The tragedy of Lenny Bruce, who is the subject and would-be hero of a new floor-show spectacular at the Brooks Atkinson, was the he became the very same obsessed creature he ought to have been satirizing.  Comedy is made of obsession, of compulsion.  The great fool we laugh at - in literature or in vaudeville - are victims of urges they can do nothing to abate.

Harpagon is a compulsive miser, Goldini's Lelio is a compulsive liar.  Tartuffe and Horner are compulsive lechers, willing to go to any lengths to disguise their libidinous energies the better to give them a workout.  These are all monomaniacal clowns.  Their heads are programmed like one-way streets.  They can think of only one thing at a time, all the time.  One or another gross disproportion has galloped away with the lot of them.

But they are the characters of comedy, not the makers of it.  The maker - whether he is a playwright or a saloon entertainer or a parlor raconteur - is another kind of fellow altogether.  he is the sane man, the norm, the champion of common sense, the fellow who sees the clown's disproportion as a disproportion and puts it into a proper, and hence hilarious, perspective for us.  Making his own sanity the measure of the insanity all about him, he serves as cool distancer, standing securely on the bank of the abyss and pointing his finger at the clown who teeters over, and finally into, it.

Lenny Bruce, somewhere along the way, lost his cool, lost his place on the brink, toppled right over into the quicksand in which the characters of comedy forever mire themselves.  He became as compulsive, as single-minded, as insistent, finally as boring as a Tartuffe or a Horner would be if we had to cope with him in real life without an intermediary to make him funny for us.

It is conceivable that at one time Lenny Bruce was funny.  I never heard him on a nightclub floor and so cannot offer any opinion out of early or personal experience.  When I did hear tapes and recordings of performances, and when I looked over transcripts of the appearances for which he was brought to trial in New York, I did not find the material or the manner genuinely amusing.  (Neither did I think it obscene; it simply seemed to me out of control.)  The man had already become the victim of a passion rather than the parodist of fashion.

Yet there are fleeting indications here and there in the long compilation that Julian Barry has put together and called a "play" of the kind of quick-witted double vision that makes comedy possible (you see the absurdity and you put it in a commonplace light).

There's a throwaway line that Cliff Gorman, a fine actor doing his best to approximate a run-on saloon gabble, tosses into the hopper of four-to-twelve-letter words that plainly has the makings.  Speaking idly and rapidly to his new bride of the home they'll have together, he says "I'll get a coffee table and make a door out of it."

That's funny. The man has nailed one decorative fetish of a pseudo-chic segment of society as surely as he has indicated that he himself is outside that society (and forever will be, God willing).  It's a joke not only because he's turned the practice inside out, but because he is out of it.  They - the fools - do this sort of thing.  Lenny remains iconoclast.

There is another whiff, drifting off into agreeable fantasy now, as he prattles on about telephone operators, particularly Tijuana telephone operators - who, it turns out, are the most helpful in the world.  Just tell them you haven't got the four bucks to make this particular long-distance call and they'll cheerfully settle for whatever you've got in your pockets.  "They'll take anything - even Chicklets."  This is east exaggeration based on a small trait the comedian has observed.  But he remains the observer, happily detailing an absurdity.  He hasn't yet been trapped in other people's excesses.

Then the wind begins to change.  Why, he asks, do comics make so many fag jokes and none about dikes?  Because dikes are liable to beat the hell out of you.  "The only true anonymous giver is the guy that knocks up your daughter."  At the nightclub tables around him are "two kikes, three niggers, one spik."  The Leopold and Loeb case?  "Bobby Frank was probably a snotty kid anyway."  He'd rather have his own kid see a stag movie than "King of Kings" because he doesn't want him coming home to kill Christ and that's what's in that movie.

From being the genially sane observer, Mr. Bruce is passing over into the insane, or at least rabid, partisan.  He is becoming part of his material rather than its detached analyst.  He is preoccupied now with a cause, as Harpagon or as Tartuffe is, immersed in his needs and determined that we shall all serve them; he is committed to an angry apostolate.  His task: to say the unsayable.  To say all the words we have normally suppressed and to say them and say them and say them. To say all the thoughts that anyone may have had at any time, founded or unfounded, whatever they may be: to say that when Jackie Kennedy scrambled over the back of that car in Dallas she wasn't trying to summon help, she was trying to get the hell out of there.  To say everything directly, uninverted, uncurved, uncovered.

