Читать книгу How to Talk Dirty and influence people - Lenny Bruce - Страница 9

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I began to make the rounds of agents in Manhattan, and got in with Buddy Friar, an amateur agent with an office in the Roseland Building, now torn down.

There were 15 or 20 clubs—such as Squires in Long Island, the Clay Theater in New Jersey, George’s Corners in Greenwich Village, the Blue Haven in Jackson Heights—that would put on amateur shows to fill in on slow nights. Supposedly, people from the audience would be called on as contestants. Actually, we were the forerunners of the rigged quiz shows.

The prizes were $100, $50, and $25. We “amateurs” would sit around the club, and when they called for volunteers we would get up. We were paid $2 apiece, carfare and, if we won, an empty envelope.

One of the other “amateurs” was a waiter from the Bronx who always sang Sorrento. When he reached the last four bars his face used to get red and his neck blue. I think he got a hand from the audience just for the fact that he lived through the number.

There was also some nut from Rye, New York, whose act consisted of standing on a chair, jumping straight up into the air and then diving and landing square on his head. Not on his hands, mind you; they were held tight to his sides. No, he would land smack on his goddamn head. It was a short act but it certainly was a hell of an opener.

There was another guy who played the sweet potato, doing a medley of patriotic songs like The Caissons Go Rolling Along. Then there was a performer known as “Al Jolson, Jr.”—he was about 65 years old. And there was a girl acrobatic dancer who used to come to the club with all her lights, costumes, props, and her mother. I always wondered why no one ever caught on. Did they think that she just happened to drop in that night lugging all her paraphernalia?

Sometimes legitimate amateurs would try to get on, but they would be told that there wasn’t enough time.

The winner was selected by holding a hand over the contestant’s head and asking for applause. I never won. The sweet potato usually did. He had a limp and wore a double-size ruptured duck he had made especially for himself: you could see it from anywhere in the house. This gave me an idea for the first bit of material I ever did that caused controversy.

My agent had a pro date to fill on a Saturday night in Staten Island, at a place called The Melody Club. Since it had struck me funny that anyone who had been in the service would use that fact to gain rapport with the audience, I had a picture taken of all my campaign ribbons and medals (including a Presidential Unit Citation), had it enlarged, and put it on. I had the band play a big fanfare and Anchors Aweigh. Then I came out and said, “I stole this routine from Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler.”

Right away one guy wanted to punch me in the nose for making fun of the ribbons. It was the first time I felt real hostility from an audience. And they’d missed the point.

The owner asked me to take the bit out for the second show. I tried to explain that I was trying to make fun of a guy who would do such a thing, not of the ribbons. He replied, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

“OK, but I’ll never play Rome again.”

And I haven’t played Staten Island since.

After four or five months of these amateur gigs, I wrote a little act for myself which eventually refined into the Hitler bit, wherein the dictator was discovered and handled by MCA. And I did all the standard impressions—Cagney, Lorre, Bogart—in double-talk German.

Marvin Worth, who later became a writer on the Steve Allen Show, had a lot of faith in my comedy prowess and decided to be my manager. He and his partner, Whitey Martin, and another agent, Bob Starr, got me on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts show, which I won.

Within a few months I became “hot”—I was making $450 a week and working everything “good”—the Strand on Broadway, the Tick Tock in Milwaukee—and, around 1951, the consensus of showbiz opinion was, “Anybody can get a laugh with dirty toilet jokes; it takes talent to get laughs with clean stuff. You’ll go a long way, Lenny, you’re funny and clean.”

Tears filtered through my lashes and rivered along each side of my nose. I was overcome with emotion—for I was blessed with talent; I didn’t have to resort to dirty toilet jokes.

Then I started worrying ... how dirty is my toilet?

I lay in bed, thinking about the “dirty-resort-to-anything-for-a-laugh” comedian. This could be the start of making the word “resort” dirty. Comedians who work resorts, entertaining people who go to resorts, are certainly resorting.

I couldn’t contain my religious fervor. I exploded from the bedroom, thundered down the hall and threw open the door to that odious place—the “resort.”

I screamed, “You dirty, filthy, stinky, crappy, Commie, dopey toilet! Thank God I don’t have to resort to you to make people laugh. It’s just a shame that there aren’t laws to keep you and your kind out of a decent community. Why don’t you go back where you came from? Take the tub and the sink and that jellyfish hamper with you! Even though their names aren’t as dirty as yours, anybody who’d live with a toilet must be resort-addicted. Purists don’t even go to the toilet. All I can say to you, toilet, is—it’s lucky you’re white!”

After theaters started closing and night clubs felt the absence of war, some show people couldn’t get work and actually did have to resort to toilets. Not discussing them; cleaning them.

The first performers to feel the pressure were the magic acts. The agents’ postwar cry was: “If I had a job, don’t you think I’d be glad to give it to ya? They’re not buying magic acts anymore. They’re not buying dance teams anymore.” The only place they could get a club date was at some broken-down Kiwanis hall, and even those were getting scarce.

