Let the Buyer Beware

Help! (Deluxe Edition) After the worldwide success of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles and director Richard Lester reunited for a follow-up film, Eight Arms to Hold You. Well, that wasn't the final title; a pleading Lennon-McCartney tune provided the catchier handle: Help! A loose semispoof of the globe...	The Lenny Bruce Performance Film Lenny Bruce is considered to this day to be America's most controversial comedian. Having been arrested numerous times for obscenity over the course of his career, Lenny performed only in San Francisco during the last year of his life. Filmed live at the Basin Street West in San ...	Traveling Wilburys (2CD/1DVD, Deluxe Edition) The Traveling Wilburys were one of the few supergroups that lived up to their promise, because they didn't try to. Things started inauspiciously when George Harrison, needing a B-side for a 1988 single, called in friends Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison for assis...	Carnegie Hall Concert Back when it took a computer the size of the Pentagon to do long division, Lenny Bruce was the personification of hypertext, connecting ideas through puns, jokes, impressions, and the weaving together of complex tales. As Don Friedman says in his spoken introduction to this prest...	Saturday Night Live - The Complete Second Season
Eagles - The Very Best Of This packed double-disc is the slim option for fans who find the Eagles' vaunted greatest hits sets too little and the boxed set too hefty. Hit singles large and medium are here, often ("One of These Nights," "Hotel California") still sounding definitive and even tough. Large hel...	The Miles Davis and Gil Evans: Complete Columbia Studio Recordings From their first work together on the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949, Miles Davis and Gil Evans forged a unique relationship as great soloist and brilliant arranger. The real opportunity to explore their shared vision didn't come until 1957, however, when Davis had forged a r...	James Bond Ultimate Collector's Set For the first time ever all 21 of James Bond's riveting adventures are together in one riveting collection! From his premiere in 1964's Dr. No all the way through to the latest thrilling installment Casino Royale Bond never fails to deliver the white-knuckle heart-in-your-throat ...	How to Talk Dirty and Influence People In 1963, before the law and his drug habit brought the curtain down on the comedian, Hugh Hefner asked then-superstar Lenny Bruce to write his autobiography. Lenny hired writer Paul Krassner to help him edit the book, which appeared in Playboy over the next two years. Though it's...	Brother PT-1950 P-touch PC-Ready Labeler for Small Workgroups The PT-1950 is the USB-ready P-touchlabeling system for office and light commercial use. With its PC-Ready capabilities, included AC adapter, compact size and available easy-change tape cassettes, the PT-1950 is the perfect solution for small groups looking to share a great label...

Legendary collection
Hands down one of the best we'll ever see. When Dick Gregory puts you in a class with Mark Twain and Richard Pryor in terms of funniest ever, that says something. I found a copy used at a Newbury Comics, and for half off, and after listening, I would easily pay the 70$ for this collection.

Essential material for any red-blooded patriotic citizen
Highly recommended listening for any red-blooded patriotic citizen and all compassionate members [or aspirants] of the human family. And for all crewmembers of spaceship earth [Bucky Fuller]

Phenomenal audio-biography of Lenny's life, view, and humor
This is a well put together package. I definitely don't recommend downloading this as it comes with an awesome oversized book containing photos of personal clippings, letters, and more information about Lenny Bruce. This is the most Lenny I've listened to at one time, and after listening to this and reading the book, I feel much more respect for Lenny and love him. There is some great comedy on here, but some of the selections were boring and had poor sound quality. I'd rather look into his live stuff and The Lenny Bruce Originals 1 + 2 for a more cohesive sound quality. If you want to learn about Lenny's personality and showmanship, you can't go wrong with this set -- this is an excellent production.

A Treasure Trove, but Not for Newcomers
This is a great collection of some classic Bruce bits and a lot of lesser known and obscure recordings. If you're a Bruce fan and know his schtick--and you're fairly well-versed in Yiddish--pick up this set. If you're new to Bruce, don't start here. The sound quality varies wildly, Bruce's references are even more arcane than usual--well, this is for aficionados. Newcomers should pick up Bruce's classic (and cleanly produced) Fantasy albums, notably: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, Togetherness, and American. Once you've absorbed these discs (with a copy of "Joys of Yiddish" nearby), then move to the Carnegie Hall Concert, and then...to this multidisc set.

