July 6, 2019
Ladies and Gentlemen! Thanks for coming out on a Monday night to our weekly open mic. The weakest comic goes first, before the audience is either warmed up or liquored up. We call this luckless person our sacrificial lamb. You know how it goes, this comic is here to placate an angry crowd. Please welcome to the stage of the Chuckle Hut our first comedian this evening, our first yuckmeister. He is just returning from an engagement at The Palladium, the finest stage in London, England. Please give a warm Toledo, Ohio welcome to Leonard Alfred Schneider!
Thank you. The MC got something a little wrong, that I need to correct. I did not play at The Palladium of London, England, but at the hot tub of The Getladium Swingers Club of London, Ohio. It was a bad gig. I had to compete with moans of pleasure from the swingers in the hot tub. I have not heard the name of God screamed with such power since I was kicked out of Jerry Falwell’s church. I wonder if Buddhists call out the name of Buddha when they are at the peak of their pleasure. Do Hindus call out the name of Krishna? Just wondering. That is what philosophers and comedians do….just wonder….just look at normal things in a way that they suddenly don’t look so normal. The difference is that one laughs with a comedian and laughs at the philosopher. Philosophers, however, do not have hecklers or two drink minimums.
In case you are wondering who I am, let me introduce myself. Some of you older, hipper people might recognize the name Leonard Alfred Schneider. That was the original name of perhaps the bravest, craziest, if not the funniest comedians of all time, Lenny Bruce. True story. Leonard Alfred Schneider changed his name to Lenny Bruce so he wouldn’t sound so Jewish. Maybe he should have chosen something like Chatsworth Collingsford to really make it clear that he was a goy. You can’t blame Lenny for changing his name – he just wanted to fit in, to conform, to not stand out. Rodney Dangerfield, born Jack Roy, had it a little easier, he was born a goy.
I am here to remind you why Lenny Bruce really did die for your sins. Me and every other knuckle-head jokester get to make what used to be called blasphemous statements because Saint Lenny did what he did.. Lenny was a saint because he kept on making jokes and telling the truth on stages like this one while a variety of state and local governments arrested and prosecuted him on obscenity charges. I’m looking at you San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. All this prosecuting was done with the backing of a certain Catholic church. As a result of his persecution he died young and broke while sitting on a toilet. Oy vey, the shame. But now he is a saint. Weird. I just gotta shake my head. How does that happen? Going from star comedian to rejection and death and then to superstar whose work is the foundation for the comedy of so many others. It reminds me of another Jewish comedian from two thousand years ago.
Having the same name as Lenny sort of got me thinking about his comedy, which I love. I’ve memorized most of his famous routines. But as much as I love Lenny and his genius comedy, I don’t want to be an imitation Lenny Bruce – I want to me, an original! I don’t want to be a copy of anybody, even a saint like Lenny.
I keep wondering about imitation…how powerful it is, how it works. It turns out that imitation is actually an area of academic study. The numero uno in that field is a French guy, Rene Girard, who died in 2015. If Professor Girard had been a comedian, he would have headlined Madison Square Garden. More about him later. Instead of wasting his time in joints like this one he wrote books and taught at places like Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
Imitation is one of those things that you never think about, but when you do, you start to notice how weird it is. For example, imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery. Ok. But if you want to insult someone, the easiest way to do it is to imitate them. When they raise their voices, you raise yours, when they scratch their ears, you scratch yours, and so on. Trust me, it works every time. Don’t believe me? Just look at any third grade playground. The kids know that imitating is an easy way to insult anyone.
When you want to insult somebody, you call them a wannabe, an imitator. The worst insult to a piece of art is that it is derivative. Nobody wants an imitation Rolex, they want the real thing. Nobody wants an imitation Rembrandt, they want the real deal.
Why are mimes a universally hated group? They are even lower on the show biz ladder than me, because they imitate. Nobody likes imitation. But that doesn’t matter, we all imitate. We kind of can’t help it. It’s tough to be original, to not imitate somebody. Try it sometime, see what happens.
Even my namesake, Saint Lenny Bruce, an acclaimed original, was an imitator. Read the excellent bio of him by Albert Goldman and you will see the sources of his humor and persona. What made him seem original is that he imitated a wide variety of sources, including junkies, vaudeville comedians, jazzers, and his mom. Like all geniuses he was quite good at hiding what a great imitator he was.
