The Trials of Lenny Bruce- The Fall and Rise of An American Ic

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 ...	Lenny Based loosely on the Broadway play, this film biography of late comedian Lenny Bruce captures his fiery brand of provocative humor while looking at his less-than-savory personal life. Dustin Hoffman earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Bruce, a seminal figure in stand-...	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...	Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s It's been said that analyzing comedy is a bit like dissecting a frog: you arrive at a greater understanding of the frog but the frog does tend to die in the process. The purpose of Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s is not to provide a la...	Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (New Americanists) Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up th...
The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce: From the Private Collection of Kitty Bruce	Lenny Bruce Without Tears The outrageous, groundbreaking comic Lenny Bruce, whose iconoclastic material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...	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...	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...	The Lenny Bruce Originals, Vol. 2

Freedom of expression
This is a great book If You wnat to endulge in a "Head-y" overview of The trials of Mr. Bruce. It may make You angry more than make You laugh at all. Recomended for those interested in a study of artist rights

Lenny Bruce something of an enigma
Comedian has Lenny Bruce always been something of an enigma.Some compared him to the famous satirist Jonathan Swift, who was a moralist and who endeavoured to uncover the hypocrisy of various situations arising out of society.His defence attorneys even pointed out "he was not a mad man writing dirty words on the walls of a public toilet. He was an original social critic with an unconventional vocabulary." Others, however, including some well known journalists, perceived him as a "sick comedian" with a foul mouth, whose commentaries using filthy, obnoxious, depraved and obscene language pertaining to religion, race, sex, and government were of no social value. The dilemma-was he not protected under the First Amendment of the American Constitution pertaining to freedom of speech, notwithstanding his shocking language? Authors Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, two attorneys and experts on the First Amendment, have authored a book entitled The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon.This is the first comprehensive and carefully documented account of Lenny Bruce's career and free speech struggles.Bruce had been involved in at least eight obscenity arrests, and had been subjected to six-obscenity court cases conducted in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York over a span of four years involving some 3, 500 pages of trial transcripts.For the most part, they all focused on so called "word crimes" concentrating on the following principal legal issues:Were his routines steeped in "bitter social criticism" of unquestionable value? Was his use of course language sexually arousing to the audience? If the words were non-erotic, how could they have been obscene? As mentioned, something is not necessarily obscene merely because it is in bad taste, shocking, disgusting, stupid, vulgar, embarrassing, immoral or offensive?Does the dominant appeal of the material used, taken as a whole, have a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt the average person by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desires?Did his use of "dirty words" corrupt the morals of youth or others, when you consider that under age persons were not permitted to attend the performances?Should an artist's use of word-taboos be judged, at least in significant part, by community standards?To better understand the power of Bruce's performances and all of the above legal questions, the authors have cleverly included a CD narrated by one of Bruce's most adamant supporters, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, highlighting some of his performances and trials. The CD also contains interviews with some of his ardent defenders, George Carlin, Hugh Hefner and Margaret Cho, and as a contrast, interviews with some of his prosecutors.Lenny Bruce died a tragic figure. He never lived to see the day where the courts recognized that comedians should not be imprisoned for their words. As the authors state, "the life of Lenny Bruce is a great cautionary tale about why First Amendment freedom must be the rule rather than the exception."This is a must read book for defenders of the First Amendment, who will not be disappointed with its meticulous research and easy to understand analysis of the pertinent legal issues. Norm Goldman-bookpleasures.com

