The newest and, in some ways, most scarifyingly funny proponent of significance, all social and some political, to be found in a night club these days is Lenny Bruce, a sort of abstract-expressionist stand-up comedian….

[Bruce is] imbued with a fidgety sense of moral indignation. The latter is so highly developed that he is sometimes said to make Mort Sahl, a contemporary critic and friend, appear merely querulous….

The reaction to Bruce is roughly comparable, although on a cerebral rather than a physical level, to that produced in chorus girls by Lou Holtz, who was once wont to prod them with a cane. Bruce's material, all of which he creates himself (some of it ad lib in a dank cranny of the subconscious) is delivered in nervous shards of hip talk accompanied by a series of impersonations made eerily abstruse by the fact. He sticks mainly to the...