Lenny Bruce remains, next to perhaps Richard Pryor and George Carlin, the most legendary stand-up comedian of all time. Notably, both Pryor and Carlin both cited Bruce as their greatest influence: once called the “dark angel” of new comedy, he was surreal, profane, critical, empathetic, brutally honest, terribly vulnerable, and always very, very funny.

Live at Carnegie Hall from 1961 is one of few unedited concert recordings of Lenny, who mostly lives on in “greatest hits” compilations. It represents Bruce at the apotheosis of his career. Five years later he’d be dead at the age of 40, his career, comedy, and life destroyed by five years of relentless legal persecution in the form of obscenity charges.

In this piece, I (with other performers) perform Lenny Bruce’s entire 2 hour show from beginning to end, speaking the language we hear it over headphones. 

Viewers do not hear Lenny—only our attempt to keep up with Bruce’s blistering pace.  In the gaps, the constant slippage between his words and our attempts to speak them, we attempt to extract a historical embodied knowledge–mother wit, a Jewish sensibility about the world–that runs, like a river, underneath. In our voices coming in and out of unison, we transform this sound away from language, and into music.

This recording, from a live performance from Trembling Grounds: Push-Pull Practice, a gallery show at Area 405 in Baltimore, features myself performing with comedian Guy Branum, actor and singer Amy Warren, and vocalist Sifu. 

Additional photos are from a Carolina Playmakers residency at UNC Chapel Hill in 2022; and from a solo performance at UC Irvine in 2011.

EPP #2 (Lenny Bruce, Live at Carnegie Hall, 1961) is part of an ongoing series of endurance/durational performances. In each, an artifact of culture gets re-performed under some condition of stress, to crack open how culture gets transmitted through the body.