They said he was a social comic and they were right. In his shows, in all of his social criticism, he told the truth as he saw it. Remember now, the 1960s were important times in America. Things were happening quickly. Everything in American society was going on really fast. Lenny needed to stay on top of a lot of things and he did. Many, many others followed his lines of comedy and social commentary. In many ways, he was a pioneer.”
Lenny Bruce got into show business in the 1950s (he was buddy Hackett’s roommate for a time). His humor was “dirty” for a while and he was arrested several times on obscenity charges.
In a way, he affected the lives of millions of young people. “He may not have thought so, but everybody else did. People were always talking about him,” noted Marmo.
Lenny Bruce was never as famous as he wanted to be. TV hosts were afraid of his vulgarity and wild stories. Example: in his career he only made six TV appearances.
“I never understood why he was not. In his era, you had television and radio and lot of people were talking about him, yet he never got as ‘big’ as he should have been. That was a shame.”
Well? See him in New Brunswick. Was he dirty? Was he vulgar? Was he an American menace or an American hero?
You be the judge.
Performances take place January 11,12,13 at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (11 Livingston Avenue) in New Brunswick. Showtime is 8:00pm each night. Tickets are available for purchase online.
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