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FAN 208.1 No Joke! New Off-Broadway Lenny Bruce Play Offends Millennials
![Lenny Bruce](/sites/default/files/styles/379x213/public/2019/04/11155302/lenny-bruce-400-600.jpg.webp?itok=6Pqn4DcY)
Lenny Bruce
I have to defend Lenny and his thoughts against the [kind of] people he was defending — Ronnie Marmo
As both Lenny Bruce and Mark Twain show, humor can be dangerous. And, just as some unthinking people brand Huck Finn a racist work because Twain used offensive words to convey important ideas, those who walk out on this Lenny Bruce monologue simply miss the point. — Robert Corn-Revere
It was inevitable. It was predicted in the 2015 documentary Can We Take a Joke?
The uninhibited comedian who was convicted of obscenity in New York in 1964, and then posthumously pardoned by the governor of New York in 2003, is once again offending some New Yorkers (millennials to be precise).
The ghost of Lenny Bruce has returned to perform his "biting, sardonic, introspective free-form" comedy that was a kind of "shock therapy for his listeners." (NYT obit, Aug. 4, 1966)
The controversy swirls around a new off-Broadway play titled "I’m Not a Comedian... I’m Lenny Bruce”:
Related
- Official Lenny Bruce Website
- Collins & Skover: The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall & Rise of An American Icon (2002, 2012)
- Lenny Bruce Trial Transcripts and Other Related Documents, First Amendment Library (Foundation For Individual Rights in Education)
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