Comedy

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Percy the Dreamweaver and Son. on October 19, 2009 at 10:18pm

No guesses, it was pretty obvious to work out all our relationships within the Pride (?) by the way I was being so lovingly ridiculed from start to finish !! What a young lad has to contend with !

"Enjoyable" !...You really and truly are the Master of the Understatement, my Dear Sue.......They are having a BALL !!!...at my tear-stained expense...O' woe is me...sob, sob.....

Bye, T's here.x

Permalink Reply by s <3 on October 19, 2009 at 10:42pm

I bet they are too :D :D :D

Permalink Reply by Percy the Dreamweaver and Son. on October 19, 2009 at 3:51am

Permalink Reply by s <3 on October 19, 2009 at 3:28pm

Even I got the magazine reference..... and I'm slow!!!!

I like Parkies style, you get more from a carrot than a stick. He puts his guest at easy and they say so much more then they would normally,

I have not seen John for years...... not that I know him, just that sportsmen pop up all over the place now on quiz shows etc.

Peter and Dud are so funny.

Peter had a club in London in the 60's didn't he?

If Stephen Fry likes Peter he must have been a good egg.... his humour was almost ahead of it's time.

A man with no ego........ now that's a rarity. I love the party invitation refusal.... hadn't heard that story before.

Permalink Reply by Percy the Dreamweaver and Son. on October 19, 2009 at 8:36pm

Yes Sue, the revue show, 'Beyond The Fringe' heralded the start of the so-called satire boom, a scene given a focus by Peter Cook, who opened London's first satirical nightclub The Establishment Club in 1961, shortly after '.....Fringe' transferred to the West End. The club would allow performances to go further than they could in the theatre, where scripts were at the mercy of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. It was an instant success, with regulars such as John Bird and John Fortune, and guests like Barry Humphries and, controversially, Lenny Bruce. There's a very funny story relating to Bruce's stay here in the U.K. at P.C.'s flat. Not here though.

Private Eye sort of off-shot from then.

Feeding time, and I am looking forward to it. Minestrone soup. Vegetable dry curry, rice, spinach (and broccoli). Apple & Blackberry pie. Biscuits. Fruit tea. A mango (mine)..............I can go for that, as the song goes.....Nil by mouth from midnight though, deary-deary me !....Have to stock-up before. The only answer.

Permalink Reply by s <3 on October 19, 2009 at 8:44pm

Is the story too rude?

Thanks for the info on The Establishment, I thought I remembered hearing something about a club that he owned.

I don't know Lenny Bruce.

Permalink Reply by Percy the Dreamweaver and Son. on October 19, 2009 at 9:54pm

No, just too long right now. It's about L.B. sending P.C. out at midnight (in th early sixties when everything was shut by 6o/c !!!) to find him some heroin !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!....The stories very English and very amusing in its' olde Worlde naive charm.................Later, I'll write it, but going off-line, seeing T. at 8o/c when she finishes. After that it's the 'Ragged Trousered......'
......................and no food in a few hours.....sssiiiiiiiiiggghhhhhh !

Permalink Reply by s <3 on October 19, 2009 at 10:01pm

Look forward to hearing it when you are ready.

Have a great evening with T.

Speak to you when you have come back to consciousness..... Sophie and I will be thinking of you and sending good vibes.

Permalink Reply by Percy the Dreamweaver and Son. on October 19, 2009 at 10:11pm

Oh, and Lenny Bruce....just something I have on him within the magic that is my laptop ! (Sometimes I'm not sure what tangent I'm flyin' off at)...........

'I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up'.
Lenny Bruce.

'Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God'.
Lenny Bruce.

'In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls'.
Lenny Bruce.

'When you're eight years old nothing is your business'.
Lenny Bruce.

'The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them'.
Lenny Bruce.

Leonard Alfred Schneider (Lenny Bruce) was born in New York. "To me, if you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish, he once said. " It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish if you're Jewish." When Bruce was five his parents divorced and he was brought up by relatives. During World War II he served in the Navy on the U. S. S. Brooklyn, a light cruiser, and was discharged in 1946. After spending some time in odd jobs, he moved to Hollywood to study acting. In 1947 he changed his name to Bruce, because "Leonard Alfred Schneider sounded too Hollywood."

The fifties was the breakthrough decade for Bruce and such comedians as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Mort Sahl, who were all Jewish, with their own vision of ethnicity. Their humor evoked a response among young Bohemians and college-educated people. Bruce worked as a night-club performer in Brooklyn and Baltimore, where he met a striptease dancer, who worked under the name Hot Honey Harlowe. She was born Harriett Jolliff in 1927. Harlowe had ran away from home in her teens and spent also some time in jail. "Honey and I just stared at each other and got hot," Bruce later said. They married in 1951.

