Stand-up comic Lenny Bruce’s routines borrowed jazz phrasing and Kerouac’s prose cadences

Evidence

Jazz critics like Ralph Gleason in San Francisco and Nat Hentoff in New York were Bruce’s strongest supporters; others, notably the British director Jonathan Miller, who wrote about Bruce both in the Village Voice and Partisan Review, compared his spontaneous, free-form raps to Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. The two had similar deliveries: Their phrasing was jazzy, their voices were nasal and New York–inflected (although Kerouac grew up speaking Quebecois French in Lowell, Massachusetts), their raps were punctuated by hipster patois. Both dug Lord Buckley. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the 1950s Beat Generation and jazz-poetry milieu from earlier in the subculture period of this book.