From Lenny Bruce to Innuendo

From Lenny Bruce to Innuendo ©

By

Michael Casey

I was thinking about words and their power the other night as I drifted off to sleep, Lenny Bruce’s name drifted through my mind. I was thinking about how we use words  and perhaps I was thinking about my next blog. How nowadays nobody has a vocabulary, just F(*&^ or &*^%, that’s what you get if you remonstrate with anybody under 30. I won’t bore anybody with my take on the past week’s mayhem.

I have a friend called Jim, we worked together at a 4star deluxe business hotel, Jim had worked very hard all his life,  he had a tongue on him and he knew how to use it.

The thing though was that he could say anything and could get away with it, why, because he had charm, an old rogue’s charm, so instead of getting the sack guests would say, a la Dick Emery, “you are awful”. So if you like his use of words was acceptable.

If you rarely curse then it has more power when you do. But 15 year olds can and do curse ad infinitum, so although we can say its bad in fact its more boring than bad.  In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Belgium is the worst word you can use. Perhaps we need to invent a few more words, Politician, NofW, Wall Street, Stock Market are just a few that spring to mind. If somebody has “stock marketed” you, its akin to some kind of rape, that has left you battered and bruised, spiritually, mentally, financially.

No doubt I’ll be criticised for my last sentence, which proves that people don’t bother to read things in context.

Over here in England we have Innuendo, we have camp and other styles of comedy. In USA Irony is not understood, and you even get attempts at using irony, and you get the joke backward telegraphed and the star saying “I was being Ironic”, when really they were getting it wrong. Innuendo is a good form of language. You can say so much while saying so little. I like the comedians who used it so well in the past, I like words used as weapons of laughter, think back to the Goons and Around the Horne. Kenneth Williams and Duncan and Sandy invented Camp humour BEFORE it was invented, I hope USA readers will Google all this they could make a comic discovery for themselves. 1950s, 1960s  were light years ahead of the game. You don’t need an overpaid fast talking guy looking at his own reflection, just go back to the old days, and they really were the good old days for comedy. I have been told myself that some of  my stuff leads people up the garden path, which is all you need to do.

Lenny Bruce said, “ have you ever Blaaaed a Bla, or have you ever Dooed a Do” I think that’s a line from the film. It makes me remember too just how good Dustin Hoffman was/is 2 Oscars and  loads of other stuff. The point is though that you don’y have to curse all the time, I think its just boring and lazy. I did a post called Metaphor This a few weeks ago, that proves that language is a balloon that can be twisted this way and that way to form a giraffe.

A sex scene when written down does not need to be graphic, a metaphor can be far funnier. He touched the scales of justice, he adjusted the weights, he was pleased with the result, law was duly served, he pleaded his innocence, but he felt the full force of justice, and he was fully processed, then he was taken down to the cells, he was relieved. That’s how I showed Romance between a lawyer and a milkman/baker in my novel The Butcher The Baker and The Undertaker. I’m no Jilly Cooper you can go to Amazon Kindle and Judge Me for yourselves.

Yes I do curse on occasion and when I write my actors may curse too, but words are like a cloak, they are clothes for my actors, and words show more Fashion and Class than some moron who can only “Daa a daa,” and doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.