Born 100 years ago this week, Lenny Bruce defined the modern idea of the standup as comedic seer and poet-prophet. And so we have Bruce to blame for decades of drunk men in leather jackets smoking on stage in sunglasses and thinking they are geniuses because they have read two books and a pamphlet.
Sadly the brilliant Bruce has been the subject of almost no thoughtful retrospectives this week, though I did do an enlightening Q&A about him at a screening of Bob Fosse’s 1974 gem Lenny, in which Dustin Hoffman pretends to be Lenny Bruce, at London’s Garden Cinema last Monday. I hope, when it is the centenary of my birth, people spend two hours watching a man who looks a bit like me pretending to be me. Terry Christian, perhaps. Or the Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladić.
My favourite joke by the alternative comedian and activist Tony Allen, whose December 2023 funeral was one of the best of the many comedian’s funerals I attended that year, was this: “Lenny Bruce ended his career out of his mind on drugs, naked on the bathroom floor and throwing up into a toilet bowl. That’s how mine started.”
Like many of us, Allen’s work would have been very different without the influence and example of Bruce, who showed that scatological standup could have a jazzy musicality, a social conscience and a Swiftian bent, and all this within its cabaret-club confines. Bruce also showed generations of comics that you could just about do the job totally off your face, which made standup a more attractive career choice to a certain kind of hedonist than long-distance lorry driving or brain surgery, both of which require plausible levels of sobriety.
In the 50s and 60s, America, and by association the western world, was moving towards a liberal consensus, and the “sick humour” of Lenny Bruce was one of the things gently steering it away from prejudice, prudishness and hypocrisy. But having reached a postwar high-water mark in 1998, when Rob Halford from Judas Priest accidentally came out as gay live on MTV, the woke tide is ebbing back out into a sewage-filled sea where Donald Trump and his global enablers bob on the waves like turds in Maga caps, lying about stuff and suing everyone who won’t do what they say. I expect the 2026 Nobel peace prize committee are already seeking legal advice ready for when Trump challenges his non-selection, despite the fact that he had formerly threatened to invade both Canada and Greenland.
In tandem with the global collapse of democratic norms, the high-profile American standups of today have turned away from Bruce’s example, attacking a now powerless woke powerbase and the now reviled causes it promotes – trans rights and feminism in the cases of the popular US standups Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr, for example. So it’s no surprise that loads of them just went to Saudi Arabia to play the first Riyadh comedy festival, and performed their anti-feminist and anti-trans material in a country where homosexuals and women’s rights activists face the death penalty. Arguably such material serves a social function of comedic counterweight in a society where liberal orthodoxies are dominant, but to ridicule people, for money, who may well be executed seems to me to add insult to injury. In the most literal way possible. You’ll laugh your head off!
The comedy festival was promoted by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man thought to be ultimately responsible for the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, whose body was then moved out of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in pieces in a suitcase. In my current show, Stewart Lee Vs The Man-Wulf, the titular Man-Wulf is a half-man, half-wolf American standup comedian, who now has this to say about his own decision to play Riyadh: “They say I shouldn’t have done it because they chopped up a journalist and put him in a suitcase. But the way I see it, they had to chop him up and put him in a suitcase. How else were they gonna get his murdered body out of the hotel room unseen? Am I right or am I right? I’m here all week. Try the fish.”
Among the British acts that played Riyadh were Britain’s Got Talent finalist Nabil Abdulrashid, who, should his material have caused offence, had little to fear from being chopped up and put into a suitcase, as there isn’t a suitcase that big in the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This isn’t the sort of crass joke I would usually make, but I suppose that’s what happens when basic norms of human decency have been suspended. Nobody can really complain about anything. Jack Whitehall and Jimmy Carr performed in Riyadh too but they are of no consequence.
Some American comedians said their own country was itself increasingly anti-democratic so logically if they don’t play Saudi Arabia they shouldn’t play at home either. And we supplied Saudi Arabia with £1.1bn worth of arms in 2022 alone, so maybe we shouldn’t play here in the UK. On some level I agree with this, which is why ultimately my goal is to do no gigs outside the London borough of Hackney, where I feel I am in broad political alignment with most of the woke residents, and to try to avoid accepting any work outside the M25. For here there be flaggers.
I don’t know if Lenny Bruce, were he alive today, would have played the Riyadh comedy festival. But I do know that when I started out in 1989, standup comedy seemed to me to stand for something. But I don’t know if it does any more. Or to put it another way … “Ladies and gentlemen, Lenny Bruce has left the building.”
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year. Stewart appears with Daniel Kitson in a benefit for Medical Aid For Palestinians on 20 October at London’s Union Chapel, and with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November