Download or read book The Trials of Lenny Bruce written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by Top Five Books LLC. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I thought I knew his story pretty well, but I learned a great deal from this book. It is a major contribution…" —George Carlin "The book is indispensable." —Booklist "Detailed, objective, and valuable." —Kirkus Reviews 10th Anniversary Edition—With a New Preface by the Authors When it first came out in 2002, The Trials of Lenny Bruce quickly established itself as the definitive work on Lenny Bruce’s free speech battles over his provocative comedy. The Trials of Lenny Bruce takes the reader on a wild and tragicomic ride, as the renegade comedian is arrested and tried in city after city—San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, and New York—for the words he spoke onstage. The charge was obscenity. The actual offense was blasphemy. This book is an essential documentation of the free speech struggles of an icon of American comedy who, by speaking his mind and fighting for the right to speak his mind, paved the way for every standup comedian, satirist, and social critic who followed him. Not only did The Trials of Lenny Bruce set the record straight on Lenny—being named one of the best books of the year by the L.A. Times—the authors led the successful push for the late comedian’s posthumous pardon in 2003 for his 1964 conviction on obscenity charges in New York.
Download or read book How to Talk Dirty and influence people written by Lenny Bruce and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "How to Talk Dirty and influence people" by Lenny Bruce. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Download or read book The Trials of Lenny Bruce written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first carefully documented account of Lenny Bruce's career and free speech struggles, The Trials of Lenny Bruce paints a vivid, shocking, hilarious and tragic portrait of a man too honest for his time --
Download or read book Trials of Lenny Bruce written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by . This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lenny Bruce¿s words had the power to provoke laughter and debate -- as well as shock and outrage. It placed him on the wrong side of the law in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago and N.Y. Lenny committed his life to telling the truth. But the truth he told infuriated those in power, and authorities worked to put him in jail. And there were those who never stopped fighting for Lenny -- like Steve Allen, Phil Spector and William Kunstler. This is the first account of Lenny Bruce¿s career and free speech struggles. Includes an audio CD, narrated by Nat Hentoff, of the routines that got Lenny in trouble, as well as interviews with his defenders and prosecutors, and his friends and followers, including George Carlin, Hugh Hefner and Margaret Cho. Photos.
Download or read book Mania written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by Top Five Books LLC. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death on the banks of the Hudson River in August 1944, it was clear that the hard-partying teenage companion to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs might need to reevaluate his life. A two-year stint in a reformatory straightened out the wayward youth but did little to curb the wild ways of his friends. MANIA tells the story of this remarkable group—who strained against the conformity of postwar America, who experimented with drink, drugs, sex, jazz, and literature, and who yearned to be heard, to remake art and society in their own libertine image. What is more remarkable than the manic lives they led is that they succeeded—remaking their own generation and inspiring the ones that followed. From the breakthrough success of Kerouac's On the Road to the controversy of Ginsberg's Howl and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, the counterculture was about to go mainstream for the first time, and America would never be the same again. Based on more than eight years’ writing and research, Ronald Collins and David Skover—authors of the highly acclaimed The Trials of Lenny Bruce—bring the stories of these artists, hipsters, hustlers, and maniacs to life in a dramatic, fast-paced, and often darkly comic narrative.
Download or read book The Death Of Discourse written by Ronald K L Collins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative book, the authors persuasively argue that the First Amendment to the Constitution has risen in the late twentieth century, like an ill guided individual with knife in hand, to murder a longstanding tradition of fine and meaningful discourse in the United States. We are bombarded with the cacophony of advertisement, the luridity of pornography, and the pointlessness of prime timepoor substitutes for intelligent consideration of ideas. }In this innovative book, the authors persuasively argue that the First Amendment to the Constitution has risen in the late twentieth century, like an ill-guided individual with knife in hand, to murder a long-standing tradition of fine and meaningful discourse in the United States. What has died is the essential kind of political discourse which promotes democracy; informs citizens; enlivens debate; and carries reason, method, and purpose. Instead, we are bombarded with the cacophony of advertisement, the luridity of pornography, and the pointlessness of prime time.With satirical spirit and wityet to a very serious purpose the narrative of this lively study calls upon many of the very tricks it criticizes. The text is augmented by amusing tales, poetry, tv zaps, eyebites, and boxes of aphorisms resonating between high and low culture, between Plato and Geraldo and Madonna and Mahler to make its points, the discussion reveals how discourse in contemporary America has lost its integrity and its soul.
