Lenny Bruce on Playboy's Penthouse, 1959

The late, great Lenny Bruce on the first episode of Playboy's Penthouse in 1959. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. A decade later, Bruce's mom Sally Marr, appeared on the second Hefner TV series, Playboy After Dark.

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Michael Leddy

That’s a strange Pee Wee Hermanesque moment after he pops his cork.
- Festus
  
  Now we know where Pee Wee got his schtick.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1551115436 Michael Johnson

I found it amazingly meta – the conversation at a show-party about the whole format. Lovely.
PaulDavisTheFirst

“i would never satirize the obvious” … genius!
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6SBYF3CS7ZNMSPGSG36QSMNVIA Maddy Mud

“You can’t tell with beards now-a-days” — preach it Hef …
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6SBYF3CS7ZNMSPGSG36QSMNVIA Maddy Mud

Because its such a strong part of our childhood, all jazz piano/combos of that era sound vaguely Peanuts. I like the combo of Peanuts music and Playboy …
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1656608537 Chris Adams

I think that’s Cy Coleman on piano. He wrote the “Playboy After Dark” theme, among other things. He wrote “Why Try to Change Me Now” for Sinatra as the crooner ended his run at Columbia Records, and was about to enter career plummeting free-fall at the end of the ’40s.
Casey Reeder

I’ve never understood, was this show controversial when it aired? I mean, I know he went for the classy vibe a lot, but Hefner was still famous for being the owner of what can’t be denied is basically a just a highbrow porn magazine. And this was the 1950′s. Was he able to integrate himself into the mainstream culture that quickly?
- princeminski
  
  Most BoingBoing readers are younger…young enough to think that all jazz piano sounds like “Peanuts”…and see PLAYBOY as the rather wretched HUSTLER competitor it became, If you were growing up in a hick Southern town in the Fifties, just KNOWING that there was somebody like Lenny Bruce was a big help. PLAYBOY, ESQUIRE or the VILLAGE VOICE were beacons of otherness in Homestead, Florida, and if some of the styles or values espoused look a little silly now, they told thousands of people that there was a world out there not revolving around the precepts of FATHER KNOWS BEST and the Bible. (Gahan Wilson’s oft-repeated story about how he decided he wanted to work for Hef after hearing him tell a prospective writer tyhat he couldn’t use an otherwise well-written piece because “it’s anti-sin, and, you see, we’re pro-sin” still delights me.) The continued interest in MAD MEN and Rat Pack-era stuff suggests that it may have lasting value as the ideocracy progresses.
- wizardru
  
  It’s a cliche, but there was a time when “I just read it for the articles” was a legitimate reference for Playboy. Even as recently as the early 80s, Playboy still had sophisticated articles and had more in common with GQ and Vanity Fair as it did pornography. Do a quick search for the kind of writers Playboy once employed and you’ll be surprised
  
  Here’s a few for you:
  http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-writers-published-in-playboy.php
- Brood-X
  
  Playboy was never a porn magazine. In its early years it only showed nipples and the mons veneris. Things changed in the eighties but i still wouldn’t call it porn i would call it erotic portraiture.
http://twitter.com/cocktail_shaker The Mixologist

Damn, I wish we could get quality entertainment like that today. So suave and debonaire, the only detraction would be the highballs instead of classic cocktails. Still, Heff in a tux, instead of the PJ’s everyone thinks he only wears, is grand.
Festus

Strongly recalls Barbara Ehrenreich’s powerful and enlightening discussion of the rise of Playboy in her wonderful The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) in which she compassionately describes how 1950s gender mores were a trap not just for women but also for men.
Festus

One more comment: As a male-type-person, it is hard not to notice the total absence of surgically inflated breasts in this clip. What a relief.
D3

Having read some stuff about Lenny Bruce, I was all primed to really “dig” him – and then I saw footage of the real Lenny, and unlike the manufactured idealization of him, he just wasn’t that funny or profound. He seems to have been more concerned with his image, with his mannered beat speech and finger snaps. I guess it was pretty effective for the squares.

In that same era, Harvey Kurtzman and the rest at Mad Magazine were the real hip ones, and far, far funnier. They were smart enough to mock the trendy, not embrace it.