Lenny Bruce - Ladies And Gentlemen (ej svensk text)

More than 40 years on from his death and Lenny Bruce remains America's most controversial comedian. With a free-form style inspired by the late-Fifties jazz-scene, Lenny's "foul-mouthed" revolutionary act poked fun at subjects previously considered off-limits, including routines on everything from religion to drugs, and pretty much inventing stand-up comedy as we know it today. His iconoclasm proved to be both the making and the breaking of him though. Persecuted by the authorities in the U.S., he was repeatedly arrested on obscenity grounds, as well as for drug possession, and eventually blacklisted from nearly every nightclub in the country. He was banned outright from performing in Australia; and, after critically acclaimed 1962 run at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in London, he was deported and subsequently refused re-entry to the UK. Bankrupt and with his legal difficulties at an insurmountable level, Lenny performed for the last time in 1966 "whacked out on amphetamines" and bowing out with the words "I'm not a comedian anymore. I'm Lenny Bruce." Not much more than a month later Lenny was dead from a morphine overdose. He was only fourty years old.