Comedy: Lenny Bruce Lives

To me, Lenny Bruce is more of a divine concept of what people are not, rather than an actual person who lived and breathed. In 2006, a squirrelly and litigious manager of a Nashville nightclub famously sued David Cross for being mocked in one of Cross’ videos. Alongside this man’s legal salvo was an online PR campaign of sorts to woo the pity—or perhaps just the attention—of Cross and a dismissive public. He wanted David Cross to know that he was not only butt-hurt in a way that only thousands of dollars of judiciously awarded compensation could remedy but, oh yeah, David, “You’re no Lenny Bruce!”

Michael Richards is another comic recently accused of not being Lenny Bruce. Richards didn’t have the grace, if one could call it that, to uh, challenge America’s views on the dreaded n-word without coming off like a racist schlub. Fifty years ago, Lenny regularly needled society with every gasp-inducing word in the English language. He was arrested multiple times for basically what amounted to cussing in public, a crime that’s beyond the comprehension of anyone born after the Vietnam conflict. Call me aloof and unwitting, but I’m usually jolted by history when I discover that dead people thought about the exact same issues I’m forced to think about. These dead people didn’t have microwaves or Hot Pockets, yet they regularly confronted modern matters like racism, drugs and censorship in ways that are still culturally relevant today.

For the people who rush to inform stand-ups that they’re not Lenny, and for the people like me who can never know the things they can’t touch, Steve Cuiffo, an actor emerging out of the elite theatrical nebula of the Wooster Group, satisfies both major quandaries of the predicament of the social satirist’s legacy. Don’t call him an impressionist though. In Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce, the essence of Lenny Bruce has been translated like a geometry shape into Steve Cuiffo. I feel he’s more Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon than Jim Belushi in that Blues Brothers band, if that means anything.

A few years ago, Steve received Lenny Bruce’s boxed set, Let the Buyer Beware, as a gift. Inspired by the material, Cuiffo created a minor part to a play he staged in 2006 called Major Bang or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dirty Bomb, a work about terrorist paranoia. During the show, he performed a two-minute bit as Lenny Bruce talking about the war and terrorism.

“Because of that performance, I was put in contact with the estate of Lenny Bruce, and they were really interested in what I was doing and wanted me to pursue doing other things with it,” explains Cuiffo. They gave him a blessing and unprecedented access to the man’s notes and life.

“So I started to learn Lenny’s material and perform it as is, without any kind of theatrical frameworks,” says Cuiffo. “I spent a lot of time getting his rhythm, his timing, his tone of voice. The idea was to get it as close as possible as what it would be like to see him in a live nightclub.” Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce is part of an ongoing monthly political series at Joe’s Pub examining artists who take the First Amendment super seriously.

Again, Cuiffo doesn’t want to be known as an impersonator, but he has memorized much of the comic’s work. “This is definitely more of a character piece. I have about five hours of his material that I know verbatim,” he continues. “This show coming up at Joe’s Pub is kind of like my top picks, things that are very exciting for me. The material that I’ve chosen for this show is some of his later material from 1964 to 1966. It’s more political.”

Steve understands how audiences often have little more than a vague catch-all concept of Bruce’s life. “It’s a common thing people tend to put on Lenny Bruce, like, ‘If it wasn’t for Lenny Bruce, George Carlin or Richard Pryor, we wouldn’t be able to do the kind of material they did. He opened the doors for them.’ That’s kind of the standard line about Lenny Bruce. Most comics I talk to don’t really know anything about Lenny Bruce at all except for Dustin Hoffman in the movie.”

Wait, there’s a movie?

“I think his real strength is his very heavy-handed social satire. Towards the end of his life, he wasn’t funny in the traditional ‘get a laugh every 10 to 15 seconds’ sense. To him, the nightclub stage was the end-all be-all of performance and satire. He could totally express himself fully.”

If you visit Cuiffo’s website, [www.cuiffo.com](http://www.cuiffo.com), you’re offered only two bits of information: his headshot and the pronunciation of his last name (Chiff-o). What Steve lacks in Web presence, he makes up with awesome credits he’s modestly not mentioning there.

For example, Cuiffo happens to be a magician who has worked with David Blaine. He’s also on the board of directors for a nonprofit that promotes the art of magic, The Conjuring Arts Research Center. For fun, Cuiffo goes to VA hospitals to teach magic to the terminally ill.

Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce is June 3 at Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette (betw. E. 4th & Astor Place); 9:30, $15.