What happens to people whose vocation becomes outmoded? (Elevator operators who are replaced by buttons—“What kind of a guy would want to be an elevator operator anyway?” Maybe some guy who just wants to return to a womb with a door he can open and close at different floors.)

Take Horace and Hilda, a dance team. They were a by-product of World War Two. Not a very good dance team; everything good was sent overseas to be killed. Horace handled the business, making the rounds of agents: Horace, fighting for breath in the abundance of the icy wind that trilled and wheezed around the Brill Building, echoing with the sound of a behemoth Goliath with bronchitis.

Horace and Hilda had met at the Arcadia Ballroom—“Dancing nitely, fun for all ages, no minors allowed.” Hilda had been fortunate; she had a classical-ballet background received at the Borough Hall YWCA every Tuesday between eight and nine p.m., immediately after the public-speaking-salesmanship class.

She had a big keester and no nay-nays. She was built like a pear. Ballet helped her so she didn’t have any fat. Rather, she was very muscular. A muscular pear. With shoes from Kitty Kelly’s, net stockings that had been sewn so many times they looked like varicose veins, and black satin tights, the crotch not exactly split, but giving.

The top of her outfit was solid sequined—she loved it and the dry cleaner hated it. A tap dancer had sold it to her when Horace and Hilda were playing the State Theatre in Baltimore. The tap dancer said she wasn’t going to use it anymore because a choreographer was planning to set a new number for her with college sweaters and megaphones, so Hilda got it at a steal for eight dollars. The hoofer had originally bought it from a drag queen she worked with at the Greenwich Village Inn when they had straight acts. They had female impersonators and then the straight acts would work in between. The drag queen said he paid $12 at Maharam’s for the sequins alone.

Horace lived flamenco and spent all of his time in the rehearsal halls striking the classic flamenco pose. The way he stood looked to Hilda as if he were applauding his ass. Horace was a faggot, an out-and-out flaming faggot. He didn’t swish but he was sort of like an old auntie. He was so obvious that everyone knew he was a faggot except Hilda and her family. They didn’t know because they were very religious and Horace acted just like a lot of ministers she had seen in her formative years.

Horace had chosen show business because it was best for him since he was so obviously nellie; not that show people have more of a Christian attitude toward their fellow men and are less likely to look askance at one who is out of step—it’s just that their egos are so big and they are so self-centered that they haven’t the time to concern themselves with the individual and his problems.

As with drug addicts, Horace’s homosexual traits were environmental. He wasn’t “born that way.” He was introduced to a group once that gave him identity. He was a stock boy at Macy’s and after one summer at Atlantic City he came back a faggot. He could just as easily have come back a junkie or a water skier or a Jehovah’s Witness—the point is, he came back as something.

“At least I’m something,” is the keynote. “I belong to a group. I share their notoriety, their problems, their laughter.” In a crowded arena, the cliché “It takes one to know one” is actually a profound philosophy.

At any rate, Horace blossomed in this anthropophagous society. He became poetic in his facility to relate in the argot of the citizens of Groupery in the county of Padded Basketdom—the esoteric delight in passing a complete stranger and shrilling, “Get you, Annie!”; the same idiomatic rapport of the nighttime junkie who is looking to score. Horace became a faggot simply because he wanted to belong.

Well, the Korean War weeded out some of the population and helped the housing problem, but it didn’t leave the dramatic impact that World War Two did. As the impact lessened, so did the desire to escape lessen. And all the escape hatches—the bars, night clubs, theaters—felt it. And the people who depended economically upon these media also felt it.

Horace and Hilda were part of this milieu.

I was luckier. Comedy is an amorphous craft in the sense that there are no academies, there are no formulas. There are no books on comedy that can train an aspirant to command a salary of $200,000 a year, but it is a craft and it can be learned.

The reports on me were now: “All Lenny Bruce seems concerned with is making the band laugh.” That should have been my first hint of the direction in which I was going: abstraction. Musicians, jazz musicians especially, appreciate art forms that are extensions of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form.

The Club Charles in Baltimore was my last bomb, then. The owner asked me if I had any good numbers like “The Golf Lesson.” This was sort of a devitalized Dwight Fiske routine, with nothing left but the subtle swish. I told the owner I didn’t have any good numbers like that.

Jack Paar, Sophie Tucker, Joe E. Lewis and the other comedy performers of their generation grew up in our culture at a time when the discussion of sex was secretive and chic, so that the double-entendre comedian was considered quite daring. It delighted the customer to be “in”—“Ha, ha, you know what that means, don’t you?”

My generation knows—and accepts—what that means, so there is no need for humor in that whoopee-cushion vein.

This is not an indictment of the performers of that era, for I know (and it disturbs me greatly) that soon I will be out of touch. I am 39 and already I can’t relate to Fabian.

There’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.