BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

I’ve known who Lenny Bruce was for as long as I can remember, but the first time I ever had any exposure to his comedy was a few years back when I watched the Dustin Hoffman biopic Lenny. I enjoyed the movie, but afterward it occurred to me I hadn’t laughed once during any of the recreations of Bruce’s performances. I wondered whether the failure lay in Hoffman’s performance or Bruce’s material.

So I went out and bought a couple of Lenny Bruce CDs. I listened dutifully, but once again I didn’t laugh at all.

It’s obvious that Lenny Bruce was an important cultural figure. “My humor is largely one of indictment,” he once said. “I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.” And indeed he sliced away at a whole host of hoary taboos, including those that limited the scope of artistic expression.

But he did it while making people laugh. Which, if I’m any judge, he can no longer do — in part because, thanks to him, we’re now far too jaded for the shock value of his routines to register anymore.

Here he is on the Steve Allen show:

Is the problem just with Lenny Bruce or it is a more general phenomenon? Is all comedy perishable? What’s the shelf life for a laugh-out-loud stand-up routine? Sam Kinison’s still funny, isn’t he? How about Richard Pryor? I remember laughing till I cried when I first saw his one of his concert movies in high school, but would I still laugh now? Would a high school kid laugh now?

Looking ahead, when will Borat no longer be funny?

In Present America, the Motion Picture Association of America has announced that it will consider giving movies an R rating if they depict people smoking. The point is to shield children under 17 from harmful influences.

In Past America, well, things were different:

And you thought Joe Camel was bad!

Here’s the first of what will be a running series: the presidential TV spot of the day. Let’s start at the beginning, with Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign.

This wonderfully hokey cartoon and jingle came courtesy of Roy Disney. It’s all delightfully peppy and cute until the very end, when the Ike Sun rises over the Capitol — what authoritarian imagery!

Eisenhower’s television advertising, the first ever, was masterminded by Rosser Reeves, the ad man who brought us the M&Ms slogan “melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” Reeves, known as the “prince of hard sell,” was the developer of the concept of the “unique selling proposition.”

Reeves’ TV campaign for Ike consisted of dozens of 20-second spots called “Eisenhower Answers America.” In each a “citizen” tosses the general a softball and he whacks it out of the park with a couple of sentences. You can watch them here.

… from On the Road while Steve Allen accompanies on jazz piano.  Pricelessly weird.

Here’s the famous scroll manuscript that Kerouac discusses in the clip above:

And now, a few more representative passages from On the Road.  Here’s the one everybody knows, from very early in the book just after the Sal the narrator (Kerouac) has met Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady):

because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

And here’s an infamous passage, from when Sal and Dean are in Denver:

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching . . . wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, music . . .

About that passage James Baldwin later commented, ”I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.”

And finally, here’s one from near the end of the book as the road trip has entered Mexico:

Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World.

In these passages can be found the essence of Beat romanticism, that early spark of mass prosperity’s countercultural conflagration: the celebration of the spontaneous, the untamed, the transgressive, the marginal, the primitive.

That such sentiments came percolating to the surface in the 1950s is no coincidence. Affluence had now given people unprecedented freedom from material and social constraints. So it wasn’t surprising that some people started to embrace the idea of freedom from all constraints whatsoever — freedom of the uncaged id.

It turns out that human beings have far too active imaginations to settle for lives of bloodless, soulless calculation and rationality. And so, while science and technology have shattered many of our old illusions, the entertainment and marketing industries have helpfully stepped in to supply our craving for make-believe and magic. 

Thus we now have sports “legends”:

And action “heroes”:

And sex “goddesses”:

And advertising “icons”:

And even pop “idols”:

Sure, the products of popular culture are often shallow and banal. They’re also a lot of fun. And harmless fun at that — I’ll take cola wars over religious wars any day.

To illustrate the ironic fulfillment of Marx’s prophecy, I began the first chapter of my book with an account of the famous 1959 “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Khrushchev.  The triumph over scarcity was indeed achieved, but under capitalism rather than communism. And to add insult to injury, the capitalists set up an exhibit of their triumph in the capital of world communism!

Above a great shot of the encounter.  Note Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor, standing at the far right — what a face! Below is a newsreel clip about the exchange:

And here is a transcript of the debate.