in 1962 he was banned from performing in Sydney, Australia, where at his first show he took the stage, declared "What a fucking wonderful audience", and was promptly arrested.
while at the same time he freely got away with stuff like this: http://youtu.be/Snkv76rNL
how things have changed - from this http://youtu.be/yOpU0nOd8Us to this http://youtu.be/JZCS5I80X-8 and now this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPNiEKcka_w
review extract on his February, 1961 performance at Carnegie Hall in New York (later released as a three-disc set, titled The Carnegie Hall Concert):
"This was the moment that an obscure yet rapidly rising young comedian named Lenny Bruce chose to give one of the greatest performances of his career. ... The performance contained in this album is that of a child of the jazz age. Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head just as it came into his head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind, pure head sending out brainwaves like radio waves into the heads of every man and woman seated in that vast hall. Sending, sending, sending, he would finally reach a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that just came to him from out there — from recall, fantasy, prophecy.
A point at which, like the practitioners of automatic writing, his tongue would outrun his mind and he would be saying things he didn't plan to say, things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up — as if he were a spectator at his own performance!"
Albert Goldman
