Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  As for David Frye, he would have to depend on his impressions of Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.

  The first interview in The Realist was with philosopher Alan Watts.

  Q. Would you call yourself a Buddhist?

  A. No.

  Q. Would you care to enlarge on that?

  A. I simply feel that a human being must always recognize that he is qualitatively more than any system of thought he can imagine, and therefore he should never label himself. He degrades himself when he does.

  Q. What is Zen?

  A. (Soft chuckling)

  Q. Would you care to enlarge on that?

  A. (Loud guffawing)

  At one point Watts described beat writer Jack Kerouac as “a very warm, feeling, sensitive personality, but because he has no bones he doesn’t sustain it. I mean, of course, Zen bones. Jack has Zen flesh, but no Zen bones yet.” Kerouac responded: “Alan Watts, you can think as long as you want about my not having any Zen bones but nothing will stop it; you can think as far as you want but it won’t fill anything.”

  The second interview was with Lenny Bruce.

  Q. Could you be bribed to do only “safe” material from now on?

  A. What’s the bribe? Eternal life? A cure for cancer? $45,000,000? What’s the difference what I take—I’d still be selling out.

  Q. Do you think there is any sadism in your comedy?

  A. What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I—well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a big brass buckle.

  Q. What would you say is the role of a comedian?

  A. A comedian is one who performs words or actions of his own original creation, usually before a group of people in a place of assembly, and these words and actions should cause the people assembled to laugh at a minimum of, on the average, one laugh every fifteen seconds—or let’s be liberal to escape the hue and cry of the injured and say one laugh every twenty-five seconds—he should get a laugh every twenty-five seconds for a period of not less than forty-five minutes, and accomplish this feat with consistency eighteen out of twenty shows.

  Now understand, I’m discussing comedy here as a craft–not as an aesthetic, altruistic art form. The comedian I’m discussing now is not Christ’s jester, Timothy; this comedian gets paid, so his first loyalty is to the club owner, and he must make money for the owner. If he can upgrade the moral standards of his community and still get laughs, he is a fine craftsman.

  The next interview was with Albert Ellis. We were discussing the Norman Vincent Peale version of “positive thinking” when we veered off onto a tangent:A. No matter how often a person tells himself, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” or “Jesus loves me, therefore I am saved,” if he keeps saying to himself, much louder and more often, “I’m really a shit; I’m no fucking good; I’ll never possibly get better,” all the positive thinking in the world is not going to help him.

  Q. Incidentally, you may recall, a couple of issues back, a Realist correspondent said that one can express any thought without being boorish. Why—by his standards—do you deliberately make yourself out to be a boor?

  A. Why should I live up to his, or for that matter any other individual’s, standards? My own standard is that certain modes of expression, including the use of many of the famous or infamous four-letter words, are usually appropriate, understandable, and effective under certain conditions, and at these times they should be unhesitatingly used. Words such as fuck and shit are most incisive and expressive when properly employed. Take, for example, the campaign which I have been waging, with remarkable lack of success, for many years, in favor of the proper usage of the word fuck. My premise is that sexual intercourse, copulation, fucking, or whatever you wish to call it, is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damned good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner. Instead of denouncing someone by calling him a “fucking bastard” we should say, of course, that he is “an unfucking villain” (since bastard, too, is not necessarily a negative state and should not only be used pejoratively).

  Q. Isn’t the apparently inconsistent use of the word fuck due to the fact that it actually has two meanings? One, it means intercourse. The other, it means screw—you know, like in business—“I fucked him.”

  A. You’re right. But since the word screw has the same two meanings, and since screwing is (in my unjaundiced view) equally enjoyable to fucking, I would want the usage to be “I unscrewed him,” when we mean that I outwitted him or gave him a rough time.

  Q. How about the famous army saying, “Fuck all of them but six and save them for pallbearers.” There, fuck means kill.

  A. Yes, and it is wrongly used. It should be “Unfuck all of them but six.” Lots of times these words are used correctly, as when you say, “I had a fucking good time.” That’s quite accurate, since fucking, as I said before, is a good thing; and a good thing leads to a good time. But by the same token you should say, “I had an unfucking bad time.”

  Q. I can see this scrawled on subway posters: “Unfuck You!”

  A. Why not? It’s fuckingly more logical that way, isn’t it?

  The Ellis interview resulted in a number of subscription cancellations. I knew it would, but the alternative was to be a censor instead of an editor. I certainly didn’t want to insult the readers’ intelligence by resorting to asterisks or dashes, as other magazines did at the time. But my printer wouldn’t even set that portion of the interview in type until I brought in a note from my lawyer. Usually Martin Scheiman—to whom I gave a measly $10 retainer fee every month—didn’t see The Realist until after it was published. Now he wrote:I have examined the text of the interview with Dr. Albert Ellis that you plan to publish in the forthcoming issue of The Realist. It is my opinion that the publishing and printing of that article will not contravene either the Federal or New York obscenity statutes. In so concluding, I am motivated by the facts that nothing in the article appeals to the prurient interests of the ordinary reader; the subject matter is presented from a scholarly point of view in connection with what purports to be a serious discussion of sociological interest; and Dr. Ellis enjoys the reputation of being an outstanding authority in the field of sexology.

