How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

by Lenny Bruce

  Or sometimes I will tag it with, “Not only did we kill him, but we’re gonna kill him again when he comes back.”

  I suppose that if I were Christlike, I would turn the other cheek and keep letting you punch me out and even kill me, because what the hell, I’m God’s son, and it’s not so bad dying when you know that you’ve got a pass to come back indefinitely. All right, so you have to take a little crap when you come home and you have to “get it” from your Father . . .

  “Oh, you started again, you can’t get along. Who was it this time? The Jews, eh? Why can’t you stop preaching? Look, this is the last time I’m telling you, the next time you get killed, you’re staying there. I’ve had enough aggravation with your mother.”

  Of all the comedians I have ever met, Steve Allen is not only the most literate, but also the most moral. He not only talks about society’s problems, but he does things about them. He’s a good person, without being all sugar and showbiz, and I really dig him for that.

  I was on the Steve Allen Show twice. Now, if I work for an hour in a night club, out of that hour I will ad-lib perhaps four minutes; sometimes, if I’m really fertile, ten minutes. But for me ever to have to come out and open with the same word and finish with the same word and do the same bits in the same order in each show, then I wouldn’t feel like a comic at all. But you have to do this for television. And it bugs me.

  They sat me down there, and I’m doing the bit for 15 guys. And I got into material that they wouldn’t let me do on the Allen Show. I have a tattoo on my arm, and because of this tattoo, I can never be buried in a Jewish cemetery. That’s the Orthodox law. You have to go out of the world the same way you came in—no marks, no changes.

  Anyway, I told how, when I got back from Malta and went home to Long Island, I was in the kitchen, washing with soap, and my Aunt Mema saw the tattoo. So she flips. A real Jewish yell.

  “Look what you did! You ruined your arm! You’re no better than a gypsy!”

  So the producer says that I can’t do this on the show because it would definitely be offensive to the Jewish people.

  “You’re out of your nut,” I responded.

  No, he said, every time we get into a satire of any ethnic group, we get a lot of mail. You can’t talk about that.

  I argued with them. I said if they wouldn’t let me do that, I wouldn’t do the show. Now, I’ll never use four-letter words for shock value—it has to fit and swing with the character whom I want to say it—but I know I can’t use four-letter words on television in any case. But here, I wasn’t making any such references, I was just doing a true bit.

  They had a meeting about it. They argued for about an hour while I was kept waiting in a corner, like a leper with a bell on my neck.

  “We talked it over, Lenny. You know, it’s not only offensive to the Jewish people, but it’s definitely offensive to the Gentile people too.”

  “Oh, yeah—how do you figure that?”

  “Well, what you’re saying in essence is that the Gentiles don’t care what they bury.”

  The funny thing is, friends of mine are always showing me anti-Semitic articles. “Look at what this bigoted bastard wrote!” And then I dug something. Liberals will buy anything a bigot writes.

  In fact, they really support hatemongers.

  George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, is probably a very knowledgeable businessman with no political convictions whatsoever. He gets three bucks a head and works the mass rallies consisting of nothing but angry Jews, shaking their fists and wondering why there are so many Jews there.

  And Rockwell probably has only two real followers—and they’re deaf. They think the swastika is merely an Aztec symbol.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was Time magazine that originally labeled me “the sickest of them all.” The reason: In connection with the Leopold-Loeb case, I had said: “Bobby Franks was snotty.”

  Of course, if Nathan Leopold had any sense of humor, the day he got out he would have grabbed another kid!

  When I hear someone say, “I love the human race,” I get a little wary. But when the Associated Press interviewed me on—of all things—sick comedy, the dialog went something like this:

  INTERVIEWER: I know you must really hate someone or something to have your point of view on humor.

  LENNY: Actually, when you hate someone or something, it makes you a little uncomfortable to see it or hear it.

  INTERVIEWER: Boy, Lenny, you hate so many things you can’t even make a choice, can you?

