The Jewish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod: The Case of Lenny Bruce1
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 07, Number 2, January 1997 |
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Maria Damon
Department of English
University of Minnesota
damon001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb (Lenny Bruce, accompanying himself on drums): To is a preposition, come is a verb. To is a preposition, come is a verb. To is a preposition, come is a verb, the verb intransitive. To come. To come. I've heard these two words my whole adult life, and as a child when I thought I was sleeping. To come. To come. It's been like a big drum solo: Did ja come? Didja come good? Didja come good didja come good didja come good? Recitatif: I come better with you sweetheart than with anyone in the whole goddamn world. I really came so good. I really came so good 'cause I love you. Really came so good. I come better with you sweetheart, than anyone in the whole world, I really came so good. So good. BUT. Don't come in me. Don't come in me. Don't come imme, mimme mimme don't come imme mimme mimme don't come in me. I CAN'T COME. Cause you don't love me, that's why you can't come. I love you I just can't come, that's my hangup. I can't come when I'm loaded, all right? Cause you don't love me. Just what the hell is the matter with you? What has that got to do with loving you? I just can't come, that's all. Now if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual, the words "to come" really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I'm rank for saying it to you, and you the beholder gets rank for listening to it, you probably can't come.
In the summer of 1989 I got a copy of Lenny Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial transcript from Albert Bendich, the defense attorney for the case. As I drove home with the 352-page document, the radio told me of Jesse Helms’ proposed muzzling of the NEA. Heretofore, my interest in Jewishness as a de facto and traditionally “traveling culture” with its own makeshift language(s) had been primarily a process of self-exploration, a project about whose narcissism and self-indulgence I had constant questions. That moment of being trapped in a small and moving space with Jesse Helms and Lenny Bruce, and later, reading the transcript itself, redirected my efforts. My work took on the added dimensions, as well as the urgency, of exploring the ways different “deviant” masculinities overlap and intersect, and how these differences can be read through the hierarchies of culture represented in the trial, which was in effect a showdown between high, low and middlebrow cultures as represented respectively by the academy, the entertainment world with its blurred sexual boundaries, and the discourse of the courtroom and the police force. The trial foregrounded and foreshadowed social change even as its protagonist was offered up for public consumption.
Bruce, the stranger who rode into town and said the right thing at the right time in front of the wrong people, suffered the consequences of a wayward hyperverbalism deployed in the interest of social criticism. Though the scholarship on Jewish-diaspora language use suggests certain strategies–for example, the primacy of anecdotes and minutiae, the valuation of dialogue, commentary and argument as pleasures and/or ends in themselves, the blending of the sublime and the earthy or its rhetorical analogue, the blending of the language of high abstraction and colloquialisms–as characteristic of Jewish written and oral culture, I want to stress that in identifying Bruce’s strategies as “Jewish” I do not posit these strategies as inherently or only Jewish.3 Indeed, Bruce’s manic polyglot eclecticism and makeshift, survivalist logic shares much with a more generalized, multi-ethnic urban sensibility, especially the African-American jive idiom; his “conversation” mingled “the jargon of the hipster, the argot of the underworld, and Yiddish.”4 Nonethless, I focus on the latter because it is, arguably, the primary constitutive element of Bruce’s self-presentation, and because in the context of his San Francisco trial his Jewishness played a mediating role–the lightning-rod role–between San Francisco’s civic structure, the intellectual and sexual countercultures, and the entertainment substratum of the city.
In addition, specific focus on the trial as a cultural and rhetorical event raises issues of censorship in terms that are all too relevantly urgent in light of recent attempts to regulate the languages of the Internet, and to dismantle the NEH and NEA, in the name of policing obscenity. It’s easy to recognize in recent policing of social critique a re-enactment of the anti-intellectualism and anti-pluralism so transparent in the transcript of Bruce’s trial; the charge of “obscenity” is used to legitimate increased government surveillance of the art world, of dissident cultures, and of the academy. I do not argue that Bruce is under attack as a Jew in the same way that 2 Live Crew or Andres Serrano were under attack as men of color.5 Rather, I argue that Bruce’s outsiderhood and ethnic language use set him up to mediate cultural and political tensions in San Francisco–specifically, he was arrested for public references to male genitalia because the emergent gay men’s community in that city posed a threat to mainstream civic discourse. His irreverence and outspokenness about sexuality and race, his willingness (compulsion, in fact) to question all norms of behavior implicated him in the local struggle over cultural expression.
Much lively work on ethnicity, gender and language in American culture has provided the methodological and theoretical base for an investigation of Jewish performance texts and their reception: the approaches to ethnicity and culture provided by James Clifford and Michael Fischer’s “new ethnographies;” the blend of close literary analysis with intuitive musings on the meaning of “vernacular” offered by Houston A. Baker’s work on African-American writers; Renato Rosaldo’s discussion of subaltern wit as a weapon and tool for social analysis; Riv-Ellen Prell’s attention to the specific ways in which gender/power relations are coded in Jewish and anti-Jewish humor. By contrast, with a few notable exceptions, what little scholarship there is on Bruce focuses on the personality cultish aspects of his dramatic life story, or on a simplistic reading of his “martyrdom,” without close theoretical attention to how he generated texts through which we can read the conflicts of his times.6 I hope to bring the questions generated by the first body of scholarship to bear on a moment in Bruce’s and the nation’s life: the moment in which his language use was labeled obscene, and he–not only his words–was censored.
This particular essay, then, explores the cultural position of Lenny Bruce as he stands on the slash between the two words that announced the title of the American Studies Assocation panel for which this piece was originally written: “Inside/Outside: Jewish Cultural Signification.”7 Lenny Bruce balances on that caesura like a carnival artist (his wife Honey grew up, in fact, in the extended-family carny world); he teeters on that vertiginous edge, that “ethereal peak,” as he phrased it, right before his plunge.8 Lenny Bruce as Jewish entertainer is the caesura–the cultural lightning rod of my title–that mediates the inside out, from the outside in.
