Dick Cavett: He had such a great time being Bob Hope.  And when I would get him on a show of mine– I’d see him and come on with me and– of course with Johnny and Jack and everybody.  And– he always– swapped gags.  He had– got a bunch of gags– ready and he came on and ready to do.  And about current stuff. And I thought– as many people have wondered– was there anyone underneath the Hope façade– the great comic picture that he was covered with.  And– was there anything under the covers?  So I would– intentionally not steer him into something I’d knew he’d do a joke on. Sometimes it was fun, too.  As in, “Were you really a bad boxer back then?  And you knew you were gonna get– I was on the canvas so much they called me Rembrandt.  And I was the only fighter carried into the ring.”  He– he would come right up with them like– a machine or like a computer.  But– so I would ask him to talk about himself.  And I got one show– it’s also on the DVD.  It’s the one where I got so conversational with him without his doing gags, that at one point he stated some fact about himself.  Oh, he talked to him when he was a kid– but he got a scar– the scar– “Little scar you can see– ’cause I got that from protecting my dog. And it was some– guys were throwing rocks at my dog and I went up– “  And he didn’t have a punch line for it.  But he was charming as hell just talking.  At one point he said something– he said, “Hey, would you rather have a gag on that one?” And I said, “No.  That’s just fine.  That’s fine.”  Amazing man.

George Carlin: Well, I had always—I was a disc jockey.  I was in Shreveport Louisana, I had—I was out of the Air Force living with a roommate in an apartment building.  He worked at one radio station, I worked at another.  And he came home one night and said, “Man, I heard about this guy Lenny Bruce, you know.”  And I was a big fan of comedy and I knew that was my next step, “I’ll get out of radio, I’ll be a comic.”  And I liked—let’s see, that would have been nineteen fift—hold on for me a second here.  That would have been 1958 or nine.  So some of that ferment was, was begun, had begun and I was—I guess I knew some, about some of it.  But he said “Lenny Bruce,” and I didn’t know anything about Lenny Bruce.  And he got the album, “Interviews of Our Time,” on Fantasy Records, it was a combination—Henry Jacobs did the album and Lenny was on it, in a few performance pieces.  And then there were these other things like an interview with Sheldom Stein, which is a mock-academic who talks about the connection between the wandering Jew and Bahama Mama, which is the mother myth of the Bahamian ind—you know, just wonderful stuff.  But the whole album wasn’t a Lenny Bruce album, but it kinda was.

And I heard things he did.  And then came the “Sick” album.  “The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce,” I think that was second.  And we got that.  And what it did for me was this; it let me know that [pause] there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in a self-expression.

Richard Belzer: As time went on, he became more and more surreal and daring and esoteric and strange and provocative and not always funny, but certainly compelling. Like a for example, one night he came up on stage and (INAUDIBLE) a sleeping bag and went to sleep and you know, and you know and stayed there. Another time he had this boil on his neck and he invited people up from the audience to touch the boil. Another time he came up, he used to do this, he would read from Great Gatsby and you know and start reading it from Great Gatsby and you know the audience would laugh and but he !@%$ going and going…people started leaving, he just kept reading it. And it was like holy !@#$, this guy is amazing. And the thing about Mighty Mouse and all that, thats what he did in his basement literally for his friends and himself. He just brought that onto the stage and there was this kind of devilish innocence that he had. I mean he knew full well…(SNEEZE) He knew full well what he was doing. He wanted to get the audience challenged.