When advertisers wants us to buy something, they use a model. Right? What the model wants becomes the model for what we should want, what we should desire. Nike wants us to Be Like Mike. And dammit, we buy the shoes he wears, the shirts he wears and the cologne he wears. We even want to smell like Mike. If you think about it, there is something embarrassing about the fact that we wind up looking and smelling like Mike. I mean, are we not independent, autonomous people? Uhh…No…Sorry…
That’s the thing about imitation, ya’ gotta have a model to imitate. Once, when I was eighteen years old, I was in a bar in upstate New York. Back then, the drinking age was eighteen. The bartender asked me what I wanted. I had never been in a bar before – I had no idea what to say, no idea what I wanted, what my desire was. It was an awful moment that seemed to last for an infinitely long time. I heard another person ordering a 7&7 (Seven-Up and Seagrams.) Yeah, me too, give me one of them 7&7s. In my long moments of confusion, I did not know who I was, because I did not know what I desired. After I imitated some random barfly’s desire for a 7&7 I knew who I was again. I was the guy drinking a 7&7. It was weird that I only knew what to desire because some guy that I had never seen before and would never see again gave me the clue. My identity at that moment came down to, “Without you, I am nothing. But who are you?” And then who am I ? Oy!
Hey you over there, quit talking – I am trying to be funny here. O yeah, tomorrow ask your mother to dress you better.
This insult implies that he doesn’t have the originality to be himself. And that his model is the worst sort of model: his mother. Most of us don’t want to imitate our moms, but when you get down to it…alas…we all do. Even Lenny…his mom was a comedian and so was he.
And hey, check out our language, which contains expressions like “monkey see, monkey do” and “to ape someone.” How about calling someone a “copycat”? The point is that it is somehow considered less than human to imitate. The phrase “to parrot” is an insult. A person who just imitates his or her model with no understanding is just parroting. Is the parrot just imitating its owner or does it really get what it is saying?
But parrots do point out one more element of the mystery of imitation. Hey, we are imitating all the time. How much of what we say do we really understand? How much of what we say we enjoy do we really enjoy? Someone modeled for us that caviar is delicious. Is it? Not to me, but I don’t want to look like a yokel and say it is salty nasty crap. I’m just parroting what I have been told when I say I love it.
It’s in the language that parrots, apes, monkeys, and cats are all imitators. Somehow it’s beneath the dignity of us awesome humans to do something so lowly as imitating. Maybe there is something scary or dangerous about imitation?
Parents know about imitation. Kids know it. Kids are the world’s number one imitators. Have one sometime and you will know what I am talking about. I learned this long ago when my wife was at home one day with our three-year-old daughter, and trying unsuccessfully to adjust a picture on the mantle. Our young daughter said, “Fuck it mama, fuck it!” Either there is an X-rated Sesame Street that I don’t know about, or that child was imitating her potty-mouth father…me. Every parent knows that you better watch your mouth because the kids are listening and imitating. And yeah, they imitate what you do, too.
Salesmen know about imitation. They get you all hopped up, you start imitating their excitement, and before you know it, you have bought a timeshare condo in the desert.
Who else knows about the power of imitation? Well, Hitler and his ilk do. Do demagogues ever ask people to sit by themselves, look deeply into their hearts, and make a conscious choice to be one of their followers? No way. Didn’t Hitler create highly managed rallies, rituals really, where thousands of people were not so subtly encouraged to imitate him and believe whatever crap he was spouting? All the copycats in the huge crowd imitated each other and reinforced each others’ faith in the creep at the podium. Hey, do you want to be the one idiot who stands up at a Nuremberg rally and disagrees with the thousands cheering for the clown speaking at the front? Ummm. No, thank you.
In his own dope-addled brilliant way, Lenny was trying to get to the root of how society functions, to talk about the secrets that nobody else was smart enough or crazy enough to understand or brave enough to talk about. He wondered about the secret that the whole culture was hiding. For him, the secret was that the most respected figures – Popes, presidents, gurus, and judges – had the same values as the petty hustlers, junkies, and scam artists in the lower depths of the show biz world that he inhabited.
St. Lenny hated what he called “the good-good culture.” Remember, he did so much of his work in the squeaky-clean 1950s, when just about all the ugliness was hidden away out of sight. Back then, comedians did not talk on stages about important things like racism, cruelty in families, the desperation of bad marriages, the sexual and social catastrophes that plague so many of us. Such things were not spoken of in public.
Lenny was no intellectual, in fact he was barely literate, but he had a gut sense that something was not right in this whitey, tighty buttoned-up world. Besides taking as much dope as he could and having as much sex as he could handle, he spent his adult life exposing the hideous underbelly of the world he lived in. Did Lenny read Kafka? Hard to say, but he lived like a character from one of Mr. K’s nightmarish tales. Throwing himself against the Law, violating the Law, fighting the Law, and finally being convicted by the Law, he sank into insanity and an early death. At the end of his life, his obsession with the Law made him commit the ultimate sin for a
comedian – he stopped being funny.
