Imp of the Perverse

By T.E. Kalem

THE WORLD OF LENNY BRUCE

Assembled by FRANK SPEISER

To Lenny Bruce, hypocrisy was the prime obscenity. He wanted to exorcise it publicly. He wanted the hypocrite in each member of the audience to confess and condemn himself. He was a messianic imp of the perverse who wanted to cleanse souls through blasphemy, to free language with four-letter words, to restore nudity and copulation and natural bodily functions to the innocent purposes of nature.

He both succeeded and failed. He certainly brought about a change in inner attitudes, so that the comic material for which he was scorned and prosecuted meets with relatively easy acceptance today. Outwardly, little has changed. The substance of the first two-thirds of this one-man show--a toilet-training routine, assorted scatology, corrosively Jewish anti-Semitic byplay--could no more find its way into print in most publications now than when Bruce first delivered it in the '50s and '60s. Most supper-club managers would still label it as "sick."

The last third of The World of Lenny Bruce re-creates the shrunken courtroom hell of the beaten man. It is Author-Actor Frank Speiser's indubitable triumph, a coruscatingly impressive display of acting skill. His mind chatters, his hands tremble with terminal withdrawal symptoms. He is a burnt-out case spilling his legal papers and tapes while the cool, disembodied voice of the law tells him that his case is closed. Merely to look at him is to be terribly moved: one beholds the dumb, spent eyes of the fox at the end of hunt.

sbT.E.Kalem

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