The lightning rod, the caesura marking difference, the person of Lenny Bruce on stage, is furthermore positioned as an index of male sexuality, the erect penis–not the hegemonic capital-P Phallus of the symbolic order, but rather in this case, Jewish male sexuality, which is as unstable and evanescent in its cultural significance as that liminal space between inside and outside, and encompassing both inside and outside, which characterizes modern Jewish life. If the veiled gentile Phallus is the elusive figure that, like the Wizard of Oz, governs the discursive institutions of American social life from behind the scenes, the exposed penis of the Other is the vulnerable carrier of the subversive disease of “obscenity,” which threatens the stability of those social institutions, and calls down upon itself the harshest recriminations.
Furthermore, using Renato Rosaldo’s analysis of subaltern humor to posit Jewish humor as a weapon of self-defense, one can analyze Bruce’s seduction/attack on his audience as a prototypical Jewish-American male performance strategy for survival. His use of Yiddish to mark a boundary of inclusion/exclusion, his savaging of Jews in front of a Gentile audience as an oblique critique of that audience as well as a direct critique of Jewish hypocrisy and assimilation, the speed of his rap, and his preoccupation with sex and sexuality work together to destabilize normative social relations on all levels.9 These tactics serve as much to confuse the opposition and get away–a tactic of survival–as they articulate an ethical and aesthetic position. They comprise a general critique of stability, an assumption and affirmation of the role of Jew as floating signifier, and a rhetorical representation of the historical and often dire contingencies of Jewish life.
JEW as Diasporic Icon
It’s painful to review the obvious. That Jews occupy the primary (non)space in the Western imagination as interlopers, counterfeits, transients, unknown quantities with chameleon-like qualities is such a truism that to attempt to document it plunges the writer into an exercise bordering on the tautological. I use the singular in my subtitle to underscore ironically the monolithic power of this Western trope: “the Jew” (both genderless and hyperbolic in his invisible masculinity, like “his” “G-d”) as icon of diaspora par excellence. The singularity and capitalization erase the history and materiality of diaspora. The false solidity of the phrase “the Jew” on the one hand and the ethereal diffusion of rotten-sweet crematoria-vapor on the other mask the physical travails and psycho-emotional trauma of displacement. “The Jew” is in fact a floating signifier: the Anglo-Christian imagination represents the Jew as embodying both the elitism of high culture and and the bestiality of low culture, as both the threat of capitalism and that of communism, as both steeped in quaintly old-World ways and committed to dangerously modern and subversive philosophies that “hold nothing dear.” And so on. To some extent this is simply the classic double-bind of an oppressed group. Feminists, for example, have for many years pointed to the virgin/whore/mother tropes constricting the possibilities of women’s sexual expression and experience. And Henry Louis Gates, Jr. among others has discussed the phenomenon of African slaves in the post-Enlightenment New World having to establish their humanity by writing–but not too well: cultivating the persona of the earnest counterfeit was the only way to succeed without being too threatening.10 Unique to the Jewish trope is that Jews as a group represent non-representability. To be Jewish, according to this master-trope, is to be un-pin-downable, without location, liminal.
Performance poet David Antin has pointed out that Jews served as “translators…of language and culture in Southern Spain and the strange fact that they as ‘boundary-dwellers’ in Spain so frequently had the name Marques, that is ‘march-dweller’ or ‘border-‘ or ‘boundary-man or ‘woman’–and furthermore that the names Marx, Marcuse, Marcus all come from an original Marques.”11 English-language speakers are most familiar with this name as the title Marquis, which in early examples provided by the OED refers to the owner of land of poor quality and low profit, or the prefect of a frontier town–a kind of consolation prize of a title. That a name representing liminality itself–boundary-person–evolved into a title of (almost-)nobility just prior to the Jews’ forced exodus from Spain speaks to the longevity and profundity of Western ambivalence toward Jews as objects of desire (that is, of both hatred and intense desire for appropriation). Ricky Sherover-Marcuse has observed that one common form of anti-Semitism is the claim (by the non-Jewish majority) that Jews are the oppressor: we are told that we “control the media,” that we have a secret plot to take over the world, that we’re all rich and pull strings behind the scenes to get our way. The ambiguity of the title “marquis” instantiates this weird reversal; as in the word “snob” (sine nobilitate), the title granted the liminal character, the entertainer-trickster, evolves into ersatz, arriviste pseudo-respectability which can then be re(pre)sented as privilege.12 Indeed, the modern announcer of entertainers (inbetweeners/Jews), the theater marquee, has its origins in the same word: a marquee was the open-air tent inhabited by marquises (inbetweeners/Jews). The multiple puns in Bruce’s visual gag in How to Talk Dirty and Influence People comes to mind here: a photo of the Strand Theatre’s marquee announcing Bruce’s engagement while the caption reads: “At last! My name in lights: S-T-R-A-N-D.”13 A strand is a border (beach) a marker of transition or inbetween-ness. Lenny Bruce was stranded on his own terrain–as the standup (erect) comic, he had marked out the trickster’s border realm for himself and was abandoned to die in that vanguard twilight zone after being encouraged and commended for occupying it. The other aspect of this joke, of course, treats the theme of naming, de-naming, re-naming so painfully prominent in diasporic histories. “Bruce,” the name that appears on the marquee, is no more Lenny’s “real” name than “Strand” is–nor was Schneider, the one before “Bruce.”
That one can both disavow and affirm an identity with perfect sincerity indicates the elusive power of the “double-consciousness” W.E.B. Du Bois has written of so eloquently, and the “ethnic id” aptly named by Michael Fischer.14 The ability to maintain and tolerate seemingly contradictory positions, to live in multiple realities, is currently considered a characteristic of “postmodernism,”15 alternately affirmed as a liberation of consciousness from the constraints of linearity and sequential time/space, and bewailed as a loss of authenticity and stability, a numb sensibility lending itself perfectly to a dangerously high tolerance for and acquiescence to social trauma. This ability, however, is also profoundly and traditionally “Jewish.”
MR. BRUCE WAS NOT PERMITTED TO REPRESENT HIMSELF: Jews and the Crisis of Representation
Kimberle Crenshaw has outlined the inadequacy of current public systems of representation to acknowledge identity and subjectivity.16 She tells of a group of Black women who, as Black women, experienced harrassment in the workplace, wanted to sue their employer for discrimination. They were told that they could not sue as Black women, though that was the identity under fire in these instances of harrassment: they had to sue either as Black–in which case they had to demonstrate that Black men were similarly harrassed, or as women–in which case they had to demonstrate that non-Black women were similarly harrassed. The legal system had no way of recognizing their subjectivity as they themselves experienced it; there was no means for them to represent themselves within the strictures of a categorical worldview that could not make room for them to grant themselves meaning.