LENNY LIVES UP TO HIS LEGACY
Remember the old story about the old actor famous for his death scenes? "Dying," he explained to a younger acolyte, "is easy. It's comedy that's hard." Comedy may be hard, but anyone can do it. But none ever did it as well as Lenny Bruce. The funny man died of an overdose, at age 41, nearly 39 years go, but his legacy lives on. It's a life and legacy of laughter, and it's ripe for rediscovery. Now, a generation who never have heard of Bruce, for those who only know him from Bob Fosse's smoky (but well intentioned) bio-flick, for those who glance at an image of Bruce and think "Castro," can grasp one of the most inventive and prismatic talents of the last century in a set of rare recordings. "Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware" is a six-CD compendium of Bruce's best material, lovingly compiled by producer Hal Willner and Bruce's daughter Kitty. More than half has never been heard before, and a great many variants and alternate riffs of his most well-known material has been anthologized here. His debut on Arthur Godfrey's show is here, as well as the classic routines about Father Flotsky (a parody of Warner Brothers prison flicks), the Palladium (about an American comic dying on an English stage), as well as (real) taped phone calls to his lawyers. Horribly illustrated is his descent into near madness, not through drugs or degenerate lifestyle, but through the systematic persecution by the U.S. government. In America during the '50s and '60s, you could make jokes about anything, except, maybe, Jesus Christ, Milton Berle and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sacrosanct bastions were not to be made fun of, and especially not by an outsider, someone different, someone who was not a Christian. Bruce was a Jewish comic, steeped in the tradition, using the attitude and the language as a position to observe the mores and folkways of mid-century American life. It's not a stretch to see his persecution by the legal system of our country as another blatant example of anti-Semitism, a suppression of truth and, worst of all, an illustration of the stupidity and lack of humor inherent in a repressive government. Bruce's take on sexuality was summed up in his observation that if the human body was dirty, the fault lay with the manufacturer. He saw religion as a greedy profession, a logical extension of an industrial complex to control reason and money. Unfortunately, and fatally, Bruce believed in our government and legal system. Like a witty Thomas Paine, Bruce was a true patriot when it came to freedom of expression. Without Bruce there would be no Bill Maher, no South Park, no Jon Stewart, and considerably less freedoms in general --- not only in speech, but also in equality between races and genders. He was one of the first to use humor to attack America's prejudice against African Americans, gays and all of the non-religious, non-republican disenfranchised people in America. Yet one man's patriot is another man's traitor. Bruce was vilified by the press and by main stream contemporaries as sick, twisted and dirty. But it's not only Bruce's material, certainly genius and of an equal to Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain, but his performance style and presentational choices that this new collection celebrates. He may not have been the first monologist who didn't use the "A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar ..." joke catalogs, and certainly he had extended parables and parodies that could be termed as "jokes." Yet his basic presentation was something very new and different. Rather than a standard set with the identical jokes, pauses and ad-libs for each show, Bruce had an uncanny ability to listen ---- not only to his audience (as all performers must), but he had the uncanny knack of being able to listen to himself. Like a brilliant jazz musician, he could circle around a motif or a joke, listening to the sound and sense, backing off, teasing the story, until the timing was exactly right to blast into the theme or punchline. In the commemorative hardcover book that accompanies Let the Buyer Beware, there are a number of essays and appreciations of Bruce, but none so telling as a single page by his daughter. "His truths were based on our most coveted lies," she writes. "He left no room for rationalized bigotry or self-deception. He seduced his audience with a rhythmic and dynamic use of his own language, acting as the slow pull of a Band-Aid off denial." Look around at our nation of addicts, a nation where prescription drugs have their own snazzy TV commercials, when cell phones are required means of communication, when the religious right still controls the White House. Where is Lenny when we really need him?