The Essential Lenny Bruce

Since his death in 1966, Lenny Bruce has been lauded as a great satirist "in the tradition of Swift," as a great parodist, a moralist, a preacher, even as a shaman exorcizing the demons of our modern society. Whatever Bruce was, he was above all an incredibly funny man with an extraordinarily original and fertile comic imagination.Transcribed from hundreds of hours of taped performances, this book brings into print Lenny Bruce's greatest insights and inventions in their original form. Here is Lenny Bruce on religion, sex, the police, censorship, pot, Dracula--the whole gamut of contemporary perplexities put into perspective by a mind that deflated pretense with uninhibited wit and made people laugh in a way they had never laughed before.