Lenny Bruce: "Two Five Letter Words:" an exhibit at the Museum of Movie and Television in Los Angeles Long before there was John Stewart and Comedy Central, long before David Letterman gritted his gap-toothed smile on CBS, Lenny Bruce held comedic sway as the nation's satirist of record. But unlike John Stewart, or even edgier comedians like Chris Rock and Margaret Cho, Lenny Bruce during his heyday was considered a transgressing presence upon the American comedic stage, rather than a popular mainstay of talk shows and popular entertainment. Today, comedians of strong words and even stronger personalities are common. But before Bruce, much of American comedy was decidedly non-abrasive. Even the Marx Brother's cutting humor was more intended in silliness, than to have an explicit cultural or social bite to it.

Bruce, as the Museum's exhibition presentation of "Two Five-Letter Words: Lenny Bruce" shows, was openly eviscerating, even when presented on mainstream television in a way that was shocking to 1950's audiences. But comedy is a living and contemporary art, very much of its moment in historical and performance time -- thus the main style of the exhibit is that of film, rather than of photographs, recordings, or text. This renders difficult, however, to fully appreciate Bruce's monologues in their full historical and social context, because Bruce's humor was so often topical, and dependent upon his reactions from his audience members and participants, as in a live performance, and so openly in reaction to the mores and political moods and headlines of his day.

The screening series featured all of Bruce's existing television appearances...

It runs at the Museum in Los Angeles, and concurrently at the Museum's sister branch in New York City, from November 5, 2004 to January 9, 2005. Bruce fans, because of the obscurity of some of the pieces, were no doubt entranced by the rarity of the footage, and parts of the work that had not been shown, according to the Museum's companion internet site, since they were first performed so many years ago. (Official Website, 2004)
But those gazers who were not well acquainted with Bruce's previous work might be a bit taken aback, not by the content of his sarcasm, but by the style of his humor, which makes use of a kind of improvisational, bebop hipster persona. This was popular when Bruce was at the height of his fame, perhaps, and connected him to the larger Beat Culture of alternative adolescent America, through the verbal rather than musical medium of comedy. But to a 20th century student of contemporary culture, what all of the fuss was about regarding Bruce's obscenity and why his humor seemed so astringent to modern America, remains obscure, when, according to the Internet World Wide Web Press release from the museum, he was "the era's hippest, most daring provocateur." It states that Lenny Bruce "knew full well the boundaries of the public arena, but broke them anyway. He skewered the moral and political hypocrisy of postwar America with a subversive quality that forever changed the tenets of comedy and free speech." (Official website, 2004)

The most shocking 'bit' is, according to the site, is Bruce's 1956 appearance on the "Tonight Show," then hosted by Steve Allen, where Bruce…