As it is for many “minority” groups, the condition celebrated by postmodernists as the “crisis in representation” has long been a lived reality for Jews. The aesthetic and intellectual excitement of challenging Western epistemologies which posit a simple one-to-one correspondence between empirical phenomena and “meaning” intersects pointedly with a struggle for the right to self-representation. Self-representation, according to Bruce, cannot involve a loyalty to a fixed identity; therein, to the extent that nationalism affords a spurious self-certainty, lies the devastating cynicism of his anti-Israel jibes in “Religions, Inc.” (“‘We gotta …great man…to… tell us what to do with the Heavenly Land–Rabbi Steven H. Wise!’ Rabbi Wise: ‘…I tink vee should subdivide.'”)17 and “Christ and Moses Came Back” (“We’re not [in temple] to talk of God–we’re here to sell bonds for Israel!”).18 On the other hand, this refusal of a fixed geopolitical body champions a Jewishness with almost sentimentally universalist overtones, especially his famous anti-essentialist dicta:
I neologize Jewish and goyish. Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai Brith is goyish; Haddassah, Jewish. Marine Corps--heavy goyim, dangerous. ... Koolaid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumperickel is Jewish, and , as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes--goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish...Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them. Balls are goyish. Titties are Jewish. Mouths are Jewish. All Italians are Jewish...19
Here, Bruce loads Jewishness with connotations of (ethnic) soulfulness, femininity, earthiness and hipness. Refusing genetic, religious or even cultural essentialism, he nonetheless incurs a different danger. He self-allegorizes a “Jewishness” so grandiose and omnipresent that it pervades all categories rather than being itself a category. Like carbon or chi (life-energy), Jewishness is, as it were, pre-essentialistic (or pre-taxonomic) in its transcendence, an inchoate prima materia–soul substance–that is nonetheless localized in the minutiae of daily life: music, food, consumer products, living arrangements, body parts. The delicate process of locating any human(e) universality in this kind of particularity (in, for example, anecdote, field observation, text or incident) describes the dialectic between the local and the theoretically generalizable which is at the heart of much current academic debate in anthropology (“pro/con ethnography”), feminism (“identity politics”), and cultural studies.20
Self-representation, as distinct from representation by hostile or well-meaning others, is one attempt to avoid laboring under restrictive definitions superimposed on a necessarily fluid subjectivity; to return to the Crenshaw example, the right to self-representation means the right to represent multiple subjectivities–especially those not mandated as legal, racial or institutional categories. Self-representation implies taking the proceedings into the realm of trans- or anti-discursivity, a move threatening enough to warrant censorship either by explicit silencing or by forcing a flamboyant rap (such as Bruce’s performance) into the highly circumscribed courtroom format, limiting wide-ranging verbal potential to legal jargon. Although in the history of his courtroom dramas Bruce was granted the right to representation by others (and hired and fired an amazing number of lawyers, none of whom satisfied his need for total control), he was heavily discouraged–as defendants routinely are–from representing himself as his own “counsel.” Bruce was expected to stay silent while prosecuting and defense attorneys read his decontextualized routines from transcripts; his bodily presence was necessary to the trials but his hyperverbality–arguably his “real” presence–was forcibly and repeatedly banished. The courts’ ambiguous need for his presence put him in absurd legal quandaries sometimes. By scheduling his trials in two different states concurrently, the law prevented him from fulfilling even the basic requirement of physical presence since he could only be in one place at a time; thus he was de facto guilty in the court at which he could not appear.
Lenny Bruce, né Leonard Alfred Schneider in Brooklyn in 1926, came from a background of vaudeville (voix de ville, voice of the city, the low culture of Lower East Side Jews) into public fame as a hip, autodidactically intellectual, socially relevant and utterly irreverent standup comic whose routines ranged from “Psychopathia Sexualis” to “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.” In this sense his biographical data instantiate the (to revise Mohamed Ali’s brilliant phrase) float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-gadfly signifier that is the Jew in the modern Western imagination. He was tried for obscenity and acquitted in March of 1962, following the first of many arrests for obscenity. This initial obscenity arrest took place on October 4, 1961 at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s nightclub strip (San Francisco’s strip strip, conformity to the “community standards” of which might qualify otherwise censorable “obscene speech” for protection). He was arrested for violating the Penal Code, the phallic order represented by the conservative elements in San Francisco’s political make-up, its traditionally Irish-Italian-American police force and political machinery. His violation consisted of three instances of obscenity: use of the word “cocksucker,” use of the term “kiss it” with implicit reference to an exposed penis, and the famous semantics-lecture-cum-religious-chant, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb.” All of these transgressions target male sexuality as both subject and object of demystification, unveiling, uncovering, a verbal circumcisive display experienced by representatives of the normative order as an assaultive castration. It is important to see this cultural text, the obscenity trial, as a moment in which gender, sexuality and language are on trial/in process, according to Tel Quel‘s famous pun, capturing in an instance of dramatic confrontation the increasing visibility of San Francisco as a center for transgressive social expression.
Entertaining Anxiety
Lenny Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial marked a temporal instant in the cultural history of a city that is itself remarkable in American culture. The late 1950s and early 60s witnessed a “Renaissance” in the Gold Rush City; it established itself as the center of several different but overlapping countercultures noted for their flamboyant foregrounding of the aesthetic and their emphasis on alternate social organizing units (the gay relationship, the hippie “tribe,” the Third World arts coalition), which threatened assumptions about the interrelatedness of sexuality, reproduction and traditional family life. The Bay Area developed as a capital of anarcho-socialist activity (and, shortly, the Free Speech Movement), and of avant garde literature and life. It fostered a literary community whose oxymoronic epithet was “Beat” (beatific, wasted, jazz-inspired) and a burgeoning gay community which for the first time in American history would have civic and political as well as cultural visibility as a cohesive unit. By the end of the ’60s, the region had become a center for the culture of altered consciousness and experimental spiritual practice. Language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, consciousness–identity itself–all became contested terms in a celebratory and experimental atmosphere.