Download or read book The Trials of Lenny Bruce written by Michael K. Allen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Dissent written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America values dissent. It tolerates, encourages, and protects it. But what is this thing we value? That is a question never asked. "Dissent" is treated as a known fact. For all that has been said about dissent - in books, articles, judicial opinions, and popular culture - it is remarkable that no one has devoted much, if any, ink to explaining what dissent is. No one has attempted to sketch its philosophical, linguistic, legal, or cultural meanings or usages. There is a need to develop some clarity about this phenomenon we call dissent, for not every difference of opinion, symbolic gesture, public activity in opposition to government policy, incitement to direct action, revolutionary effort, or political assassination need be tagged dissent. In essence, we have no conceptual yardstick. It is just that measure of meaning that On Dissent offers.
Download or read book Stand up Comedy in Theory or Abjection in America written by John Limon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-23 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
Download or read book The Comedians written by Kliph Nesteroff and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Funny [and] fascinating . . . If you’re a comedy nerd you’ll love this book.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, National Post, and Splitsider Based on over two hundred original interviews and extensive archival research, this groundbreaking work is a narrative exploration of the way comedians have reflected, shaped, and changed American culture over the past one hundred years. Starting with the vaudeville circuit at the turn of the last century, the book introduces the first stand-up comedian—an emcee who abandoned physical shtick for straight jokes. After the repeal of Prohibition, Mafia-run supper clubs replaced speakeasies, and mobsters replaced vaudeville impresarios as the comedian’s primary employer. In the 1950s, the late-night talk show brought stand-up to a wide public, while Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters attacked conformity and staged a comedy rebellion in coffeehouses. From comedy’s part in the civil rights movement and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, to the first comedy clubs of the 1970s and the cocaine-fueled comedy boom of the 1980s, The Comedians culminates with a new era of media-driven celebrity in the twenty-first century. “Entertaining and carefully documented . . . jaw-dropping anecdotes . . . This book is a real treat.” —Merrill Markoe, TheWall Street Journal
Download or read book Triumph Forsaken written by Mark Moyar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-28 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of new evidence from all sides, Triumph Forsaken, first published in 2007, overturns most of the historical orthodoxy on the Vietnam War. Through the analysis of international perceptions and power, it shows that South Vietnam was a vital interest of the United States. The book provides many insights into the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and demonstrates that the coup negated the South Vietnamese government's tremendous, and hitherto unappreciated, military and political gains between 1954 and 1963. After Diem's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson had at his disposal several aggressive policy options that could have enabled South Vietnam to continue the war without a massive US troop infusion, but he ruled out these options because of faulty assumptions and inadequate intelligence, making such an infusion the only means of saving the country.
Download or read book Great American Trials written by Edward W. Knappman and published by Great American Trials. This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great American Trials covers 378 historically and legally significant or notorious courtroom battles.
Download or read book Lenny written by Julian Barry and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Comedy at the Edge written by Richard Zoglin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the stand-up comedy of the 1970s, citing the contributions of celebrity comics, from George Carlin and Richard Pryor to Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman, in an account that also evaluates the roles played by such clubs as Catch a Rising Star, the Improv, and the Comedy Store.
Download or read book Girls Lean Back Everywhere written by Edward De Grazia and published by New York : Random House. This book was released on 1992 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the battles fought and won during the twentieth century in behalf of free expression.
Download or read book Lenny Bruce written by Lenny Bruce and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This short section of Lenny Bruce's live work is based on his own tangles with the law over alleged 'obscenity'. Taken from a variety of different shows and edited together by John Cohen, it represents only a small part of Bruce's comedy. On it's own it may often seem obscure, sometimes indecipherable. But hopefully it serves as an introduction to the drama and poetry of Lenny Bruce's work. Some of it appears dated, though most is applicable in today's climate of moral hypocrisy and 'Victorian Values'"--Page [27].
Download or read book People of the State of Illinois Vs Lenny Bruce Record of Appeal written by Lenny Bruce and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3 documents pertaining to comedian Lenny Bruce's trials on obscenity charges in Illinois and New York in the 1960s.