  LENNY: I hate to shave . . . I hate to be alone . . . I hate liver.

  INTERVIEWER: Come on, stop kidding, that’ll never do. What are you, a saint? Give me some guy you really hate.

  LENNY: Oh, a guy . . . George Bernard Shaw!

  INTERVIEWER: George Bernard Shaw? What the hell have you got against him?

  Now, the truth is, I had never even read anything by Shaw. My reading matter ran the gamut from a technical book on intercontinental ballistic missiles to Jean-Paul Sartre’s study of anti-Semitism, but all I knew about Shaw was that he wrote Pygmalion. And what he looked like. And that he was dead and unable to defend himself. I’m not proud that I was completely ignorant of George Bernard Shaw. It’s just a fact. I blurted the name out of the blue. Now the AP interviewer wanted to know what I had against him.

  LENNY: What have I got against Shaw? Didn’t you ever hear about the Whorten Incident?

  INTERVIEWER: Well, uh, yeah, but what the hell, you can’t expect . . . George Bernard Shaw, that’s wild . . . I mean it’s OK but—you’re too much . . . another question I want to ask———”

  I had him by the balls. There wasn’t any “Whorten Incident.” I was improvising as I went along, and I just threw that in. I figured he was too insecure to admit that there was a subject he wasn’t hip to. I sensed I had him up against the pseudo-intellectual rope.

  LENNY: Well, do you feel Shaw was right in the Whorten Incident?

  INTERVIEWER: Lenny, you know better than anyone that you—well, I have to see something before I believe it.

  LENNY: See it? Jesus, it was in all the papers. His heirs had proof.

  INTERVIEWER: Yeah, Lenny, but you know yourself that people are only interested in what they can get out of a person.

  LENNY: Well, getting all you can and sleeping with a guy’s wife, is two different things. And you wouldn’t believe it, but you talk to the majority of people—and I mean people that are supposed to be bright, erudite, literary-oriented people—and you mention the Whorten Incident, and they look at you as if you’ve been smoking the weed or giving away the secrets of the Rosicrucians.

  INTERVIEWER: Lenny, when are you going to learn that everyone else isn’t as honest as you?

  LENNY: What the hell has honesty got to do with a guy getting another guy’s wife started on dope and hanging around Lesbians? What was that Lesbian’s name, anyway? . . . They had her picture plastered all over at the time. . . . Is that something, I forgot her name. . . . I think it was Helen. Yeah, that’s it, Helen. I almost forgot her name.

  INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that was it, Helen. Boy, people are characters. You’ve got a great memory, Lenny.

  The reporter left, saying that the story would probably break the next week.

  The next week, I searched and searched, and there was no AP story. And then I finally found it, in John J. Miller’s column in the National Enquirer. There it was, right between Fidel Castro doing one of his unnatural acts and Elvis Presley sticking a Fraülein’s bosom in his paratrooper boots.

  THE PIG THAT WROTE PYGMALION

  Lenny Bruce is a comedian who is currently appearing at the hungry i in San Francisco. The owner, Enrico Banducci, gave Lenny the go-ahead to expose the infamous “Whorten Incident” thrill-slaying, dope and abortion-ring case involving George Bernard Shaw . . .

  The news media have done me in—from Walter Winchell’s lies (“Lenny Bruce was being heckled and he handed the mike to a patron, walked over
and slugged the heckler, who was a New York judge . . .”) to the TV newscaster’s lies (“Lenny Bruce, the sick comedian, was really sick today. Bruce, who’s had more than his share of brushes with the law, charted a new course with a narcotics arrest. He has admitted to using heroin since he was eighteen years old. Bruce, shown here with his attorney, stops and mugs for the cameraman and promises to stir a little commotion at tomorrow’s hearing . . .”) dignified by his balding crown resting in shadowed bas-relief Himalayas.

