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Critic's Review
Lindsay Planer, All Music Guide
This multimedia package houses John Magnuson's raw but brilliant documentary of Lenny Bruce's penultimate public appearance in August of 1965 at the Basin Street West in San Francisco. Notably, the Bay Area was one of the only locales that would allow Bruce to perform, as his well-documented lawsuit for obscenity in New York City was concurrently pending. In addition to offering the roughly hourlong black-and-white feature, the video also contains Magnuson's full-color animated short film based on Bruce's "Thank You Masked Man" routine -- which became an instant cult classic upon its release in 1968. A key element in Bruce's popularity -- or perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof -- was that he was not a joke teller. In his own words, "I am not a comedian, I am...Lenny Bruce." He focuses on his upcoming trial, reading actual transcriptions, then contrasting it with the so-called "evidence" of what had actually transpired. In the course of doing so, Bruce recounts several of his legendary works -- such as "Father Flotsky's Triumph" and his discussion of Jackie Kennedy's reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy and his "Eleanor Roosevelt Had Nice Tits" shtick. His explanations are greatly illuminated with an introductory dialogue about "the eye of the beholder" and the fact that in court, many (if not most) of the seemingly offensive comments are taken out of context and delivered by a peace officer's interpretation of the words off a page to a jury. That is to say that Bruce was being tried on the "performance" of someone other than himself and said "performance" was completely out of context. The box set likewise includes a compact disc with the film's entire soundtrack as well as a 17-minute cut titled "Christian & Jews" -- compiled from a number of different live shows. As Performance Film (1992) is out of print, parties wishing to hear and see "Thank You Masked Man" are encouraged to locate the CD of the same name from Fantasy Records, which has been enhanced to include a CD-ROM video of Magnuson's cartoon.
