Lenny Bruce

The surviving performance film is invaluable as a document of Bruce's onstage manner, but one must have Bob Fosse's 1974 biopic to understand the comedian's story, or at least the popular version of it. Beautiful B&W photography and faux documentary structure are correct choices for the subject, given the fragmentary (mostly audio) record of Bruce's life and especially his own fixation on the Xanadu of legal documents that buried him. Most of the time I can do without Dustin Hoffman tearing through a picture with his prestige Acting, but here Hoffman seems dedicated to the man more than to a character. Plus Fosse's intercutting flashback narrative keeps Hoffman in check by offering him only a few extended scenes and placing the burden of storytelling on the editor more than the performer. The only missing element is one of Bruce's most famous quips, which would have served as a fitting coda:

Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.

Conventional opinion is that Lenny Bruce's final performances, as he feverishly obsessed over his legal battles and read from unfolded court documents onstage, were boring and unfortunate. This is wrong. Most of the time comedians just do an act. Rarely, and almost never to popular success, does a stand-up engage in some kind of dramatic performance art. Pryor did it with his heroin impression. Bill Hicks turned his show into a satanic tent revival. Andy Kaufman, perhaps the master of audience baiting, somehow made his appearances into a joke on the world. Currently the chief practitioner of anti-comedy is Zach Galifianakis, who seems to be working on a piece where he gets fatter and beardier every year. So Lenny Bruce himself achieved something arresting in those last engagements &mdash he was a living Josef K, persecuted and destroyed for undefined crimes. It is bizarre but accurate to think of him as the sole sacrifice made to the obscure gods of decency in exchange for modern stand-up comedy.

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