Traces of all the destabilizing elements of the countercultural discourses surfacing in the particularly volatile years of the shift from the McCarthy era to the Civil Rights Era can be found in embryonic form in Bruce’s controversional Jazz Workshop routine and in the trial that ensued. The trial’s subtext concerned, among other things, mainstream discomfort with the emergent gay men’s community (Bruce used the word “cocksucker” in a routine about being asked by his agent to do his gig in a newly gay bar). The trial displayed the town/gown politics of the Bay Area’s own cold war between the police force and the “long beards” at Berkeley, who in Bruce’s defense invoked figures like Rabelais and Swift to legitimize his satirical and ribald “shpritzes.” The trial embodied the tension between the protocol of juridical process and the carnivalesque nature of Bruce’s deterritorialized language–dramatized by the constant disruptive laughter from the courtroom audience. Although he was neither San Franciscan, gay, literary, beat, nor politically active in any conventional sense, the notoriety of Bruce’s arrest and trial enabled, almost by accident, the emergence of these cultures’ national visibility. Specifically, several of the dramatis personae of the trial indicated Bruce’s affiliations with these circles. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published and distributed Bruce’s pamphlet Stamp Help Out, was the contact person who supplied the defense attorney; Al Bendich, known to Beat circles as Ginsberg’s successful ACLU defense counsel in the “Howl” obscenity case six years earlier. The presiding judge, Horn, had also presided over the “Howl” case. Bendich hypothesizes that Bruce owed his acquittal to Horn’s having been “educated” about obscenity and the Constitution by the defense in the “Howl” case.21 (The “Howl” obscenity trial, also held in San Francisco, was likewise a bellwether instance of Jewish-male verbal and sexual identity on trial.) Bruce’s own status as an ethnic person, an outsider whose weapon was language–in short, as a Jewish entertainer–marked him for repercussion. He became a lightning rod mediating civic wrath and countercultural flamboyance.
I have discussed elsewhere the survivalist compulsion in Bruce’s Jewish hyerverbalism: if I stop talking they’ll kill me.22 The hairpin turns in logic and association in Bruce’s tragicomic spiel hold out against the closure that means death. Bruce told Bendich “I can see around corners,” evoking images of adrenaline-powered feats of psychic and physical strength.23 The vision is always of disaster; the words are always chasing after the vision, trying to articulate it and to obscure it (you can’t let them know you know), and racing to head it off at the pass. Hence the decentered, brilliantly precise imprecision of Bruce’s rap, the mumbling, desultory delivery that never quite ends. To “entertain” (“entretien,” conversation or negotiation) derives from “entretenir“–literally, to hold in an in-between state. Entertainment means hanging on to a liminal stage where all manner of things are possible because everything is both in suspension and in transition, deterritorialized and resistant, holding disparate elements together, maintaining a state of unsettledness and nomadic consciousness. “Entertainment,” Bruce’s philosophical rambling, enacts verbally a history not of aimless wandering, but rather of a purposive, at times frantic self-displacement. Thus Judge Horn errs when he insists to the packed and unruly courtroom crowd, “You are not here to be entertained.”24 As an attempt to salvage a career, the trial was a negotiation for survival, an entretien. Given the performance imperative of the Jewish American male, Bruce’s “semantics” lectures become “sementics” and finally “see-my-antics” routines as the fight for survival becomes, poignantly, the struggle to please, to be entertaining.25 The scene is shot through with tremendous vulnerability.
Positing Jewish male sexuality as a subversive element in this scenario does not mean celebrating it unambiguously. Male sexuality is, to say the least, a contested terrain, and different ideologies of masculine prowess–here, the Anglo-Christian and the Jewish (the rhetoric of the trial recasts this opposition as straight/decent and gay/obscene)–conflict with such seismographic force that the collision throws off sparks illuminating an historical and cultural transition. Consciously problematizing these masculinities and their interactions can be an emancipatory move toward dismantling a discourse which posits any construction of sexuality as normative or monolithic. The logistics of Bruce’s trial do indeed lend themselves to the quasi-structuralist school of neat differences (viz. the dichotomized title of the trial–“The Plaintiff, aka The People of San Francisco vs. the Defendant, aka Lenny Bruce”), appearing to be a showdown between the forces of the phallus and those of the vulnerable penis, between the symbolic and the imaginary, between the factual and the fanciful, between the straight and the hip, between several different masculine sexualities. However, in following such an analytic pattern, I feel torn between wanting to see the neat dichotomies I’ve just outlined as definitively separate–so I can put myself safely on the side of vulnerable penile imaginary fanciful hipness–and on the other hand wanting to portray the putative opposition as in fact indicating ambiguity: outside is always already inside, the potential disruptions in the hegemony of the Phallus are ultimately recouped anyway. (They’re all men, the terms of their discourse exclusionary and closed to me.)
And, in fact, both the heroes and the villains of this free speech debate, are all men, all ostensibly straight, all white. Both the defense attorney, Albert Bendich, and the prosecuting attorney, Albert Wollenberg, were Jewish, so there goes any untroubled claim for Jewishness as subversive. (However, Bendich, from New York, was a Yiddish speaker who grew up, like Bruce, in an oppositional culture; Wollenberg’s family were multi-generational San Francisco Jews who had not, by and large, experienced the same kind of prejudice as their East Coast counterparts, and having arrived at a more central civic position had arguably more at stake in upholding the status quo). Mary Brown, an audience member of the Jazz Workshop routine and the only woman called to testify on the comedian’s behalf, is not permitted to answer the question, otherwise routine in an obscenity case, whether or not her prurient interest was stimulated by the show (the Constitutional protection of obscene speech stipulates that the utterance “not arouse the prurient interest” of the listener/reader); that is, she may not define her own sexuality, even to deny it. Despite her status as an eye witness rather than an expert witness, Wollenberg challenges her competence to answer such a question because her “expertise” on this matter has not been established.26 Nonetheless, though it is staged and reads very smoothly as a showdown of diametrically opposing sensibilities and values, permeated with anxiety over gender and sexuality as it is, the trial is exclusively dominated by male voices and male interests. Though the men read long passages from Lysistrata, the Wife of Bath’s tale, and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, no female academics or authors are given the floor; Mary Brown, as we have seen, was thwarted in her efforts to speak on behalf of Bruce and her own subject position. This male entretien, I think, revolves around the dual discourses of male homophobia and homosociality, in which Jewishness plays a transitional though implicit role.
