Adventures In Recordland, #17: The Bs, part 14: Lenny Bruce marathon

I normally do three records a day- I was too tired yesterday to bother writing a blog, so now I'll write about all six records I've listened to over the past two days- which is all right since they're all Lenny Bruce.

#1: Lenny Bruce- "I Am Not A Nut, Elect Me", 1959:

This is early Lenny, when he was still doing "bits" instead of free-form ad-libbing the way he did after he was busted. The highlight is undoubtedly his classic "Palladium" routine about a third-rate comic bombing at the London Palladium. It takes up nearly all of side 2 of the album and is a tour-de-force. The rest of the album feels more like filler- most of the bits are either dated or not especially funny, although his bit about being censored on the Steve Allen show is also noteworthy. This would be a minor Lenny album if it weren't for the Palladium bit.

#2: Lenny Bruce- "Interviews Of Our Time", 1958:

This was Lenny's first album, and it's an odd one. Somehow the record company (Fantasy Records) must not have had much faith in him, as he is forced to "share" the album with other material- the "interviews of our time" are Henry Jacobs interviewing Dr. Sholem Stein about calypso music, and jazz musician Shorty Petterstein who really has nothing to say and rambles on about it anyway. These interviews take up nearly half the album, and are so odd that I'm not even sure whether to take them seriously or not.
The rest of the album is Lenny- very early on, doing short bits. And the bits are not even treated very well- some of them are just cut off in the middle without a punchline. What's there is pretty good- the most interesting bit is a slightly Twilight Zone-ish studio-recorded bit, "The March Of High Fidelity", about a hi-fi addict whose head turns into a Victrola. Other than that, this is a curious footnote in Lenny's career. He wasn't happy about having his material used as an afterthought to an otherwise rather pointless album, and as you can see, he asked for his name to be removed from the back cover.

#3:  Lenny Bruce- "The Law, Language And Lenny Bruce", 1974:

This is, obviously, a posthumously-released album, recorded around the same time as the "Berkeley Concert" album in 1965. That was towards the end for Lenny, and it was at this point that he was reading his trial transcripts onstage in a desperate effort to prove that what he was doing was not obscene. So it's not his funniest album, it's more of a rant- and even the parts that are funny duplicates a lot of material from the Berkeley show. It's more of a historical document than a comedy album.

#4: Lenny Bruce- "Lenny Bruce Is Out Again", 1966:

 

This is probably the best of all the Lenny albums I have. It repeats a lot of material from his other mid-'60s albums, but he's in good form here, it's one of his most enjoyable performances.

#5: Lenny Bruce- "The Sick Humor Of Lenny Bruce", 1959:

 More early Lenny. This was his first full-length album, after "Interviews Of Our Time." They don't call it "sick humor" for nothing- he opens with a bit about a plane crash, and the album also contains a bit about Hitler and a poem about a man who's in love with a horse. Some of it is uncomfortable today, and unfortunately much of the rest of it is dated, but it shows you how daring Lenny was in the beginning and why he stood out as somebody who was different.

#6: Lenny Bruce- "What I Was Arrested For", 1971:

This is a compilation of the bits that got Lenny arrested, as the album title would imply. It's remarkable to think that Lenny got busted for material which any comedian today could use freely. Toilet humor, sex jokes, gay jokes, words like "bullshit" and, in one notorious instance, "cocksucker"- comedians have been using such material for decades now, but in 1961 it was Lenny who got in trouble for it. There are some bits that are funny, but again, this album really is a historical document of a comedy martyr, I can't rate it based on whether it's funny or not.

Adventures In Recordland, post #11: The Bs, part 8

#1: Shelley Berman- "New Sides" (1963):

This was Berman's last standup album before an incident that showed him in a bad light caused his career to go downhill. (Some documentary footage was taken out of context to make him appear more temperamental than he really is, which gave him a bad reputation as a result.) It's not a bad ending. I don't feel it's as strong as some of his previous albums, but there are some very good bits. Probably my two favorites are "The Complete Neuroses" about a psychiatric patient whose amnesia is triggered by the word "porcupine", and "Lost Dog" about a man calling a little boy who has accidentally stolen the man's dog. It's pretty solid stuff, but doesn't quite reach the heights of his previous work.