When Dorothy Parker remarked that if all the girls at a college prom weekend were laid end to end she wouldn't be surprised she was doing two things: She was making a pun, and she was making a show of making it politely.  (The pun is a double meaning, two-track device; the politeness creates distance, establishes proportion; those are the things that make the line funny.)

As we meet him in "Lenny", Mr. Bruce is no longer interested in giving such a though form.  He wants to describe each copulation plainly, in graffiti garishness, one after the other, same terms each time.  He wants to rub our noses in the names for things - only certain names, only the ones he thinks we will most resist hearing - because he has the impulses of a prophet, a desperate need to hurl anathemas.  ("All of my humor is based on destruction and despair," he is quoted as saying.)

Where the compulsion came from, and why it took over so totally, is impossible to say (he doesn't seem, on the evidence offered at the Brooks Atkinson, to have been sexually frustrated).  There may be a glimpse of it in his background.  He makes almost-jokes about his mother and aunts constantly coming home, when he was a child, to report men rushing out from behind bushes to expose themselves.  The reports were too constant to be true.  But he is already less than amused by the memory, less than amused by the sexual fantasies of elderly women.  He cannot put them by, or put them down, as a stock human foible.  He is more nearly enraged by them, as he is enraged by our unwillingness to use the right word for fellatio.

It is easy to see, though, what the compulsion did to his comedy: it killed it.  "Lenny" is not only a play about the disintegration and death of Lenny Bruce, it is a play about the disintegration and death of comedy.  Comedy done in by becoming as incoherent as the crazy creatures it first set out to lampoon.

Unfortunately, no one connected with the production has realized this.  (It is a valid subject, and might have made an honest play.)  From beginning to bitter end, playwright Barry and director Tom O'Horgan have elected to celebrate Lenny Bruce, to offer him as culture-hero, to deify him as a humorist wrecked by other people, by social pressures.

There is no acknowledgment along the way that humor has suffered.  Bruce is compared to Aristophanes and Swift, his enemies are symbolized by a massively booted Hitler on stilts.  Where laughs are probably not going to be forthcoming, dodges are used.  A policeman asked to read a transcript of a performance in court begins by saying "I'm not going to get any laughs with this, I know that," sheepishly acknowledging his incompetence as a performer; the implication is that Bruce did get laughs with it, though it is hard now to see where.  The last line of the evening is spoken by the performers long abandoned wife: "He was a damned funny guy."  But, at the last, that was the last thing he was.

The stance of comedy had long since vanished and only its content - obsessiveness - remained.  The comedian had dissolved into his joke.  To continue to justify him as a comedian, as the production unflaggingly does, is a great deal like trying to persuade us that Harpagon was really a very generous man, that Tartuffe was pious, that Lelio was telling the truth by his own lights.

Mr. Gorman, in the demanding and perhaps exhausting title role, isn't truly a shtick man; he is no master of swiftly slipped in Yiddish or Irish.  But he is surely an actor of range and intelligence;  he is himself likable; and, in one of the rare moments when we are able to see Bruce at a loss, he is moving.  Fumbling with his prepared defense brief, then losing himself in a terrible tangle of recording tape as he kneels in bewilderment on the floor, he suggest the play that might have been.

Mr. O'Horgan's work is visually more disciplined than usual: stage compositions are sharp, movement is generally well focused.  But intellectually the director is still pandering, pouring gratuitous and question-begging devices over the stage with a lavish, leering hand.

Ceiling-high puppets of Orphan Annie, the Lone Ranger, Dracula and Jacqueline Kennedy dangle in space to no great purpose; the granite heads of four recent Presidents loom in Mount Rushmore solidity to less.  When Lenny Bruce is discovered nude and dead in his bathroom, the bathroom moves forward out of Richard Nixon's mouth.  The image trades on a disaffection, but it is quite irrelevant.  When Mr. O'Horgan offers us a nude Jesus and a nude Moses at the end of Act One, as though the world hadn't moved an inch since "Hair" first proclaimed itself, the effect is rather wistful, naive now.

There is decoration everywhere.  But neither Hitler nor Nixon killed this particular man; Jacqueline Kennedy may be absolved as well.  His inability to hold himself at or near the common-sense center of things - the comedian center - killed him.  He forgot, even when he was telling the truth, how to make us laugh at the wild thing he was saying.
 

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