  I could never expect to get a jury that didn’t read the papers and watch television, and to make sure they were prejudiced and that The People had their side of the story in first, they saw to it that I glommed the first handicap: the stigma of being arrested. That in itself puts one in an unsavory light. “Bruce Arrested for Dope.”

  Who gave them the item that was on the street even before I was out on bail?

  Look at the bottom of my arrest report—all of them—and you’ll find: “LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) Press Room was notified and City Newsroom was called.”

  A press notice on an arrest report. But don’t get me wrong, brother, I love Hollywood.

  In Van Nuys court the photographers were taking pictures and I really got tired of them. I asked them to stop. They continued. I put my coat up over my ears. Their cameras still clicked away. I walked behind the state flag, but a guy jerked it away. I walked out of the court. They followed me. When I walked, they walked. When I ran, they ran. See Lenny run. See the photographers run. See Lenny stop. See the photographers stop. See Lenny wave his arm. All fall down.

  I had stopped short, only to be charged with assaulting a photographer.

  The newspaper is the most dramatic medium of the written word, whether it’s Dr. Alvarez with his arthritic pen pals or Prudence Penny’s 12 ways to make leftovers attractive. It is because of newspapers—their disregard for the truth when it comes to reporting—that my reputation has been hurt.

  Walter Winchell wrote: “The comic, Lenny Bruce, was booed offstage in England.” All right, now that’s another lie, I was never booed offstage, and the owner sent me a letter to the contrary.

  The truth is, I was received with great aplomb in England. Kenneth Tynan, Britain’s leading drama critic, wrote about me: “We are dealing with an impromptu prose poet, who trusts his audience so completely that he talks in public no less outrageously than he would talk in private. . . . Hate him or not, he is unique, and must be seen.”

  The best write-up I ever got in my whole life was by George Miller in the New Statesman. I’m not concerned with whether he was pro–or anti–Lenny Bruce—I don’t care about that—but his beautiful style . . . he described me as “lemurlike.”

  I know all about British people from the movies.

  England is a country in India. The men have two jobs—they’re either in the R.A.F. or they’re accountants. They reject IBM machines and do everything in scroll. They wear scarfs and caps all the time and they have bad teeth. They governed everybody to death. The Queen has two outfits. She has the riding outfit and a long satin thing with a tiara. The Windsors are about 200 years old by now. But the kids never grow up; the kids have been kids forever and ever. And there’s not many farms in England. Those who live in farm areas are lewd, lascivious people that are always strangling children and saying, “There’s a little bit of Hyde in all of us.”

  I had a lot of fun in England—although I didn’t get laid once. I had heard that, gee, in England you really get a lot of girls, but I was there a month and I never got laid.

  The one time I almost scored was in this hotel. The chick came up to my room after she fell for what I call my innocuous come-on: “Hey, I gotta go upstairs for a minute, why don’t you come up, I’ve gotta———” And the rest is said on the car-door slam, and mumbled into the carpeting on the stairs.

  “What’d you say?” is answered by, “We’ll just be a minute,” leaving the door open, keeping your topcoat on, and dashing for a bureau drawer as if to get something, throwing open the closet and grabbing a briefcase, rumbling through it while muttering, “Siddown, I’ll be just a second.”

  All this is done very rapidly, with a feeling of urgency.

  “Christ, where the hell did I put that? Make yourself a drink. What time is it? We gotta get the hell outta here. Now where the hell did I put that damn—remind me to get a new maid. Hey, are you warm? Christ, it’s hot in here . . .”

  Well, I didn’t even get to the second paragraph, when a knock came at the door, synchronized with the key turning in the lock.

  “Mr. Bruce, I’m afraid we don’t have any of that here.”

  (What a temptation to finish the joke: “And I’m not, either.”)

  To my amazement, the manager smirked knowingly as the girl looked up apprehensively, and I sat down gingerly as his thin lip curled snarlingly.

  “Out, the both of you—out!”