 

#2: Shelley Berman- "Outside Shelley Berman" (1959):

This is one of the classics. After a few opening remarks, Shelley goes into one of his phone routines (in my opinion one of his funniest), "Franz Kafka At The Telephone." It sounds like most of the audience had never heard of Kafka- certainly I hadn't when I first heard this album at age 10- but the Kafkaesque frustration of trying to get a phone number in the days of operators and pay phones is certainly understandable, and rendered very funny by Mr. Berman's writing and witty performance. The highlight, which takes up nearly the entirety of side 2, is perhaps one of his most famous bits- "Father And Son", a monolog dramatizes, from his father's point of view, young Berman's attempt to convince his father to give him a hundred dollars to go to acting school in New York. It's not so much a comedy monolog as an acting piece, exploring the personality of a character in a very human situation. It's funny, well-acted, and ultimately poignant. It's one of Berman's masterpieces. In fact, there's a YouTube video of him performing it just a year or two ago, and even after 55 years, it was extraordinary to see an old master still giving a beautiful performance of something I grew up listening to. He then closes the album with a few minutes of audience-participation improv in a game of "PTA"- Berman plays a child psychologist and the audience asks him questions. It's a quick, fun closer to a great album.

 

 #3: Shelley Berman- "A Personal Appearance" (1961):

I'm glad this one happened to come last alphabetically. This is Berman on all cylinders- it's a passionate, delirious, brilliant performance. There are some phone-call bits just to please the crowd- and they're very good- but the highlights are when Berman just talks to the audience, in "confessional" mode- and muses on black specks in glasses to milk, dentists, folk singing, television advertising, and other things. As a comedian, he's very funny, and as an actor, he's more energetic and extraordinary than ever before. I don't think my words can describe the experience of listening to such a great show- go out and buy it yourself and I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

Adventures in recordland, post #1: the As, part 1

Hello, Blogspotters!
I started digitizing my LPs today. I decided to do somewhere between 3 and 5 per day, depending how much time I have. At this rate, it will take maybe five or six months to do, but... I expect to be alive six months from now, so why not?
I did five today. Here's what they were.

#1: Abbott & Costello: "When Radio Was King", 1974

 I bought this album when I was maybe ten years old. You can see it still has the price sticker on it from the dearly missed Plastic Fantastic record shop in Bryn Mawr, which I used to go to every now and then. Got a lot of great stuff there, too.

Being a comedy nerd with OCD, I have copies of all of Abbott & Costello's movies and just spent the past summer watching all of them, so I've learned quite a bit about them. I'd have to agree with the consensus that radio was not their best medium- although they had their moments, and the show on this disc is enjoyably silly. It's about the boys going on safari to hunt big game. Costello meets a lion, who turns out to be a misanthropic hermit wearing a lion skin to fool people. He lets Costello take the skin, Abbott thinks Costello has successfully killed the lion, he eventually finds out the truth and Costello's in trouble again. That's about all you need to know.  Oh, and there's a gratuitous musical number about what a hero Costello is. Anyway, it's an amusing show with some good lines. Trouble is that, where most record companies give you two half-hour shows on a record, this one stretches the half-hour show over both sides and only gives you a so-so version of the team's classic "Who's On First?" routine as a "bonus", so it's hardly their best representation on vinyl. But hey- not a bad way to start off. I'm glad I have it.

#2: Don Adams- self-titled album, 1963

Comedy albums were a fairly new phenomenon in the early '60s. Of course there had been comedy records of some kind going back to the dawn of recorded sound in the 1890s, but they were primarily of a musical nature, such as the 1940s records by people like Spike Jones or Danny Kaye. It wasn't until long-playing records became popular in the 1950s that two new kinds of comedy records came into being: radio-style concept albums recorded in a studio- the most famous of those being Vaughn Meader's famous "First Family" album from 1962- which I'll be discussing in a later blog- and recordings of a nightclub stand-up comic doing their act. The latter particularly was a whole new experience in the 1950s. Remember, this was long before the internet or hour-long cable specials could bring famous stand-up comics immediately into our homes. The whole idea of a "live album"- sitting around listening to a recording of a comedian doing his act in a nightclub- was brand new. Mort Sahl was among the first to release a live comedy album- Shelley Berman won a Grammy for it. They were followed in rapid succession by Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, and many others. (More on all of those talented gentlemen in later entries.) Just about every nightclub comic gave vinyl a try back then. Among them was a young up-and-comer named Donald Yarmy- known professionally as Don Adams.
Of course you all know him as Maxwell Smart on the "Get Smart" TV series, but that didn't start until a couple of years after this album was recorded- but the liner notes mention that he had already been on television, on Steve Allen's show among others, so he was certainly becoming famous by this time.
What's interesting about this album is how different it is from today's comedy. Adams is relaxed and confident, and, instead of having to hit the audience over the head with a comic attitude right away, he just starts talking, conversationally, really taking his time, and leads the small but appreciative audience into some very funny, very well-crafted jokes. I grew up listening to the albums of this era, and because I'm a curmudgeon who doesn't like modern comedians very much (with some very notable exceptions I might discuss some other time), I wish today's audiences had the attention span to appreciate the humor of an act like Adams'. His opening series of monologs, lasting a full 13 minutes, is wonderful.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is rather mild in comparison. A lot of the bits involve parodying the clichés and characters found in old movies, so you have to be a real movie fan to get some of the humor. This being an album from 1963, of course audiences at the time would have recognized names like Edward Arnold, Conrad Nagel or Chester Morris, but it's a bit dated now. Adams' talent is obvious, and there are some good lines here and there, but aside from the opening, much of this album isn't his best work- that would come later.

