"Lenny Bruce (The Establishment) [is] the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language this inhibited island has ever engaged to amuse its citizens. Mr. Bruce is dark-hatred, dark-suited and American; and the virulent, free-associating manner in which he excoriates the hypocrisies of his compatriots has earned him the epithet "sick." He is in fact pan nihilist, part moralist. He slouches around the stage clutching a microphone, smiling as he improvises, caring as he smiles, seldom repeating in the second show what he said in the first, and always conducting what amounts to a rush job of psychoanalysis on the audience he is addressing. He talks about the nuances of race relations (viz. the white liberals who worship Negroes but somehow never meet them) ... about the techniques of masturbation and the psychological duplicity ("a horny hoax") involved in sleeping with a prostitute; about pain, and laughter, and dying. At times Mr. Bruce drawls and mumbles too privately, lapsing in to a welter of Yiddish phrases borrowed from the show-business world that reared him. ... But at the end he had broken through frontiers of language and feeling that one had hitherto thought inviolable ..."
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Comedians from the United StatesHumorists from the United StatesSatirists from the United StatesStand-up comedians from the United StatesCritics from the United States
Original Language: English
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Kenneth Tynan "Look Back in Quadruplicate" The Observer (London, April 29, 1962) p. 29
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lenny_Bruce
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Lenny Bruce
Leonard Alfred Schneider (October 13, 1925 β August 3, 1966), better known by his stage name Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist.
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