A New (Jew) Yorker article

[Ognir]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/m ... -film.html

July 31, 2009
The Lenny Bruce Performance Film

Most of the funny people in Judd Apatow's "Funny People," which opens today, are Jewish, and, as David Denby points out in his review of the movie in the magazine this week, most of them joke about sex. In the early nineteen-sixties, Lenny Bruce, who was also Jewish, did the same thing, and got in lots of trouble for it. In this clip, from a 1965 performance that was his penultimate (he died the following year, at age forty), Bruce explains why Jews joke about sex (and I discuss his explanation). In that show, he also talked a great deal about his legal ordeals; his trial transcript was the closest thing he had to a script, and he performed it with gusto. Toward the end of his life, bankrupted by his legal ordeals and unable to perform anywhere but California (where he had won an obscenity case), Bruce was obsessed with the law. It's a Jewish thing to be, and he became a stand-up Kafka in his bewildered journey through its labyrinths. (I reviewed the DVD of this performance when it was released, four years ago.)

In 1987, I was a temp in the word-processing department of Cardozo Law School, in Greenwich Village, when I began working with one of the professors, Edward de Grazia, on his manuscript regarding the modern history of obscenity law as it related to literature and, ultimately, to some major cases in which he was personally involved. One of his chapters had to do with Bruce, whose lawyer he was at the time of this performance. One day Ed brought over several letters, from Bruce to him, for me to transcribe. I recall one that was typewritten, but remarkably clumsily; words routinely fell off the edge of the odd-sized paper, and phrases were squeezed between lines. My physical contact with those documents, as well as my friendship with Ed, whose stories about Bruce are terribly sad, gave me the sense of a personal connection to Bruce and his work. The book, which came out in 1993, is magnificent; it has an odd title, "Girls Lean Back Everywhere," which suggests little of the dramatic legal history and literary passion with which its thousand or so pages are packed.