  Just when that issue was published, Lenny Bruce came to New York for a midnight show at Town Hall. He called me that afternoon, and we met at the Hotel America in the theater district, where he was staying with Eric Miller, a Negro musician who worked with Lenny in certain bits, such as “How to Relax Colored People at a Party.”

  Lenny would play the part of a “first-plateau liberal” trying to make conversation with Miller, playing the part of an entertainer at an otherwise all-white party. Lenny would spout one racial cliché after another. The New York Journal-American critic blasted him for “the insulting way in which he ridiculed races and creeds.”

  Miller lamented, “They just don’t understand.”

  At that point in his career, Lenny was still using the euphemism frig onstage. Although the mass media were already translating his irreverence into “sick comic,” he had not yet been branded “filthy.” I handed him the new issue of The Realist with the Albert Ellis interview. He was amazed that I could get away with publishing it.

  “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”

  “Absolutely. The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.”

  Lenny magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and he looked up the word prurient.

  “Itching,” he mused. “What does that mean—that they can bust a novelty-store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopie cushion?”

  “It’s just their way of saying that something gets you horny.”

  Lenny closed the dictionary, clenching his jaw and nodding his head in affirmation of a new discovery. “So it’s against the law to
get you horny.”

  He asked me to give out copies of The Realist with the Ellis interview in front of Town Hall before his concert that night. Lenny brought a copy onstage and proceeded to talk about it. As a result, he was barred from performing there again. “They’ll book me again,” Lenny said. “They made too much money on that concert. I’d have more respect for them if they didn’t ever book me again. At least, it’d show they were keeping their word.” But he was right. They did book him again.

  Lenny marveled at the similarity between what his mother had advised him—“Lenny, don’t tell it like it should be, tell it like it is”—and what Alan Watts said in The Realist interview: “My philosophy is not concerned with what should be, but with what is.” Lenny began talking onstage about the difference between what should be—“those bullshit standards we set for ourselves and never do live up to”—and what is.

  When I decided to work at a summer camp again, I queried Playboy about writing an article on the social life of counselors, but the idea was rejected: “It is our feeling that the college man does not want to read very much about his own breed, but would rather fantasize about the urban executive world he is about to enter.”

  Playboy offered me a position on their editorial staff, but I would have to give up The Realist and move to Chicago. They asked me to think it over for a week, but I turned them down. I had been spoiled by my own freedom.

  Then they came up with another offer whereby I would not have to stop publishing or leave New York. Hugh Hefner wanted me to moderate a new feature, the Playboy Panel. I accepted and said I would begin after the summer. They were anxious for me to get started, though, and kept calling me at camp, so I decided to leave that job in order to work for Playboy, and one morning, while the kids were having breakfast, this little counselor ran away from camp.

  It turned out that I wouldn’t be getting credit for doing the Playboy Panels. Instead, the moderator would be identified as Playboy. So I told Hefner that I was planning to have my name legally changed to Paul Playboy. The other thing about the Playboy Panel was that it wasn’t really a panel. I had to interview each person separately, then follow up with questions to give the illusion of interplay, and finally weave all the material into a discussion until even I was convinced that we had all been sitting at a table together in the same room. Playboy supplied me with the names and phone numbers of the “panelists.” The first panel was on “Jazz and Narcotics.” Gerry Mulligan refused to participate.

  He asked me, “Do I have to show my nipples?”

  I told him, “Yeah, just one.”

  The second panel was “The Hip Humorists.” Bob Newhart refused to participate because as a Catholic he was offended by Playboy. Mike Nichols was on the panel, but not his partner, Elaine May, because this was, after all, a men’s magazine. I flew to Milwaukee to interview Lenny Bruce. He was staying at the YMCA. I checked into my room, then called him and went to his room. We talked for a while before going out. As we were about to leave his room, he stood in the doorway.

  “Did you steal anything?” he asked furtively.

  I took my watch out of my pocket—since I didn’t like to wear it on my wrist—and, without saying a word, placed it on Lenny’s bureau. He laughed—one loud staccato “Ha!”—and kissed me on the forehead.

  Lenny wanted to do a complete makeover of my wardrobe for Playboy, with before and after photos. He dressed sharply, but all I wore was sweatshirts and dungarees—this was before they were called jeans.

  “Dungarees,” Lenny mused. “That name must’ve come from cowboys when their pants dragged along the cow dung in the pasture.”

  I had already interviewed Mike Nichols for the panel, and now I mentioned to Lenny that Nichols had put him down in my interview.

  “He’s just mad,” Lenny explained, “because I balled his wife.”

