In an age of fifteen-minute celebrities and empty entertainments, Lee Camp brings art back to the stand-up stage. His full length CD, Chaos for the Weary, rife with startling juxtapositions and keen cultural insight shines a light on social injustice, economic disparity and rampant consumerism, as Camp keeps the laughs coming with machine gun delivery and sports-tuned timing.
This is stand up the way I loved it when I was a kid. This is the art form that gave us Lenny Bruce and George Carlin (whose daughter Kelly introduces Camp on the CD), Lord Buckley and Bill Hicks. Only Camp is the new generation, building on what came before and filtering it through the hyperactive mind of a child of the MTV generation. Each new thought leads him to an attention-deficient verbal montage of images and ideas that would seem to be pure stream-of-consciousness were it not so elegantly constructed.
On this CD, Camp delivers a series of roller coaster sentences, or perhaps a single, breathless prose poem of human outrage, whose stanzas are punctuated by slightly demented one-liners that serve as Sergio Aragones margin sketches to an oversized mad magazine of high-caliber comedic ammunition. He may seem to be shooting from the hip, but this young man takes careful aim and his sights are set on all the right targets.
The performer uses a great deal of casual vulgarity that may be off-putting to the tight-assed, but one has the sense that it all comes organically from his natural conversational style. In his exploration of American history and the way it is taught, Camp talks about how the truth is more interesting than fabrication and he proves it on this CD. It's not just more interesting. It is, as Ms. Carlin says in his introduction, really fucking funny.
Lee Camp performs all over the country, on late night talk shows, and can be seen in video blogs right here on Huffington Post.