  Ask anyone who has been to England. They do not allow persons who come into hotels to bring members of the opposite sex with them, because they know what it’s liable to lead to. It’s a wonder the maids ever get into the rooms. That’s a thought, though. Maybe it’s the maids who instituted that action. God, what if all the maids in England were whores?

  I think that the Profumo scandal was a beautiful commentary on the British image of an asexual people, puritanically moral.

  The reason most men could indict those people, when they themselves were probably guilty of the same crime which is not a crime, is that most men won’t admit that they have ever been with whores. Not for the morality of it; the reason they don’t cop out is because of the ego aspect. “What kind of guy has to pay for pussy, man? I get it for nothing—the girls give me money!”

  It was right before the Profumo scandal that they wouldn’t permit me even to enter England again for what was to have been my second engagement at The Establishment. I actually flew to London and was rejected without anyone thinking any more about it than if I were to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco. They kept me overnight in the same cell they had used for Dr. Soblen—the international-espionage agent who committed suicide.

  Then I got back to Idlewild—and for the first time in my life, after coming in and out of this country maybe 20 times—my luggage was thoroughly searched. I was taken into a private room where I was stripped and internally searched—and, goddamn, that is humiliating.

  It sure bugs you to stand naked in front of five guys with suits and shoelaces and pens in their pockets.

  What if you got a hard-on?

  “All right, take your shoes off now and—what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Why don’t you put that away?”

  “In my shoes, sir?”

  “I mean make it go down. A damn weirdo—getting a hard-on at Customs. All right, put your clothes on.”

  “I’d like to, sir, but I don’t know if you noticed my pants—they’re rather tight. I’ll have to wait till this goes away.”

  “Come on, now, cut the silliness and get your pants on and get the hell out of here.”

  “I’ll try, sir, but . . . it’s never done this before. I guess it’s nerves.”

  “Well, try to pee.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Out there in the hall in the men’s room.”

  “But I can’t get my whatchamacallit, my oh-my, into my pants. Do you know anyone who could make it go away? Or could you gentlemen go out while I make it go away, up and down . . . Oh, here, I know what I’ll do, I’ll put it in the wine basket and I’ll carry it.”

  By the way, I’ve figured out a sure way that you’ll score every time. You meet a chick and you tell her, “Look, I’d like very much to take you out, but I’ve got a bit of a problem. I know you aren’t familiar with my problem but I’ll just go out with you and I’ll be very happy—but I don’t make it with anybody. I’m a celibate and that’s the way it’s got to be. So you know in front there can be no se
xual rapport between us. I just wanted to tell you that now because a couple of times I’ve gone with girls and they said, “Why didn’t you tell me, you’ve ruined the night and everything.”

  And sure enough, driving along, she’ll ask: “How come you don’t make it with anybody?”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “I never heard of not making it with anybody.”

  “I have, but not for years.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you, I can’t talk about it.”

  “You can tell me. I like to hear other people’s problems.”

  “All right. It’s the way I’m built. I’m abnormally large.”

  “You’re that big?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, are you kidding me?”

  “Haven’t had an affair with a woman since 1947.”

  “And what was her reaction?”

  “She’s been in the hospital all these years.”

  “Are you really serious? I mean, didn’t you ever go to visit her?”

  “They would have me killed. Her brother is still looking for me. I can’t wear walking shorts in public.”

  “Really? Well, how big is it?”

  “Makes me sick. I’ve tried to forget about it.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “No, not a chance. It’s all locked up anyway. I don’t even have the key. My father has one key; the mayor has the other.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It’s quite possible that one of the reasons I’ve gotten busted so often goes back to an unsuccessful extortion attempt on me right after that first arrest in Philadelphia. I was approached by an attorney who has since died—he was one of the biggest lawyers in the state—he could have gotten Ray Charles a driver’s license.

  “How do you do, son, could I talk to you? I don’t know if you’ve heard of me, but I understand you had a little beef today . . .”

  And he promised to quash the whole thing for $10,000.