Lenny B could see the shadow hiding in the simple act of imitation. He told a story which went a little like this: “Hey let’s all get together for National Brotherhood Week. Yeah, let’s get together, Jews, Poles, Greeks, French. Let’s get together and hate the Puerto Ricans.” A dumb joke, but if you think about it, there is something terrifying at the base of it. Lenny intuited that what brings people together is the hatred of a person or group who is different. The group creates unity by coming together against the one who is different. Oy!
In other words, we only know that we are us when we find someone who is not us. Sadly, there are countless examples of this phenomenon in our country alone – the way the Jews have been treated – oh yeah, and the Irish, Chinese, Blacks, Muslims, on and on… It’s a tragedy not a comedy and I can’t figure out how to make it funny. But this vicious process is what we alleged sapiens have been doing to each other since day one.
The philosopher guy I mentioned before, Rene Girard, writes extensively about scapegoating, the phenomenon of group formation by means of expulsion. I am going to take a little risk here and step out from the usual dick and ca-ca jokes that are the staple of places called Ha Ha A Go Go or the Chuckle Hut or The Laff Shak.
As I recall, Lenny could talk over the head of his audience and all that happened to him was convictions for obscenity, drug addiction, and death, so here goes…
I know it is hard for you guys to imagine, but the internet has more to it than porn and gambling. I can hear most of you gasping in amazement, but this is true. I suggest you Google “Rene Girard, rivalry, and imitation” and see what you get. I can assure you that there is a gold mine of good stuff out there about Rene’s insights into what makes us humans do the weird and horrible stuff we do. The point of me being up here is to tickle your curiosity enough that you will check out my boy Rene, but first pay for your drinks. Just the titles of his books should be enough to make you curious: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Violence and the Sacred, The Theatre of Envy… Rene Girard was definitely not a comedian, but rather a hybrid theologian/anthropologist/philosopher who pointed out the very real possibility of violence arising from imitation. So have another plate of nachos, sip an adult beverage, and here we go.
Our man, Doctor Girard, started noticing and writing about the power of imitation in great novels like Don Quixote while he was teaching literature in the 1970’s. Cool. Most of us don’t think too much about imitation we just do it. If someone does something that looks good, we do the same thing. Who has time or brains for Cervantes?
Joseph Campbell urges folks to follow their bliss. Rene would ask where did the bliss come from and what makes it yours? He might answer his own question by reminding us to see how our desire is really the desire of another person who taught it to us. And anyway, if it really is your bliss, why do you need anyone to tell you to follow it?
I now have the desire to slug the guy in the third row who is checking his email on his cell phone. Hey, listen up, you might learn something.
Where was I? O yeah. The connection between desire, rivalry, and violence. Rene noticed that there was an uncool side to this copycat business. Imitation can easily lead to conflict. He reminded us that societies distinguish between the sacred and the secular, good people and bad people, what is permissible to desire and what is not permissible, and the right kind of violence and the wrong kind of violence. He wrote
extensively about how cultures create these distinctions and differences in order to prevent imitative desire from flaring into violence.
Saint Lenny got up on stages like this one and told the truth – that many of these cultural differences are absurd. You know, the ones about gender, race, and power.
He knew that cultural differences helped some people and hurt others. The folks in power were not amused by his jokes and japes. We know what happens to goats like him.
Lenny was outrageous. He broke many of the taboos that society had set up to keep order, keep things cool. He made fun of racists, hypocrites, and Puritans. For example, in 1964 he was busted for making fun of Jackie Kennedy. Dig it… There was a famous picture of Jackie Kennedy splayed out on the back of the limo, seconds after JFK was shot and killed. The caption described the photo as Jackie heroically going for help to save her husband. Ok. Lenny, on stage in Chicago, in front of God and everyone, noted that she was not a hero, she was scared out of her wits and was performing the very human act of diving for cover. The Catholic church had plenty of power in Chicago back then, and had him arrested for obscenity for a joke you can probably hear on cable TV today. After he began telling jokes like that, the vice squad arrested him so many times that he could no longer work as a comedian. He died a broken-down junkie before he was fifty. Now anyone like me can get up and say just about any filthy thing he wants to. Nobody would be able to do that today if Lenny had not hung his Yiddishe tuckus out there, and put his life on the line.
Lenny had much in common with contemporary philosophers, who focus on narrower concerns such as the analysis of language. He correctly noted that, “To is a preposition, Come is a verb.” That piece of linguistic analysis got him an obscenity conviction. Oy! He observed that anybody who found that joke dirty probably couldn’t come. He had no grand unifying theories. He just riffed on culture and found humor in its contradictions, but could not tie it all together in one grand, unifying theory. Hey, he was a comedian not a philosopher.