Entertaining Homophobia
A Pretty Bizarre Show --the Hungry i [a club in San Francisco; "i" = intellectual, eye, "I"...]. The Hungry i has a Gray Line tour and American Legion Convention. They took all the bricks out and put in saran wrap. That's it. And Ferlinghetti is going to the Fairmont. You know this was a little too snobby for me to work; I just wanted to go back to Ann's. You don't know about that, do you? Do you share that recall with me? It's the first gig I ever worked up here, is a place called Ann's 440, which was across the street [from the Jazz Workshop]. And I got a call and I was working a burlesque gig with Paul Moer, in the Valley. That's the cat on the piano here, which is really strange, seeing him after all these years, and working together. And the guy says, "There's a place in San Francisco but they've changed the policy." "Well, what's the policy?" "Well, they're not there any more, that's the main thing." "Well, what kind of a show is it, man?" "It's not a show. It's a bunch of cocksuckers, that's all. A damned fag show." "Oh. Well, that is a pretty bizarre show I don't know what I can do in that kind of a show." "Well, no. It's--we want you to change all that." "Well--I don't--that's a big gig. I can[t?] just tell them to stop doing it.."
John D’Emilio has documented the emergence of the gay men’s community in post-War America, and devotes considerable energy toward detailing the historical dynamics by which San Francisco became “Mecca.” The confluence of a number of progressive literary, political and spiritual countercultures with the Bay Area’s military centrality enabled a richly unorthodox milieu of marginalized men: creative artists, beatniks, anarchists, academics and military men discharged after the war.28 Some men, such as Allen Ginsberg (a gay man and a beatnik poet), Peter Orlovsy (a Naval dischargee and Bohemian demi-mondain), Gary Snyder (poet and Berkeley student), and Kenneth Rexroth (poet and anarchist), and other “outcats” whose names will never be known, formed bonds that crossed over from one subculture to the others. The nightclub/entertainment scene contributed to and reflected this culturally potent mix; gay bars operated next to straight strip joints, jazz clubs that featured a new “intellectual” breed of comedy, and coffeehouses that specialized in poetry readings. The Bruce skit that introduces this section addresses this emergent network of countercultural communities and resultant ambivalence on the part of the traditional entertainment business (which already had only a tenuous relationship to mainstream respectability). The rough narrative outline here is that Bruce is in hypothetical conversation with an agent who wants to book him at Ann’s 440, a club he used to work at (across the street from the Jazz Workshop, so he could expect that his audience would be somewhat familiar with it). In the meantime, since he used to work there, Ann’s 440 has become a gay bar. His agent wants to book him there in order to “change all that”–to restore it to straightness. Bruce’s routine documents the increasing visibility of the gay men’s community, even as his arrest for mentioning it attests to its ongoing–perhaps proportionally increasing–vulnerability. He asserts his own straightness even as he questions the impossible task of altering, ignoring or denying the historical development of a solid alternative sexual community. “Well–I don’t–that’s a big gig.”
At the moment of Bruce’s arrest, the arresting officer Solden asked him, “Why do you feel that you have to use the word ‘cocksuckers’ to entertain people in a public night spot?” Bruce replies, “Well, there’s a lot of cocksuckers around, aren’t there? What’s wrong with talking about them?” This moment is complicated. It is possible that Bruce is using the term here simply as an insult, implying that the policeman is a “cocksucker” in the generalized sense of “jerk.” But given the saturated moment–Bruce has just come off the stage from his routine–it is more likely that he is engaging the more specific sense of the term as “gay men.” The case is still complicated, however. On the one hand, Bruce, repeating uncritically and for “authentic” effect the homophobic term he attributed to the show-biz manager in his performance, complies with a larger social homophobia. On the other hand, the flippant answer foreshadows, if not the pro-active sentiment, the logic of the slogan so crucial to contemporary cultural survival in San Francisco and elsewhere: Silence = Death. (It bears reminding that Bruce’s subsequent silence was materially related to his death.29) While his commitment to free speech and to unmasking hypocrisy necessitated his occasional attacks on homophobia, nowhere more than in his routines on gay men does he conform to the ineptly self-revealing liberal who is the usual butt of his vitriolic humor. In this particular routine, though, it is not liberal homophobia that is the target of his humor, but gay men themselves, used as “bizarre” objects. The meaning of the routine is further complicated by its respective transcriptions as “I can just tell them to stop doing it” and I can’t just tell them…” in response to his agent’s desire that he intervene in the bar’s gayness. The first instance implies that the “bizarre show” is itself comprised of men performing fellatio–by telling them to stop, he would put an end to their objectionability. “They” are “cocksuckers” only when they are sucking cock. In the second instance, “I can’t just tell them to stop doing it,” Bruce suggests that simply telling people not to be gay (in public) will not work–sexuality is an inclination, rather than a set of actions. He calls attention to the disparity between the literal/descriptive and figurative/derogatory meanings of the term “cocksucker,” even as he gets mileage out of his presumed-straight audience by suggesting an inherent funniness in fellatio (though in “The Bust,” he also proclaims its pleasures).
The police officers testifying against Bruce were witnesses for “The People” of the State of California, capital P, with a relationship of illusory grandiosity to people analogous to the Phallus’s relationship to physical penises. Who are the people? Who gets to decide who is human? The right to talk about “them”/us because there are a lot of them/us implicates talk itself as a deciding factor in the constitution of personhood. Al Bendich said to me that language is what makes us human, it’s a medium for getting our basic human needs met; the pragmatist would have it that the word be spoken beforehand, in the absence of the thing, to indicate lack, desire, need.30 But it’s also a medium for celebrating: the wild boy of Aveyron delightedly repeats “lait, lait,” after the milk has been served, acknowledging its wonder.31 Is Bruce calling “cocksuckers” into existence by naming them, or is he acknowledging their emergent visibility in San Francisco’s public life? Clearly the People were not happy with the possibility of alternative sexuality or the articulation of that sexuality. Truth is what is, Bruce insisted in his moments upon the witness stand. If there are gay people, why not talk about them? The People’s fear is that talking about “it” will create “it;” conversely the hope is that not talking about it will keep it invisible.