#3: Kip Addotta: "The Comedian Of The United States", 1985

 

Another album I've had since I was maybe 11 or 12. The reason I knew who Kip Addotta is- and this is probably the case for many of you- was because I heard his song "Wet Dream", a funny song involving about 40 or 50 puns about fish- on a Dr. Demento compilation tape. Of course I was too young then to even know what "wet dream" meant, but... I digress.
I love puns- if you read my blog long enough, you're bound to see many of them here- so I still find that song amusing. Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn't have anything nearly as clever. A few bits of average '80s standup (though I admit I laughed at a couple of the jokes) combined with mediocre studio-recorded songs. Really nothing very memorable. The opening "State Of The Humor Address" (in keeping with the presidential theme established by the album's title and cover, which otherwise has nothing to do with most of the album) is cute, but that's about it.

#4: Dayton Allen: "Why Not?", 1960

Back to the innocent, whimsical humor of the late '50s, a style I really enjoyed as a kid and still do now. I only got this record a few years ago, but it's a fun one.
Dayton Allen, for those who don't know, was a comedian and voice actor, probably best known for doing cartoon voices for characters such as Deputy Dawg and Heckle and Jeckle. At this time, he was a regular on Steve Allen's TV show, and this album compiles some of his appearances there.
He delivers a series of goofy, slightly surreal monologs in a cartoony voice, in the guise of an expert on various topics- criminology, surgery, the military, etc. There's some good material here (interestingly, his satirical lines about early television have not dated), but the album does run out of steam after a while. His shtik was meant to be taken in three-minute bits, and in that small dosage, it's very funny, but a full half-hour of that stuff wears thin. But there's still a lot of fun to be had, and I enjoyed this one.

#5: Fred Allen: "Down In Allen's Alley"

 I know I have at least one or two younger readers here who may not be entirely familiar with who Fred Allen was.
Fred Allen was a vaudeville comedian who found his greatest success in radio with a cerebral, sarcastic brand of humor. He was on the air from 1932 to 1949 when, much to his dismay, he was replaced by a quiz show, a genre of radio programming he found idiotic and often ridiculed mercilessly on his own show. He tried to adapt to the new medium of television, but never really found his niche, and then died suddenly in 1956.
So unfortunately, because so few people today remember or appreciate the kind of purely radio-based humor which Fred did so well, his remarkable wit and talent have been largely forgotten except by a few comedy devotees like myself. I've been listening to him since I was ten, so it's hard for me to review his work in an objective way- all I can do is describe.
The most famous and best-remembered element of Fred's radio shows was the "Allen's Alley" segment, where Fred would stroll down an imaginary street and interview a group of recurring characters about their opinions on things that were in the news that week. Many characters came and went over the seven years that Fred wrote "Allen's Alley", but the best-remembered group consisted of the Southern loudmouth Senator Claghorn (played by Kenny Delmar, a character who partially inspired the famous Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), dour New England farmer Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) and excitable Irishman Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald). Many other memorable characters with names like Falstaff Oppenshaw and Socrates Mulligan were featured in the segment over the years, but only the four I mentioned are featured on this record.
The album features four "Allen's Alley" segments which are all delightful and funny. Side 2 has something a little different- a 1949 radio show with Fred discussing the history of American humor, and where he thought it was going at the time. His comments about the decline of radio comedy and the lack of originality in television comedy, again, are not entirely outdated in lieu of the lack of quality comedy material around today, and very interesting to a comedy nerd.
One other very important point about Fred for those who don't know- he had a long-standing "feud" with Jack Benny (if you don't know who Jack Benny was- shame on you!). The two comedians insulted each other constantly on their respective shows for almost 20 years. It was all for the audience's amusement, of course- in real life they were close friends who respected each other greatly. But of course that made the insults even funnier. So this record closes with a wonderful six minutes of Fred roasting Jack Benny at the Friar's Club in 1951.

That's all the records I did today. See you tomorrow for more.