unnatural acts
by Douglas Messerli
Lenny Bruce (writer and voice), Jeff Hale
(animation and director) Thank You Mask Man / 1971
Describing the “plot” of a Lenny Bruce routine
is a little bit like lecturing on jazz or rapping about architecture. It can be
done: Nathaniel Mackey has written several fictions about jazz that fully
convey the syncopations and rhythms of the music, and I suppose a hip hop
artist might be able to take on the Empire State. But every time I’ve heard a
different recording of Bruce’s famed “Thank You Masked Man” routine it’s
somewhat different from the last, things left out, new elements represented,
the comic emphases located in different parts of the “story.” And all the oral
versions of the skit that I’ve heard, now some four or five various recordings,
are different, sometimes substantially, from the 1971 Jeff Hale animated short
film featuring yet another version of the work. In fact—and this is
important—the routine generally titled in the recordings as “Thank You Masked
Man” is called “Thank You Mask Man” in the cartoon film animation.
A
masked man is simply one of many of a kind, another male wearing a mask, while
a “mask man” is a very particular individual, a man who himself represents the
mask, a singular being who has come to be defined not only by his costume but
what that element of apparel represents. The Lone Ranger of the film is not
only wearing the mask but has become the mask, the “mask man.”
In
short, the horse rider who rushes in to help his fellow citizens in peril is,
in the animated version, not only alone, a man who ranges about the landscape
as a loner, but is someone basically unknown to the society which he repeatedly
helps and saves. He is an outsider, defined by his being apart from the people
he regularly rushes in to protect.
For
that protection it is quite understandable why societal figures, the town
leaders, their wives, their children, and even the local streetcleaners wish to
thank him. After all, he protects them and helps them to maintain the society
which they define. And surely we cannot wonder why they
might
wish to award him for his maintenance, his salvation of the normalcy for which
they stand. The sheriffs and mayors who are grateful for his help would love to
give him medals, it would give their wives great pleasure if he’d stay around
just long enough to eat a slice of their freshly baked cakes. Their kids would
enjoy personally thanking their parents’ hero. “Thank you mask man. Thank mask
man,” would appear to be a lovely thing to come out of the mouths of these
babes.
But no, the mask man runs in to save the day only to escape before
having any substantial contact with the citizens he protects. And frankly those
perfect respectable and bourgeois folk are getting a little bit irritated with
his highhandedness, with his clearly standoffish behavior.
One citizen suggests that the mask man is in analysis, having discovered
that he can’t accept love. A small town medical doctor even diagnoses part of
the problem can is evidenced in the fact that he uses only silver bullets
which, he argues, symbolizes Dr. Paul Erhlich’s struggle to discover the silver
bullet—arsphenamine (compound 606)—that will cure syphilis. “He sees all of us,
the entire society,” so speculates the good doctor, “as being infected with syphilis.”
Not at all an appropriate way for their hero to characterize those whose
difficulties he cures. Maybe he’s not such hero, after all, the town leaders
suspect.
Finally facing the gun—in Hale’s comic version both figuratively and
literally—held by the local sanitation worker, they demand to know why he
doesn’t hang around to accept their appreciation. The mask man attempts to
explain that if he stayed around to hear a young boy say “Thank you mask man.
Thank you mask man,” he might get used to it and even enjoy the praise heaped
upon him. He’d possibly like it so much that he’d stay at home with the other
society folks and wait for each day’s delivery of his fan mail. And then one
day, when he didn’t find a single fan letter in his mailbox, someone might tell
him that the Messiah had returned and made everything right again, and he’d
find himself without a job, without even his identity. He’d have to go out and
cause trouble, create a ruckus just so he might be required to come to the
rescue. He’d have turned a good thing inside out, the savior transforming
himself into the villain of the story. So that’s why, he concludes he can’t
stay around for the praise. “What I don’t have, I don’t miss.”
