The Essential Lenny Bruce

When Lenny Bruce was arrested on charges of obscenity in New York, over 100 men and women prominent in the arts and other fields, including Theodore Reik, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Richard Burton, and James Baldwin rallied to his defense and signed a statement that described him as a social satirist "in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain." Transcribed from hundreds of hours of taped performances, this book brings into print- many of them for the first time- his greatest satirical routines in their original, unexpurgated form. Here is Lenny Bruce on religion, sex, the fuzz, censorship, the Russians, pot, the Lone Ranger- the whole wide gamut of a mind that punctured pretense with uninhibited wit. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People was the story of his life. The Essential Lenny Bruce is the written record of his art.