Lenny Bruce in How To Talk Dirty and Influence People ripped the thing. Super intelligent, crazy irreverent, an artist and criminal personality for all the right reasons. He offered a critical voice in Babylon and knew the truth as Emerson knew the truth, of a spirit within American society, freedom and confinement, libertine expression and square. Very aware of social control, prison to the soul. Lenny Bruce understood and so lived the deal, and he expressed with words and voice in our face. Thank God. “Strippers were only a step above hookers,” he wrote after marrying the erotic dancer Honey. Dropping a version for American titter. “Even as late as 1951” strippers in this country barely above prostitutes. “The first great break-through - or, rather, breakdown - of society’s nudity/lewdity guilt-by-association was the now-famous Marilyn Monroe calendar. Marilyn’s respectability when she died was based principally upon her economic status, which is, in the final analysis, the only type our society really respects.” Here’s his social commentary, his Position, and a spot-on critique of American culture. An alternative voice inside the belly of the beast. Goodbye American society, can you recover from this decadence? Sorry, you can’t. Goodbye America, owned and directed by the billionaires. The new Gilded Age and the new aristocracy.