Bruce appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Show and drew national attention with his daring style of satire, in which he probed taboo subjects such as racial fears, sexual fantasies, Jewish-Christian tensions, and presidents. "I really dig what they do with a homosexual in this country. They put him into a prison with a lot of other men. That's a really good punishment." (Dustin Hoffman in Lenny)

Bruce imagined Hitler in show business and stewardesses jettisoning infants from overloaded airliners, betraying at the same time a schooling in the Catskills resorts. The black sheep among salon tyros and young comics, such as Joe E. Lewis, Buddy Hackett, Alan King, Bruce played to intellectuals, wearing jeans, not tuxedo. His wit and inimitable frankness won him an admiring audience and made his act celebrated in liberal literary circles.

Harlowe appeared in two films, Dance Hall Racket (1953) and Princess of the Nile (1954). Bruce was married to her until their divorce in 1957. Harlowe, who later published a book of memoir, Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady (1976), died in 2005 in Honolulu.

Bruce worked in Hollywood at night-clubs and on a local television show. Steve Allen had Bruce on his show in April 1959.

(Can't remember if there's any florid language in this...I don't think so but can't get the sound or vid up at the moment (this laptop goes back when I'm released, I can tell you)....so my apologies if there is. Delete it if you want, it's just to give insight into Lenny Bruce. Who's an American and should not be here 'cept as a flying visitor ! Hehe !).

In 1961 Bruce was imprisoned on obscenity charges and in 1963 he was refused permission to enter Britain. "The comic, Lenny Bruce, was booed offstage in England," claimed the controversial radio journalist Walter Winchell. Eventually Bruce's show was banned both in England and Australia.

After a number of nightclub owners started to Bruce's show, assuming that it would only lead to police arrest, he was unable to perform his material. In 1962 the United States District Court in San Francisco, in support of a bankruptcy action, declared him a pauper. The idea for Bruce's autobiography, HOW TO TALK DIRTY AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, was suggested by Hugh Hefner in 1963. It appeared in Playboy over the next two years and in book form in 1965.

In spite of pressures, Bruce refused to clean up his language. "All my humour is based on destruction and despair," he said. "If the whole world were tranquil, I'd be standing in the breadline, right back of J. Edgar Hoover." (from The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. by J. Cohen, 1970) In 1964 Bruce was convicted of giving obscene performances at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village.

When he was arrested by the police in April 1964, Norman Mailer, James Jones and other prominent writers and intellectuals defended him as a social satirist "in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais and Twain." In his later years Bruce became addicted to heroin. In 1963 he was found guilty of illegal possession of drugs. Bruce died of an overdose on August 3, 1966, in his home on Hollywood Boulevard. He was 40 years old.

Bruce's life inspired Julian Barry's 1971 play Lenny and Bob Fosse's film Lenny (1974), which portrayed him as a martyr of freedom of speech. Marvin Worth, Bruce's longtime friend, had tried to produce a screen biography of him since 1968. Fosse considered Dustin Hoffman the best candidate for the title role - the actor even looked like Lenny. Actress Valerie Perrine, who played his wife, Honey, had been a Las Vegas stripper. In the nightclub scenes Hoffman performed many of Bruce's most remembered monologues, with a live audience looking on. "I'm totally corrupted. I mean, really. My whole act, my whole economic success, whatever that is, is based solely on the existence of segregation, violence, despair, disease and injustice. And if by some miracle, the whole world would suddenly tranquilize, be pured, I would be standing in an unemployment line somewhere. So you see, I'm not a moralist." (Dustin Hoffman in Lenny)

Hoffman had prepared himself well for the role - he listened to records, watched films, and read books on the comedian. He also had his own view of the Lenny myth: "I don't believe Lenny used drugs just to get wasted. Instead, I thought he used them to keep himself going for four days, since he was under enormous pressure from performing in clubs, writing new material, recording new record albums, and planning concerts." (from Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's Antihero by Jeff Lenburg, 1983)

Lenny Bruce expanded dramatically the style and subject matter of stand-up-comedy. His style has left impact on many performers. Years later Eddie Murphy was using language and material that would have made Bruce seem inhibited. Woody Allen, who had became a respected comedy writer in the late 1950s, appealed to a similar audience, but when Bruce satirized middle-class values, Allen satirized his own idiosyncrasies.

"Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn't commit any crime
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time.
I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half,
Seemed like it took a couple of months.
Lenny Bruce moved on and like the ones that killed him, gone".
(Bob Dylan in 'Lenny Bruce', from Shot of Love, 1983).

Permalink Reply by s <3 on October 19, 2009 at 10:40pm

I listened to this Lennon song for the first time today, it got the same response as Lenny Bruce...... people seemed to miss the whole point of what they were trying to say.