Lenny Bruce’s best work was achieved by improvising rather than rehearsing

Evidence

6 Bruce’s biographer Albert Goldman considers this performance, recorded for posterity and released as a three-LP set in 1972, six years after Bruce’s death, to be the comedian’s masterpiece: “Lenny worshiped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. His greatest fear was getting his act down pat. On this night, he rose to every chance stimulus, every interruption and noise and distraction, with a mad volleying of mental images that suggested the fantastic riches of Charlie Parker’s horn.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1872

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about spontaneity/improvisation as a defining feature of 1960s countercultural comedy — Hoberman’s larger argument about the avant-garde.