Presented here is a digital reproduction of a recorded performance by Lenny Bruce at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago on December 12, 1962. Bruce immediately refers to his legal troubles (he had been arrested at the same club in the early hours of December 5 for giving an obscene performance) and makes his suspicion known that several members of the audience may be "peace officers," since they are over 45 and wearing bow ties. During the set he performs the bits Las Vegas Tits & Ass, I Picked on the Wrong God, Would You Sell Out Your Country (Francis Gary Powers), The Clap, Balloons, Never Cop Out, We Did It to Their Mothers for Chocolate Bars, Dykes, Southern Accents, Christ and Moses, Adolf Eichmann (based on the Thomas Merton poem Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with a Furnace ) and Ten Thousand Asses (Tigers & Lions). Two Chicago-centric names he mentions are Chicago Sun-Times TV and radio columnist Paul Molloy, whom he considers to be sanctimonious, and Paul Crump, a death row inmate who had recently published the novel "Burn, Killer, Burn. Bruce ends the set on a serious note, saying, "You've been a very strange audience. I didn't feel humorous at all this show. It was not a funny show at all. You were my peers, this show."
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.
