“As a sexual persona, Bernhard is unique in the contemporary arts. She is completely American. No other country can produce this kind of brashly individualistic woman, harsh, aggressive, raunchy and physical, with an imagination drenched in thirty flamboyant years of popular culture … Sandra Bernhard has Lenny Bruce’s brooding menace and quick, razor-sharp mind. She re-creates the brainy neuroticism and earthy sensuality of Beatnik women, with their gloomy hipster realism. By her gutsy insistence on singing – in an ever-improving but often thin or fractured voice – Bernhard has rejoined stand-up to its origins in vaudeville, where music and comedy were brassily interwoven … she has the sophisticated worldliness of gay men and the gorgeous theatricality of drag queens … Bernhard embraces the great female personae excluded by the prudish Steinem politburo: bitch, stripper, whore, lady, fashion model …”
/ Camille Paglia’s musings from her think piece “The Female Lenny Bruce: Sandra Bernhard” in the San Francisco Examiner, 6 December 1992 /
Happy birthday to perennially fierce and in-your-face comedienne, singer, actress, authoress, conceptualist, performance artist and Playboy playmate - the divine Sandra Bernhard (born 6 June 1955)! How fitting she was born during pride month! Like so many Gen X-ers, Bernhard first came to my attention as a teenager when she was a regular anarchic (or as The Village Voice put it, “rivetingly obnoxious”) presence on Late Night with David Letterman. And seeing her 1990 film Without You I’m Nothing in a nearly empty cinema (was it The ByTowne? The Mayfair?) as a university student in Ottawa, Ontario blew my freaking mind. Pictured: portrait by Timothy White (circa late 1980s, I estimate?).
