I taught myself to type to Side 1 of this record. I borrowed one of Hilary's Teach Yourself guides in early 1986, and sat in my room at the back of the garage with a typewriter in front of me and this on the stereo. You see, my mum had typed my dissertation for my BA, but I knew I had to get into the swing of typing up my own work for my Masters. What I did was put the record on, type a phrase that I heard, and by the time that had completed the sketch would have moved on some distance, so when I typed the next phrase that I heard there would be a jump-cut built into the text. I told myself the result was similar in some ways to William Burroughs' cut-up technique. In fact, I think the results were not too bad: Lenny Bruce turned out to be good source material.
But the much more lasting result was the keyboard technique that serves me to this day — not technically correct, but a hell of a lot better than hunt-and-peck.
I'd guess I got this from the Spoken Word section of the Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street, where I was getting other similar material. It's similar in some ways to some of Burroughs' skits in caricaturing the abuses of power by professionals, government and clergy. But played for laughs. I'm not that big on comedy. I tend to agree with Brecht: "He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news."
I imagine this LP must be pretty rare now, though perhaps not as rare as the 8-Track Cartridge version (the reviewer there particularly enjoys Religions, Inc, though I couldn't follow it at all).
You can get all the tracks from this album on Lenny Bruce Originals 1
Comments