The Berkeley Concert

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...	Live at the Curran Theater Once Lenny Bruce had amassed legal troubles, he turned a corner, going from standup performer doing funny, if acerbic, routines (which is more than being simply a comedian) to being a free-improvising social commentator. Here is the first CD reissue of Bruce's 1961 show at the Cu...	The Lenny Bruce Originals, Vol. 2	The Lenny Bruce Originals, Vol. 1 These 1958 tracks from The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce and Interviews of Our Times are the roots of the rage but not the rage itself. When Bruce first made the scene in the late 1950s, he was considerably tamer than he would become (although he was already quite volatile by the era...	Live: San Francisco 1966
Thank You Masked Man	Let the Buyer Beware UNEDITED, UNCENSORED, UNAPOLOGETIC...The ultimate Lenny Bruce box set 10 years in the making! Let The Buyer Beware is an unprecedented 6-CD boxed collection of Lenny Bruce's popular recorded performances, never-before-released performances, and various private recordings that te...	Lenny Bruce Without Tears The outrageous, groundbreaking comic Lenny Bruce, whose iconoclastic material in a conservative era got him into tragic trouble, is profiled by a close friend, Fred Baker, who prefers to remember the laughs Lenny Bruce's memory evokes instead of the tears. By presenting Bruce's l...	Lenny Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 06/27/2006 Run time: 111 minutes Rating: R	The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of An American Icon Lenny Bruce’s words had the power to provoke laughter and debate—as well as shock and outrage. It was the force of his voice that would place him on the wrong side of the law in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Lenny committed his life to telling the trut...

Don't Start Here to Understand the Evolution of Lenny Bruce
The Berkeley Concert, complete and unabridged, provides insight into the brilliance of Lenny Bruce. Please understand that this concert took place less than a year before Lenny died, and most of the material is NOT funny. What the listener gets is a diatribe by a man so beaten down by the legal system, that he waxes on about the hypocrisy of the legal system. It is laughable and absurd to realize that Lenny was busted for language that is so tame by today's standards. Regular cable stations, such as FX, expose viewers to objectionable language that it is almost surreal to imagine that Lenny's transgressions took place a little over 40 years ago! This not to excuse the fact that Lenny was a drug addict, and this too, led to his demise. Now, on to the CD: As I stated previously, the first half, Lenny is self indulgent about the law. Then, toward the latter part of the concert he returns to his time-tested comedy: the horniness of men, race issues, Catholicism, Judaism, women (he always mentions women), and the laughs emerge. Interestingly, he mentions Bela Lugosi's drug habit. Was he "projecting" here? Despite being a complete concert, the ending is rather abrupt. If you want to explore Lenny Bruce, do not begin with this CD, but listen to his work chronologically. What you will witness with the Berkeley Concert,is the deterioration of a brilliant mind. It has been said many times before: There would be no Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Lewis Black, Chris Rock, et.al, if Lenny Bruce had not paved the way.

Lenny Bruce is not afraid!
Until last month, I had no clue who Lenny Bruce was. I remember his name from a R.E.M song, but that was it. Then, last month, I had the chance to see Dustin Hoffman portray him in the film Lenny and I was hooked. I wanted to get my hands around as much of this cultural icon as possible, so to start my journey I bought this album. Maybe it was the wrong place to start, or that Hoffman created a better character than he was, but Lenny didn't make me laugh. His jokes in this concert are dated and longwinded (I know that was his style, but without the visual it just didn't work). While there are some bits that had me thinking of the parallels between this time and his era, most of the 78 minutes were left listening to his ramblings that never really went anywhere. I think to fully appreciate Bruce, you needed to be a liberal living in that generation. He was truly speaking to them about their lives, and I think that is why the translation is not as good today. I would recommend seeing the film Lenny, but skipping this album. It isn't his best. Grade: *** out of *****