  That evening three plainclothes police walked into his dressing room at the dinner club where he was working. They told Lenny that he was not to talk about politics or religion or sex, or they’d yank him right off the stage. The night before, a group of Catholics had signed a complaint about his act. The cops told him that he shouldn’t say “son of a bitch” in his impression of a white-collar drunk. Lenny was nervous. That night, after he did two slightly toned-down shows, we went back to his room and took turns naming all the books we had not read—even though we both used references from them—from James Joyce to Harold Robbins, from Franz Kafka to Kahlil Gibran.

  “People use The Prophet to get laid,” Lenny said.

  Critics had written about each of us that we were in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, but neither of us had read any of their books. Coincidentally, though, we were both reading books by Nathanael West. I was reading Miss Lonelyhearts and Lenny was reading The Dream Life of Balso Snell. There was a line in the latter about an old actress with much-shaved armpits, which triggered Lenny to improvise on what eventually developed into a bit about a popular singer who used to flash her unshaved armpit to the audience.

  We stayed up till morning, discussing such things as the subjectivity of humor. We talked about a rehearsal for the Steve Allen show, where the network had scheduled an appeal for funds to cure some disease. A little girl who was afflicted with it was supposed to walk toward her mother, who would be waiting with open arms at the center of the stage. The little girl wasn’t at the rehearsal, but they had to know the camera angle, so a man on the staff hunched very low and walked toward the mother. Some folks thought that was funny, and others thought it was awful.

  We talked about the “Lone Ranger.” I told Lenny about the time my brother had played the violin in a concert given by the All-City High School Orchestra. They performed the “William Tell Overture”—which was the theme song of the Lone Ranger radio show—and kids in the audience started calling out, “Hi-yo, Silver, aw a-a-a-a-y!” Again, some folks thought that was funny, and others thought it was awful.

  At breakfast in the YMCA cafeteria, a man sitting at our table told us how he had slapped his daughter because she wanted to see Psycho. He had seen it himself, and didn’t want her to witness a kissing scene at the beginning between a partially disrobed couple. He didn’t mention the violence in the infamous shower scene. The contradictions in that conversation would work their way into Lenny’s performance that night.

  I was fascinated by the way he played with ideas, and I became increasingly inspired by the way he weaved his targets—from teachers’ low salaries, religious leaders’ hypocrisy, cruel abortion laws, the double standard between illegal and prescription drugs—into stream-of-consciousness vignettes.

  I was intrigued by the way he played show-and-tell with his audiences. When he heard “There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem” on the radio, he bought the record, came onstage with a phonograph, and played it. “Listen to these lyrics,” he said. “This is like a Puerto Rican Porgy and Bess.” And when Gary Cooper died, he brought the New York Daily News onstage to share a headline: “The Last Roundup!”

  “I found this today,” he would say, introducing his audience to a bizarre concept, as though it were as tangible as a record or a newspaper. Then, in each succeeding performance, he would sculpt and resculpt his findings into a theatrical context, experimenting from show to show like a verbal jazz musician, with a throwaway line evolving from night to night into a set routine. Audience laughter would turn into applause for the creative process itself.

  “Please don’t applaud,” Lenny would request. “It breaks my rhythm.”

  Sometimes he would become so serious about what he was saying that the laughs wouldn’t always come every fifteen to twenty-five seconds. I reminded him of his apparent inconsistency with that definition of a comedian’s role.

  “Yes, but I’m changing,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.”

  Lenny encouraged me to start performing again, but without the Paul Maul stage name and without usi
ng my violin as a crutch. I began trying to memorize a long list of things that I could talk about, and the order they were in. Lenny told me to just go out on stage with a completely blank mind, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. In December 1961, I opened at Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate in New York, making a logical jump from contraception to abortion during my performance:India has allocated 105 million dollars for birth control, but can you imagine the uproar there would be in this country? So don’t tell me we’re free from religious interference. I won’t be satisfied until you can find an abortionist in the Yellow Pages. Until it’s as socially acceptable as a nose job. Until people can start sending studio cards saying, “Good luck on your abortion.” And don’t say, “Well, that’s different from birth control, that’s murder.” Because, when you talk about abortion being murder and birth control not being murder, what’s your focal point? The moment of conception. Before, si. After, no. But this gets into all kinds of equivocal ramifications. Shouldn’t a douche be ruled out? That’s foul. It’s a very tenuous thing. You’re gonna have these rabble-rousers going around scrawling on signs in the subway: zonite is a murderer!

  Lenny couldn’t come to my show because he was too busy getting arrested. His first bust had occurred in September, ostensibly for drugs—for which he had prescriptions—but actually because he was making too much money and the local officials wanted a piece of the action. Lenny was appearing at the Red Hill in Pennsauken, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. Cops broke into his hotel room to make the arrest, and that night an attorney and bail bondsman came backstage and told him that $10,000 was all it would take for the judge to dismiss the charges. Lenny refused. A lawyer friend, David Blasband, happened to witness this attempted extortion. The others assumed he was a beatnik, just hanging around the dressing room. That was on Friday. On Monday Lenny went to court and pleaded not guilty.