A completely one-sided picture
Let me start by saying that I'm a fan of the First Amendment, and of the idea of and ideas of courageous people like Lenny Bruce who stand up for it in the face of considerable and outrageous persecution. Before getting this book, I knew very little about Lenny Bruce apart from the standard accolades to his artistic integrity and courage; after getting this book, the only additional information I have is that Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover have spent a considerable number of pages in creating a shrine to someone whom they clearly admire greatly.There's no problem with admiring someone, even in a biography, but the way this book is packaged makes it sound as if it's a penetrating legal analysis offering some enlightening picture of Lenny's life. Maybe I didn't read this deeply enough, but what I saw was page after page of `Good ol' Lenny, and the things he did. Then the cops came in.' Yes, as I say, what Lenny was doing (onstage, if not in his private life) was basically right, and certainly impressive; yes, the legal harrassment he received was absurd, and hounded him to his death -- but surely that's not all there is to the picture. I wanted to find out about the life of an important, if largely indirect, fight for the First Amendment; I found only a testament that Free Speech Good, coupled with a few timid caveats that the subject was not a saint.That said, how about the writing? Well, again, I picked up the book for some sort of insight into the legal twists and tangles of the matter, something to make me really begin to understand the cases; what I found was the work of someone who I think has great insight, but who was more concerned with showing that he was as cool as Lenny than with sharing that insight with his readers.By the way, the CD is great, although it takes a few listens to see how it hangs together.

A First Amendment Martyr
Lenny Bruce lived to shock people. His nightclub routines, full of the worst of the four letter words, made fun of stuff which people, especially his contemporaries, were supposed to take seriously: religion, marriage, intimacy. However, _The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon_ (Sourcebooks) by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, makes plain that the iconoclastic Bruce had enormous respect for the law. His rooms were cluttered with tapes, court transcripts, and legal research efforts, and he wrote letters to judges trying to explain how his comedy was legally protected speech. He even showed civic respect for the policemen who were so often out to get him. Bruce saw that it was his job to change the law, and while he never really managed that, he made historic changes by fighting battles that those after him would not have to fight. The authors of this engrossing book have found that his story is virtually absent from the history of the First Amendment; this is a corrective. Bruce was arrested many times for obscenity, but particularly interesting in this book is the demonstration that what often drove the arrests was irritation about his blasphemy. Bruce had routines that could bother any denomination. After mockingly accepting Jewish responsibility for killing Jesus, he roared, "We Jews killed Christ, and if he comes back, we'll kill him again!" He had a hilarious routine in which Christ and Moses come into the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral, to the embarrassment of Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Sheen, who have to telephone the pope to explain ("_Of course they're white!_"). We have no blasphemy laws in this country (to the dismay, still, of some), but he was literally brought up on blasphemy charges. Blasphemy could not stick, but obscenity might. The problem Bruce had was that according to the Supreme Court decision in _Roth_, a work had to be taken as a whole, but the cops and prosecutors always concentrated on the specific words. The vice squad informers could, during a performance, tally every naughty synonym Bruce used for genitalia or coitus, and then present the list for consideration by the grand jury. Consideration to the sweep of Bruce's satire was seldom given.As demonstrated in this comprehensive and well referenced volume, by two lawyers who obviously love their subject and enjoy explaining First Amendment issues, Bruce has had a resurrection. There have been plays and movies, but more importantly, as George Carlin (who was once arrested for attending a Bruce performance) said, "Lenny opened all the doors, or kicked them down." The nightclubs and comedy clubs are now open for anyone, with the sensible idea that if you might be offended by what you hear, don't pay to go in. A stand-up comic might fear bombing on stage, or getting heckled, but because Bruce has already taken the heat, no comic has to fear getting arrested. Within this book is a CD of Bruce giving some of his most famous routines, and commentary by admirers and detractors. On it, Margaret Cho, who continues in the tradition of offering outrageous satirical commentary, says that she knows part of her job, as Bruce's descendant, is to disrupt polite society, but she knows what has gone before: "I don't want to end up like him, but I want to be like him."

First Amendment Icon
This is really an excellent book. The first 200 pages focus on the embattled comedian, his bits and his scrapes with the law. As someone who was never a Lenny Bruce fan I found this section a provocative read. However, I found the book becoming progressively more compelling as the authors get into the details of the First Amendment trials. They do a masterful job of intergrating theory with the mechanics of placing the factual "matter" (the testimony) before the finder of fact. In its discussion of the post-death and resurrected Lenny Bruce the book ascends to its highest level. The irony of Lenny Bruce as a First Amendment icon, whose free speech is beyond challange and the political destruction of William Kuh provide brilliant insights on the vicissitudes of American popular culture since the 1960s