Another twist to simple homophobia comes into play in this scenario to exacerbate the issue of what specifically constitutes “obscenity”–legally construed as a “morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion.” During cross-examination, the defense witnesses were asked, “Why did he have to use the word ‘cocksucker?’ Wouldn’t ‘faggot’ or ‘fairy’ have done as well?”32 The state objects, not to derogatory epithets for gay men, but to the explicit penile reference, which evinces morbid interest. The term “cocksucker” refers to an act; the terms “fairy” and “faggot” indicate a type of person that might engage in such an act. As Foucault has taught us, this is an important historical distinction. The discomfort engendered by the term “cocksucker” indicates that the People’s true fear is of the homoerotic possibilities embedded in conventional homosociality–a fear implicitly suggested by Bendich when he elicited testimony about the frequency with which the word is in fact used in the police station, a public place.33 The Jewish male is implicated in this mainstream fear by embodying for them that middle space, neither fully “homosexual” or demonstrably homoerotic, nor conforming to the laws of Gentile male-bonding through physical activity; as Daniel Boyarin has observed, the “Jewish sissy” occupies a place that conforms to neither mainstream hetero-masculinity nor unambiguous homosexuality. Bruce understood this mainstream fear that the line between homosexuality and homosociality collapse: his subsequent skit “Blah Blah Blah” insisted on the People’s proclivity for using the word covertly–and exposed Their secret love of excess and celebration in language, which love implicated them as phatic fags, spewing Jews, redundant, secreting and feminized–his semblables:
The Bust What I got arrested for in San Francisco... I got arrested for...uh...I'm not going to repeat the word because I want to finish the gig here tonight. It's...uh...all right. They said it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice. A ten-letter word. Uh...It's really chic. That's two four-letter words and a preposition. I can't...uh...I wish I could tell you the word. It starts with a "c"...Well, you know what the word is. Now it's weird how they manifested that word as homosexual, 'cause I don't . That relates to any contemporary chick I know, or would know, or would love or marry. You know. When I took the bust, I finished the show. And I said that word, you know, ... the ten-letter word and the heat comes over and says, "Uh, Lenny, my name is Sgt. B...You know the word you said?" "I said a lot of words out there, man." "Well, that -that--that word." "Oh, yeah." "Well Lenny, that's against the law. I'm gonna have to take you down." "Ok, that's cool." "It's against the law to say it and to do it." "I didn't do it, man." "I know but, uh, I just have to tell you that all the time." ...I get into the wagon. And the one heat is cool. 'Cause he said, "You broke the law." Now the other guy: "Look I gotta wife and kids." "I don't wanna hear that crap at all, man. I don't want to get emotionally involved in this." "Waddya mean you don't want to hear that crap?" "Did your wife ever do that to you?" Bang. Then it got pretty sticky. "NO!" "You ever say the word?" "NO!" "Never said it, honest to God, never said it?" "NEVER!" ... Now we really got into it, into it. Now we get into court. The chambers. The judge--Aram Avermitz, a red headed junkyard Jew, a real ferbissiner with thick fingers and a homemade glass eye. Tough-o, right? He comes in. Swear the heat in , honk, honk. "What'd he say?" "Ya Hona. He said 'blah-blah-blah.'" "He said blah-blah-blah?!" Then the guy really yenta-ed it up: "That's right, I didn't believe it. There's a guy up on the stage, in front of women and a mixed audience, saying blah-blah blah." "This I never heard, blah-blah-blah. He said blah-blah-blah?" "He said blah-blah-blah. I'm not gonna lie to ya." It's in the minutes: "I'm not gonna lie to ya."... The DA: "The guy said blah blah blah. Look at him. He's smug. He's not going to repent." Then I dug something. They sorta liked saying blah blah blah. 'Cause they said it a few extra times. ... it really got so involved , the bailiff is yelling,"What'd he say?" "Shut up, you blah-blah-blah." They were yelling it in all the courts: "What 'd he say?" "He said blah blah blah." Goddam, it's good to say blah blah blah. That blah blah blah. That blah blah blah That blah blah blah.
Entertaining Homer-phobia
A schematic take on the trial also reveals a glaring opposition between the strategies of the prosecution, The People, and the defense, Lenny Bruce and/or his counsel, which speaks to epistemological differences: what constitutes knowing, and what is the status of interpretation? The prosecuting attorney called only two eye witnesses: the two arresting officers. They testified to the facts: they had indeed heard Mr. Bruce use the words “cocksucker,” “kiss it,” “I’m coming,” and “Don’t come in me.” The defense, by contrast, was concerned not with facts, but with the Constitution’s protection clause for obscene speech: all but one (Mary Brown) were expert witnesses. Albert Bendich had called in a constellation of cultural critics, university professors, poets, musicians and teachers, including Ralph Gleason, Grover Sales, Lou Gottlieb, and Don Geiger, then Chair of the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. Rather than disputing the facts, this stellar lineup of cultural interpreters mediated Bruce to the jury by dwelling on his semantic brilliance as witnessed by his lecture on grammar in “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb,” on his redeeming social significance through his pedagogical discussions of “human problems,” on his artistic merit through associating his name with those of the Western greats, and on his conformity to “community standards” in that he performed on the same street as drag shows and strip joints. According to this strategy, Bruce’s legitimacy rested on his being translated by expert interpreters who compared him to the heavy hitters in the most conservative Western Civ. major league. In one of the more astounding sequences of the trial, Kenneth Brown and Albert Bendich offer their respective plot summaries of Lysistrata (invoked for its overt references to penises) to Judge Horn, who rejects the former (“I know that is not the theme of Lysistrata“) and approves the latter (“…what you just stated is the correct answer”) as if he were administering an oral exam for a Great Books course.35 However, even though the judge gets caught up in this all-male intellectual revue, cultural capital is both a requisite and a liability in this trial. It is a requisite and a liability for the defense witnesses, whose professional credentials protect them (they routinely assign passages from Swift, Joyce and Rabelais with no fear of reprisal) even while the prosecution attempts to discredit expertise as effete. Wollenberg, appealing to the jury rather than the judge, deploys a predictable anti-intellectualism: what does the “average citizen” know or care about Aristophanes, Rabelais and Swift? The acquittal reflected the division of labor; when interviewed afterwards, the jury avowed that it had desperately wanted to find Bruce guilty but couldn’t, given the judge’s carefully Constitutional instructions.
And cultural capital was a liability for Bruce, the high-school drop-out court jester to the intelligensia, who although well-read and self-taught, lacked the insider knowledge–a function of class and training–to understand the complicity between juridical and high-cultural discourses (throughout the trial, he kibbitzes so disruptively that the Judge threatens to have him removed).