Still, just this one time, they insist, he take with him, just as a
gesture or for their kid’s sake, anything he wants. The mask man looks around
and dismisses the ash tray. He looks around again, ponders, and then, comes up
with a brilliant idea, “Give me that Indian over there!” Who? Tonto? Yes,
shouts the mask man, Tante. Give me Tante. It’s Tonto says the surprised street
cleaner, not Tante (which in Yiddish means “aunt.”*) And what do you want him
for?
The mask man: (straightening up the feather atop Tonto’s head) To
perform an unnatural act.
The street cleaner: What??
The mask man: To perform an unnatural act.
The cleaner: O, the mask man’s a fag. Awwww. [sticking out his tongue]
The fag man. A dirty fag. You damn queer you! The mask fag man, ain’t that a
kick in the ass? [to the mask man] I bet you got mascarry under that damn mask
ain’t you? A damn queer. I never knew you were a fag mask man.
The mask man: I’m not a fag. [pause] But I’ve heard a lot about it and
I’ve read exposés and I want to try to see how bad it is. Just once. I like
what they do with fags anyway (wrapping his arm around Tonto’s shoulder). The
punishment is quite correct. They throw them in jail with a lot of men, very
clever (he laughs with a slight giggle).
“Wash him up and get him ready,” he commands as he now strides forward
in a walk that might almost be described as hip-heavy strut. Spotting a pink
horse with a fluffy white mane and tail, the mask man pauses: “Hey, give me the
horse too.”
The cleaner: What do you want that horse for?
The mask man: Some act...
The street cleaner sticks out is tongue again in disgust and almost
immediately the whole town is howling out “Fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag as
the Lone Ranger, no longer alone rides off into the sunset shouting heigh-ho,
proving to the whole of society that he remains a true outsider worthy of his
name, a mask man willing to experiment, at least twice, in sex. And we must
remember Tonto remained loyal to him to the very end.
You have to imagine the story I’ve just shared with you, however, being
performed not by a pop intellect but a brilliant verbal storyteller who uses
the syncopations and rhythms of music along with the riffs of a hip-hop artist
to build up a satirical high rise whose structure, like the tower of Babel,
comes tumbling down with the awe of a chorus of laughter.
For those in the LGBTQ community who were offended by the use of the
word “fag,” I might suggest they go back and carefully study the structure of
Bruce’s linguistic construct. It is the society, as it has been through the
ages, who calls this wise loner by names, not the comedian who tells the tale.
And what a brilliant fable it is, demonstrating as it does, just how
hypocritical these desperate folk so desirous to embrace their savior into
their fold are. It is, as Jacques Derrida might have put it, la différence that
makes it possible for the mask man—maybe even with mascara applied to his
eyes—to save them. For it has always been the outsiders who have shown those
inside how to survive.
I’d like to have seen Bruce riff on Batman and his boy Robin as well.
epilogue
I
should just mention that in his skit “blah-blah-blah” Bruce also draws
attention to the LGBTQ community. Arrested in San Francisco for obscenity,
using a word that he describes as a common homosexual practice of ten letters,
the comedian forces his audience to deal with homosexuality much in the way
that Tim Miller does in some of his performances. Miller often opens his show
appearing naked and sitting on an unsuspecting audience member’s lap, forcing
them, in some cases for the first time in their lives, to actually make bodily
contact with a homosexual man.
Similarly, Bruce turns an adjective through the telling of the story of
his arrest and his appearance in court where the policeman, the judge, the
lawyer, and several others repeating it over and over—Bruce coding it as
“blah-blah-blah” in his recounting of these events precipitated by his calling
someone, apparently, a “fucking ass”—into a verb. An unlikable person suddenly
is transformed into a sexual act which requires Bruce’s audience, each time he
repeats the words “blah-blah-blah,” to imagine, for many
of them, the unimaginable. It’s sheer genius.
*In one version of the recordings (“Thank You
Masked Man” of 1972) The Lone Ranger is described as being Jewish, and speaks
in Yiddish, yet another version of the outsider.
Los Angeles, February 14, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (February 2021).
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