No idea if I'll ever find him funny but I think I'm going to become fascinated with Lenny Bruce either way. It's so weird seeing a reasonable, rightheaded reprobate responding to oppressive 60s America like you would imagine they would respond today. Most of the media from past decades without the internet tends to destroy actual human thought and identity from those time periods and replaces it with intentional or unintentional cultural propaganda that gives the impression that that's just how people were back then even though you know it's just Goebbels in the form of a Kennedy speech or an episode of Andy Griffith. Even dissenting voices like MLK speak in a way that's meant to connect with the way the people of the time were geared toward being spoken to by a public figure and you can't imagine what they'd sound like at home.
Lenny Bruce is just far back enough in time so that his time feels remote and alien to anyone my age probably yet has none of the affectation of media from back then while confronting the norms that bred that affectation. It's like watching real footage of a dinosaur taking a **** or something.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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