The Bob Dylan Lyric Saluting a Famous and Controversial Comedian

Rock and roll legend John Lennon. (Then)-imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter. Notorious gangster Joe Gallo. Those are just some of the real-life figures that Bob Dylan has immortalized in his career with song-length tributes.

Then there’s “Lenny Bruce,” a somewhat idiosyncratic tribute to the legendary, controversial comedian. The song says a little bit about Bruce, and it says a lot about the connections that Dylan makes in his head when writing such songs.

The Singer and the Comedian

Like Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce brought about a sea change in his chosen art form. Until Bruce hit the scene, stand-up mostly resorted to rapid fire setup-punchline jokes or broad shtick. Bruce started in that vein himself, but by the ‘50s, he’d developed a style that revolutionized stand-up routines, so much so that comedians today very much follow his lead.

Bruce’s routines were often improvisational and relied on observational humor that poked holes in the social constructs of the time. He also used foul language that occasionally touched on sexual topics. Breaking those taboos caused him all kinds of troubles with the law (as did his drug use), and his career was sputtering at the time of his overdose death in 1966 at just 40 years old.

Bob Dylan penned his ode to Lenny Bruce for his 1981 album Shot of Love. That record marked a transition for Dylan (in a career full of them), as he started to move away from the religious material that had filled his previous two albums and was once again writing about secular topics.

According to biographies, Dylan did indeed see Bruce perform back in 1963. Maybe that inspired him. Or maybe it was the fact that, as mentioned in the song, Dylan once shared a cab with Bruce. In any case, Dylan claimed in interviews the song took him all of five minutes to write, and that he hadn’t even been thinking about Bruce before he began it.

Revisiting the Lyrics to “Lenny Bruce”

It’s telling that Dylan’s tribute to Bruce was one that was tossed off quickly. After all, Bruce’s comedy often found him picking up on a thread of subject matter on the spot and following it down whatever avenue it led. Dylan sort of does the same here, keeping in somewhat odd lines he otherwise might have edited.

Dylan sets the tone for the wild path that Lenny Bruce takes in the first verse. After a pedestrian opening line (Lenny Bruce is dead, but his ghost lives on and on), he starts making strange associations as he muses on Bruce’s life: Never did get any Golden Globe award / Never made to Synanon. Drawing equivalencies from Hollywood’s glitziest trophies to a cult seems like a sly joke, one Bruce would have enjoyed.

Those surprises make the instances when Dylan goes for genuine praise somehow mean much more: But he sure was funny and he sure told the truth / And he knew what he was talkin’ about. Much of the song continues on that same path: Moments of absurdity, followed by moments where Dylan cuts right to the heart of Bruce’s genius, as well as the predicaments he underwent because of it.

Late in the song, Dylan talks about that cab ride, and does so with a killer analogy: I rode with him in a taxi once / Only for a mile and a half / Seemed like it took a couple of months. Toward song’s end, he pulls all of his previous points together in a stunning couplet: They stamped him and they labeled him, like they do with pants or shirts / He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts.

Those last lines certainly could have been Dylan writing about himself, in terms of how he had been baring his soul for decades by that point and despite all his success, still faced scrutiny with every word he uttered. On “Lenny Bruce,” Bob Dylan finds the parallels between himself and the iconic comedian, even if he does so in unorthodox fashion.

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