Lord Buckley



""People, yes people are the true flowers of life and it has been a pleasure to have strolled in your garden.""

- Lord Buckley, quoted by Robin Williams on Throbbing Python of Love

""Buckley was the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels.""

- Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Lord Richard Buckley (born Richard Myrle Buckley; April 5, 1906 – November 12, 1960) was an American poet/humorist/monologist whose work from the 1940s onward anticipated and embraced the Beatnik generation and its sensibilities. His unique style and stage persona has influenced several generations of performers, including such diverse figures as Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce, Wavy Gravy, Del Close, and, even after Buckley's death, Ken Kesey, George Harrison, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Robin Williams, and Jimmy Buffett. The New York Times once described him as "an unlikely persona ... part English royalty, part Dizzy Gillespie." The Baltimore Sun called him "a magnificent stand-up comedian" and said that "... Buckley's work, his very presence, projected the sense that life's most immortal truths lie in the inextricable weaving together of love and irony — affection for all humanity married to laughter."

His trademark was a persona that blended an exaggerated aristocratic image — tuxedo, waxed mustache, and pith helmet — with a kind of proto-rap rhythmic hipster slang, carefully enunciated and often rhyming. This characteristic speech pattern he called his "hipsemantic", and drew equally from black Americans in the Jazz community, Big Band/Swing performers like Frank Sinatra, the original Hipsters, and the British aristocracy to create something undeniably different and new.

Occasionally performing to music, he punctuated his monologues with scat singing and sound effects. His most significant tracks are retellings of historical or legendary events, like "My Own Railroad" and "The Nazz". The latter, first recorded in 1952, describes Jesus' working profession as "carpenter kitty." Other historical figures include Gandhi ("The Hip Gan") and the Marquis de Sade ("The Bad-Rapping of the Marquis de Sade, the King of Bad Cats"). He retold several classic documents such as the Gettysburg Address and a version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." In "Mark Antony's Funeral Oration", he recast Shakespeare's "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" as "Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies: knock me your lobes."

His career ended abruptly in October 1960 when his cabaret card was seized by New York City police just before he was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, supposedly because of an arrest for marijuana possession twenty years earlier. (A necessity in order to work legally in NYC entertainment venues in that era, cabaret cards were often seized for political reasons and/or to extort payoffs from performers.) Despite massive support from the entertainment and arts world, his attempts to have his card reinstated came to naught, and he died of a stroke in November of the same year.

The scandal of Buckley's death, attributed at least partly to his loss of the card, helped lead to the removal of NYC Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy in 1961 and the abolition of the cabaret card system by 1967, some 7 years later.

For more information, you may consider visiting the Lord Buckley website and "Wig Bubbles" at airbrushmuseum.com.


 * The Nazz at YouTube.
 * Lord Buckley and Groucho Marx, on You Bet Your Life in August 1958.

You can find Lord Buckley's personal dictionary, the HIPesaurus, here.

Lord Buckley recorded over 15 studio albums, including:
 * Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Knock Me Your Lobes, 1955
 * Euphoria, 1955
 * Euphoria Volume II, 1956
 * Way Out Humor, 1959
 * Buckley's Best, 1960
 * Parabolic Revelations Of The Late Lord Buckley, 1963
 * The Best of Lord Buckley, 1963
 * Lord Buckley In Concert, 1964
 * Blowing His Mind (and yours too), 1966
 * The Best of Lord Buckley, 1969
 * The Bad Rapping of the Marquis De Sade, 1969
 * a most immaculately hip aristocrat, 1970


 * Adventurer Outfit: Partly invoked by the inclusion of a pith helmet in his usual look.


 * Badass Mustache


 * Beatnik: Strictly speaking, he presaged and anticipated the beatnik moviement, but was not actually one of them.


 * Cool Helmet: Not many people can pull off a pith helmet, even in the 1950s.


 * The Fifties: It is hard to find a figure so of the Fifties who still defies everything the Fifties represented. It is both telling and somewhat sad that during the great Fifties Nostalgia Craze which swept the United States during the 1970s, Lord Buckley was completely ignored and forgotten.


 * Hipster: Of the original variety, not the 21st-century subculture that's been tagged with the term.


 * Jesus Was Way Cool: The whole point of "The Nazz".


 * Jive Turkey: Completely and totally averted. Lord Buckley was the original, whom all others copied — not always successfully.


 * Neologism: Some of Buckley's argot was born of this.


 * Nice Hat: See Cool Helmet, above.


 * The Nicknamer: As part of his "hipsemantics", Lord Buckley would lay a custom handle on a cat, like "The Nazz" for Jesus of Nazareth, or "The Hip Gan" for Gandhi.


 * Spoken Word: When his performances involved music at all, they often included proto-rap pieces that are best described with this trope.


 * What Did I Do Last Night?: "God's Own Drunk"


 * Yet Another Christmas Carol: In 1960, he retold the whole story in his particular argot. Listen to it here.