Regardless of his defense’s courtroom attempts to present him as a Great Master, Al Bendich stressed to me twenty-seven years later that Lenny Bruce was a human being speaking to other human beings.36 Therein lay the “disturbing” and “esthetically painful” quality of his performance.37 Bruce’s humanness underscores the absurdity of summoning expert witnesses–experts in literature and language, in comedy, in cultural critique, in “semantics”–to qualify him as someone entitled to use the words “cocksucker,” “don’t come in me,” and “kiss it.” Disciplinarity falls aside in conversation; in entertainment it becomes ridiculous. I suggested to Al Bendich that Lenny pushed language to its limits. He demurred. “Lenny was no Homer, no Whitman. He wasn’t a poet. He was no Kant or Hegel, he wasn’t a philosopher.”38 But a human being in conversation can push language to its limits as well or better than anyone–that’s what a rapper, a raconteur, a comedian does. Because the organic intellectual can transgress the arbitrary boundaries of disciplinarity and of expertise, she or he gives the lie to the concept of a bounded field of knowledge. Bruce is not particularly avant garde in the literal sense–the integrated thinking and talking person in performance predates the Western educational system of disciplinarity and expertise. Just as the Bacchanalian poetry readings in North Beach, greeted as cutting-edge, rowdy, revolutionary poetic praxis, reenacted a much earlier tradition of poetry as ritual, Bruce’s performances enacted philosophical and moral inquiry in the vein of street raps such as Socrates’ before they were domesticated and transcribed by his students. Bendich’s strategy–establishing the expertise of his various witnesses to prove Bruce’s right to First Amendment protection–worked. But the acquittal (the only one in Bruce’s long trial career) was a Pyrrhic victory.
The question of expertise–suspect to those of us whose expertise lies in the area of cultural critique–becomes an embattled one for very different reasons when the subject comes under attack from the prosecution, particularly with regard to “community standards.” For the district attorney representing The People, “expertise,” a necessary qualification for “expert witnesses,” is suspect as de facto elitism–experts by definition are outside the “community” to whose standards Bruce must conform. However, he appeals to the concept in order to disqualify Mary Brown from commenting on the putative prurience of her interest in Bruce’s performance; she is not part of the People’s community either. Furthermore, the elitism of high culture and the academy and the low culture of vaudeville vulgarity are played as both ends against what is represented as the mainstream populist interest; no denizens of the “strip strip” are called to the stand by the prosecution or by the defense–except Bruce himself, stymied by the discourse of both his allies and his foes. In the closing argument, the People–Wollenberg–appeals to the jury’s sense of civic self-representation:
When you describe San Francisco to somebody, ladies and gentlemen...do you talk about our sewers? That's what we heard a performance of, the sewer; and that's comedy? ... Now, the question isn't what the University of California professors or the high school teachers from Daly City feel is literature or comedy; the question is what the community feels--not the top of the community educationally, those people over in the ivory towers that say this is a literary work; it is what the people on the street, the conglomerate average, feel--not just the high and mighty or the self-appointed high and mighty.
On the one hand, Bruce’s language belongs to the realm of the “high and mighty” (academic literati/ sexually suspect men) rather than the “conglomerate average” (middleclass family men); on the other hand, his language is low and vulgar, that of:
...stevedores down on the wharf loading a ship, ..., and the stevedores ... aren't saying ("cocksucker") in a place crowded with people in an auditorium.
On the one hand, Wollenberg questions and impugns the “origins” of Bruce (Jew as paradigmatic “white Negro”)’s bastard rap:
What scurvy hole did it come from?
On the other,
We would have a long beard up on the stage explaining the act of love and explaining the shortcomings... We're ...not called on to judge other than the community standard itself; not the standard of the University of California in a cultural environment under direction and control of a professor teaching in the school...
…none of us are dealing with [either the top at the professors’ level, or the bottom at the sewer]; we’re dealing at the common level.
…
[Lenny Bruce] is a man who believes that he can go out amongst us in society, not just at the academic level in a class of speech or literature at the University of California, not down at the other end of the rainbow--out with the boys, maybe, let's say, doing a laborer's job, using vile and profane language; no, this is a man that is going out into the public and believes he has a license to use this language.39
Bruce’s crime is spelled out, albeit redundantly and incoherently: he mixed up high, low and center; he de-centered culture by bringing to hypothetically mass audiences content that should be tightly constrained within academic contexts or all-male worksites. Wollenberg’s closing speech implicitly associates high and low cultures with counterculture, and he casts the retrogressive populism represented by the People–the “authentic” American people’s culture–as the beleaguered victim of attack from the effete above and vulgar below. The representative of this attack is the Jewish chameleon, inauthenticity personified, who infiltrates the high and the low (whose corrupting influence blurs the boundaries between high and low), but can never quite achieve the respectable invisibility of the middle. In the name of the People of the State of California, Wollenberg seizes public culture as the domain of a mythical middle America, which sometimes is “the man on the street” and sometimes is decidedly not the man on the street (especially if that man is a laborer or “out with the boys”); sometimes is “women and children” and sometimes is decidedly not (especially if the women volunteer to testify for Bruce). In contrapuntal relation to contemporaneous Black-Jewish relations (in which Jewish lawyers often defended Black victims framed by racist courts, and Jews in general were a visible force in the civil rights movement), here the figure of the silenced Jewish entertainer stands in for the figure of the gay man, who has as yet no public discourse for self-legitimation, no political voice to silence.
Coda: Inside’r’Out
People call me a sick comic, but it's society that's sick, and I'm the doctor.
