Presented here is a digital version of a recording of a Lenny Bruce performance at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago on December 12, 1962. Bruce devotes more of this set than usual to topical matters and to discussing his arrest for obscenity days earlier (during the early hours of December 5). He begins by expressing his affinity for Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kup Kupcinet, and decides he likes Kup more than columnist Will Leonard because Kup seems like my Jewish uncle. He does his bit Jewish vs. Goyishe, then rails against columnist Paul Molloy, who purports to be Christian. Bruce says, no, the true Christian is Jimmy Hoffa, because he hires ex-convicts, as Christ would have. He displays a picture of a lovely lady in a men's magazine (possibly Rogue), and disputes that her body is indecent. He says the older generation of Jews is bigoted and relates the plot of typical Jewish theater, with the son marrying a shiksa to the despair of the self-sacrificing mother. He again brings up Molloy and does Would You Sell Out Your Country (Francis Gary Powers). He then does Custody/Get Even, Stag Film vs. King of Kings, Transvestites Posing as Police, We Did it to Their Mothers for Chocolate Bars and Bad Toilet Training. He discusses the Gate of Horn arrest, which came in the midst of his engagement after people who had walked out of the show complained to the authorities. He says the complainers did it in a correct manner. They didn't take a brick and throw it through the window. They didn't paint swastikas. He says that the bit that got him arrested was saying how the freak show business is dying out, but thank God for the Catholic Church, [because of] the thalidomide babies, we'll see a few. He talks about how the cops positioned themselves in the club before the arrest. He mentions a black man who's been in a military prison for 25 years and wonders why Molloy isn't concerned with that. He says that when he was Australia he found out that anti-American feeling is high there. He does Thank You Masked Man. Reading from a newspaper, he comments on various items and wonders who Ivan Bunny is. He talks about Bobby Kennedy's antipathy towards Italians and about how Irish and Italian Catholics don't get along. He riffs a dialogue in which a son is trying to elicit feelings from his mother about a painting he's done. The recording ends abruptly.
Full length copies of the recordings are available for use in the department. Please contact the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University for more information.