Lenny threaded some interesting questions through his routines. For example, are some words so dirty that they should never be said in public? Is the human body so vile that certain parts of its should never be displayed in public? Or, more generally, which prohibitions are just and necessary for the functioning of society and which are unjust and unnecessary? Munch a corn dog, sip a mixed beverage and get back to me when you have figured out the answers to these questions.
My boy Rene points out that as the desires of two or more yokels converge, those two, or perhaps a whole group, will turn their fury on one unlucky sucker. By clobbering that poor soul the group attains unity. They feel better, and all is lovely again. Of course, not for the schlemiel who has been killed or expelled. When we do that kind of thing, we generally feel righteous, that we have done a good thing by getting rid of an evil person. That is probably how the Nazi’s felt when they rounded up the Jews. The genius of Rene’s work is that it offers insights which help us to gain some awareness of this tragically all too common phenomenon.
Scapegoating only works if folks don’t know that they are doing it. There is no myth in which the people get together when things are bad, such as a drought or plague, and say, “Hey, I have an idea – let’s find the weakest, weirdest guy…blame him, gang up on him, and kill him, and then everything will be fine.” Scapegoating doesn’t work that way. Think about a lynch mob. The group which is going to become a mob already holds a set of stories, prejudices, and grievances that incline individuals to coalesce against a luckless member of the already despised group. Remember the power of imitation? Mob violence is an example of the negative side of it as the hatred of each person encourages the hatred of the others until it is discharged in the worst possible way. Tragically, the mob usually feels that god is on their side, justifying their violence.
Many of us have scapegoated someone. Remember high school? Either you were the one getting rejected or were in the group doing the rejecting and praying you would not face the scorn of the gang. How did we know we were cool? Only by finding some schlub who we could reject and feel superior to. Not pretty, but I did it and possibly so did you. And hey, I have been the schlub and probably you have been, too.
Rene makes the bold claim that human culture started at the point when a group of proto-humans in crisis united and turned its fury on a hapless victim. After all, what kind of culture can you have if everyone kills the person who makes him angry? This mechanism of limiting violence, he argues, makes human culture possible. The group of proto-humans remembers this first murder as a glorious event. From this original murder comes a story, a myth, which is the group’s memory of the killing and also the prohibitions to stop that kind of violence from happening in an unregulated manner. Just to be clear, Rene does not approve of this form of violent expulsion. He asks one of his many provocative questions: how can we humans live without finding innocent victims to scapegoat? His suggestion is to imitate the absolutely peaceful life and teachings of Jesus. You might respond, “Jesus H. Christ! That ain’t gonna happen!”
Lenny thought that he had gotten to the deepest, darkest secrets, the hidden realities at the foundation of society. For him, they were sexual and financial. He used the stage to expose the hypocrisies, deceits, and shams that were passing for truth. Rene points out a deeper secret: that culture is created and sustained by killing the one who is different. At a minimum,Rene asks interesting questions such as – where does human culture start? How is it possible to limit human violence? What is the relationship between imitation and violence?
As a guy pretending to be cool while trying to imitate Lenny B, nothing is less cool than the Bible. Shockingly, Rene has found a way to understand the Bible that makes it maybe the hippest book ever. Anybody out there ever read a book? Say what? No! Reading with one hand does not count. Well, you gotta read the Bible with two hands and there are no pictures. Dr R says that the tale told in the Gospels, the crucifixion of Jesus, is the first time that the victim of the violent expulsion by the crowd is shown to be an innocent dude. You could look it up. Remember the story of Orpheus? He got himself killed by an angry mob because he did something bad, something wrong. He deserved what he got. Right? Brother Orpheus broke some rules and his violent death is the just and logical consequence of those actions. Culture needs limits and he violated them, so he got what he deserved. Rene pointed out that a very similar angry mob killed Jesus H. But the story clearly lets the reader know that JC is innocent, that he did nothing to deserve his torture and lynching. Next time you are in a hotel room, you could check it out.
Rene would argue that the story of JC being unjustly executed means that we have to seriously consider the possibility that the victim of mob violence is not guilty – the mob is guilty. This perspective lets us see that even though all the authorities were arrayed against Lenny, like JC, he was innocent.
In 2003, Governor George Pataki gave him a posthumous pardon for his obscenity convictions in the state of New York. I can imagine Lenny saying, “Thanks you putzes…..damn lot of good that does me now!”
What do those blinking lights mean? Is this when they sacrifice me? Maybe I need to end my set? I have so much more to say. Lenny has a million more routines. Rene has lots to say about scapegoating, how to recognize it and how to move beyond it. Damn, I gotta split, so they can bring on the real comedians.
Don’t forget to tip your waitress and to read Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. I’d like to introduce our next act… Please welcome Jacques – don’t call him Jackie – Jacques Derrida. You won’t understand a word he says in either French or English, but trust me, he is a laff riot.