--Lenny Bruce
Like the origins of the title “Marquis,” Euro-Jews40 are “sort of” white but not really. Being a Jew of any gender is like being a middle class white woman: oppression is privilege and vice versa. It’s not a quantitative issue–it’s not that you’re “in-between” the most privileged and the most oppressed on some scale of comparative outsiderhood; rather, your insiderhood is simultaneously your outsiderhood; you occupy a particular subject-position that has its own logic and exacts its own dues. The white middle class housewife is oppressed in that her privilege is conditional on her man’s status. Though Euro-Jews share the privileges of whiteness in the sense of skin-color, they are nonetheless by definition excluded from central participation in the groups that guarantee white privilege. They are oppressed in that (among other things) their safety still depends on the beneficent goodwill of non-Jewish power centers. But “inside/out” strikes in another way as well, as a pun: insight out. It points to the ostracizing of the person with increased social insight, who brings out of the closet the secret shame of the social body; and the converse and corollary position of insight afforded those who have traditionally been termed outsiders. In the words of Bob Kaufman, African-American Beat poet and Bruce fan, “way out people know the way out.”41 If we think of the hyperverbal stranger who tells stories, the one who mediates heaven and earth, who mediates Beatitude and stolid populism, who enables a cultural and historical shift, the Jewish entertainer who may not represent himself but who must represent what is projected onto him by the various constituencies in this historical drama, we would have to consider the possibility that Christianity is the paradigmatic scene for this pageant. And lest anyone find obscene the suggestion of Jesus as Jewish phallus whose frictive movement engenders history, here are some alternative obscenities: Infant mortality, starvation in a land of dollars. Child abuse, sexual violence and the death penalty. Cross-burnings, castrations, lynchings, queer-bashing. The routine plundering of Native American burial grounds and the episodic defacement of Jewish cemeteries. The inability to respond to pain or to honor beauty. The institutional ravaging of our bodies. Attempts to silence our creative and erotic powers, our powers to change the conditions of our lives, our powers to represent ourselves however we want.
Notes
1. I want to acknowledge the research help of Carolyn Krasnow, Rachel Buff, and Frieda Knobloch, especially the latter’s editorial skills. I learned much also from Albert Bendich, Rebecca Mark, Riv-Ellen Prell, Robert Danberg, Judith Halberstam, and David Antin.
2. Lenny Bruce, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb,” What I Got Arrested For, Fantasy Records, 1971.
3. For several recent works on the cultural meaning of Jewish language use, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially Chapter 1, “The Jewish Voice;” and Jewish Self-hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; Max Weinreich, The History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Maria Damon, “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” Cultural Studies (5:1) 1991, pp. 14-29; and “Gertrude Stein’s Doggerel ‘Yiddish’: Women, Dogs and Jews,” in The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 202-235.
4. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972), p. 6.
5. For a useful summary of censorship cases involving artists and entertainers in twentieth-century United States, see Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992).
6. Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” Writing Culture, James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 194-233; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 190-193; Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Post-war American Jewish Life,” People of the Body, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed. (New York: SUNY Press, 1992); for an instance of hero-worship, see Frank Kofsky, Lenny Bruce: the Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist (New York: Monad Press, 1974).
Serious recent work on Bruce includes Ioan Davies, “Lenny Bruce: Hyperrealism and the Death of Jewish Tragic Humor,” Social Text 22, Spring 1989, pp. 92-114; and an abbreviated but interesting discussion of Bruce in social context in Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89-92.
7. “Inside/Outside: Jewish Cultural Signification,” American Studies Association, New Orleans LA, 1990.
8. Honey Bruce, Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny’s Shady Lady (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1974); Lenny Bruce’s letter to Judge Horn, trial transcript, p. 2.
9. On Bruce’s use of Yiddish to mark a boundary of inclusion/exclusion, see my “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” Cultural Studies 5:1 (1991), pp.14-29.
10. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” “Race,” Writing and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 1-19.
11. David Antin, letter to author, November 15, 1990, responding to an essay I’d written in which I argued that Antin’s simultaneous assertion of and self-distancing from Jewishness indicated his “ethnic anxiety.”
12. The poignant ambiguity of titles, nobility and class status among Jews is nowhere better illustrated than in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which could be profitably reconstrued as Remembrances of Folks Passing.
13. Bruce, How to Talk, (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972), no page number given.
14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45; Fischer, p. 196.
15. And/or clinical schizophrenia.
16. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum, Summer 1989, pp. 139-167.
17. The Essential Lenny Bruce, p. 65.
20. See, for example, two back-to-back articles that advocate “experience-near” anthropology and generalized theory respectively, each implying that the approach favored by the other is more imperialistic: Unni Wikan, “Toward an Experience-Near Anthropology,” and Nicholas Thomas, “Against Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology, 6:3, August 1991, pp. 285-305; pp. 306-322.
21. Author’s notes, July 1989.
22. “Talking Yiddish at the Boundaries,” pp. 21-22.
23. Author’s notes, July 1989.
25. Bruce is explicit about the relationship between dependence and performance anxiety, or, conversely, mastery as the right to command performances. See, for example, his “Look at Me, Ma!” routine, The Essential Lenny Bruce, pp. 110-1, in which he quite plainly ascribes the performer’s desperation to Oedipal power relations, just as elsewhere he acribes the Jewish performer’s desperation to the Egyptian captivity (“How Jews Got into Show Business,” Ibid., p. 50).
26. Trial transcript, p. 276-277.
27. Bruce, “A Pretty Bizarre Show,” What I Got Arrested For.
28. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See especially pp. 176-195.
29. As a result of his many obscenity and drug trials and convictions, Bruce was eventually unable to get a cabaret card and was driven out of work; on the day he died from a drug overdose, he had received a foreclosure notice on his home.
30. Author’s notes, July 1989.
31. Susan Griffin, author’s notes, August 1990. Daniel Boyarin brought my attention to a relevant joke: A Jew is sleeping in the upper bunk of a train; a Hungarian officer sleeps below him. Every five minutes, the Jew sighs, “Oy am I thirsty.” Finally the officer can’t stand it any more and brings him a glass of water. After five minutes of blessed silence, the voice rings out, “Oy was I thirsty.”
34. Bruce, “Blah Blah Blah,” What I Got Arrested For.
35. Trial transcript, pp. 190-191.
36. Author’s notes, July 1989.
37. Trial transcript, pp. 188-189.
38. Author’s notes, July 1989.
39. Trial transcript, pp. 305-314
40. I use this term to distinguish these Jews from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Jews.
41. Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 80. Many African-American hipsters of the jazz milieu, including Kaufman, Philly Jo Jones, and Eric Miller (a bassist who played the “Colored Friend” in “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parites) appreciated Bruce’s artistry. Kaufman glosses Bruce’s fortunes pithily in his “[The Traveling Circus]”: “There are too many unfunny things happening to the comedians.” The Ancient Rain, Poems 1958-1978 (New York: New Directions, 1981), p. 25.