Question: What is the difference between Lenny Bruce and Don Imus?
Answer: Lenny Bruce was not sponsored by The New York Stock Exchange.
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Comedians can say things that other people can’t. Lenny Bruce said out loud all sorts of stuff that was, and still is, floating around in the American collective unconscious - racism, misogyny, bestiality - fear and hate of every kind, the stuff that drove Richard Nixon, the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.
When Bruce talked, he talked as one of the oppressed - as a “Kike”, an object of hate and derision who had the guts to talk back to the Man. Listen to how he starts off with a racial slur and, by the time he’s done, he’s formed a sort of club of the dispossessed - all the ethnic groups who’ve been victims of racism at one point or another in this country. It’s like we’re suddenly sitting around in the living room together saying “Damn- he called you that?”
The shtick goes on- Bruce makes believe he’s talking to the head of the Klan, asking if he’d rather marry a white or a black woman. What if the white woman was Kate Smith, and the black woman was Lena Horne? He starts to sound like an auctioneer - an oblique reference to the slave trade that I think is not accidental.
The idea is that society labels people in order to objectify and ultimately commodify them. He’s auctioning off a black and a white woman to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, and he makes them celebrities, maybe to show that we’re all party to the process of racial objectification and commodification. It’s radical humor, and there’s no question whose side Bruce is on when he’s doing it.
Don Imus isn’t radical. Imus is the Man. He’s another face of corporate culture. When he calls black women prostitutes, there’s nothing inclusive about it. He’s just putting them down.
Which is right where the Money wants them to be.
Lenny Bruce is amazing — are there any comedians not-of-color these days who even care about issues like racism? I can’t think of one. Like Imus and that Seinfeld fool Michael Richards, all they care about are their careers. I love how Imus’s network is trying to excuse him by saying his on-air personality is one of a “cantankerous crank” — “Boy those ethnic minorities sure make me cranky!”
LOL
Well, there’s you!
Don Imus in some strange way reminds me of the blackface minstrel shows in which white performers dressed up as Blacks could evoke the most exagerrated stereotypes of Black life & culture. Imus played a bufoon & tried to get away with whatever he could in the way of disseminating base prejudices.
In Lenny Bruce’s savage satire there was always an overarching political purpose at work. With Imus it was just pandering to the worst prejudices of his audience.
The shame of it is he could actually be a decent interviewer of serious personalities. He just didn’t feel that would generate sufficient ratings.
That’s a very good point, Richard. Actually it makes me think of an essay by the jazz critic Gary Giddins on the use of blackface by white and black performers:
Giddins points out that cork was very freeing for white performers, who actually paid tribute to black music and performance when they performed in blackface.
Blacks, on the other hand, found minstrelsy a degrading but necessary route to bring their style to white audiences:
Unfortunately, I think the sort of street language that Imus was presumably borrowing from rap music and hiphop culture has itself been exploited by a white dominated recording industry to pander to white racist stereotypes. It other words, by the time the word “ho” reaches Don Imus’s lips, there’s nothing authentically African American about it. It’s just the old racist notion of the oversexualized black woman.
Lenny Bruce was Jewish, however, so leading off with “Kikes” is significant. Sarah Silverman plays off on her fresh-from-the-bat-mitzvah good looks to say the foulest things, offending all equally. George Carlin is famously and still marvelously enraged, a working class white guy who says what he sees.
Louis Ck> mostly makes fun of men and women’s roles but has taken bracing dips into his own racism by playing off black characters who are his neighbors in his short-run HBO show.
Issue here is, comedy blurs the lines between communcal and discriminating, in the sense of “we are smart enough to get your scray jokes, we are discriminating and you’ve included us” That tenuous community can quickly split if the secret pact between the audience and the comedian (e.g., we are safe to look at these things here) breaks down in a direct ocnfrontation. Watch the Michael Richards video. There is no safety in that room once it becomes personal and deeply historical.
sorry. tired typist today.
I think you’re right, Lisa, that there’s a sort of ephemeral cultural phenomenon around comedy, as to whether the audience “gets” the joke, whether it’s within or outside the boundary of what’s acceptable. As the world changes, that boundary changes, and what was funny and acceptable at one time may not be at another (and vice versa).
That also makes comedy a good way to recapture the past. “Getting” Lenny Bruce also means “getting” the fifties and sixties, in a way.
Gerry laughed out loud at the Kate Smith/Lena Horne thing. I think most people born after 1970 or so would miss that entirely.