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Bruce! My Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Essays
Bruce Vilanch
Tarcher/Putnam Press
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Even if you don't know who Bruce Vilanch is, you've heard his jokes. He's the man who made Bette Midler funny, who made Billy Crystal beloved as Academy Award MC, and who cracks wise with the best on "Hollywood Squares," where he's rumored to write all of the jokes.

Bruce! My Adventures in the Skin Trade and other Essays (Tarcher/Putnam, cloth, 139 pages, $18.95) is a collection of 26 essays-- most of which have appeared in slightly different form in Vilanch's Advocate column-- he skewers such appropriate topics as the Academy Awards, Donnie and Marie Osmond, and the Super Bowl. And why not?

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This is American and this is what passes for American culture. Vilanch is great with targets like these. As a writer for an Osmond special, he considered it a "personal triumph" when he had Marie sing "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me." Although it seems, in retrospect, that any triumph over Marie Osmond is, well, awfully easy for a queer comic.

Vilanch becomes more interesting when he aims at more serious notes, as when he meditates on why Lana Turner died the day of Hugh Grant's arrest for picking up a Hollywood Boulevard ho. Lana, you see, was simply humiliated by the drastic decline in the sheer dignity of Hollywood scandal. His remembrance of the life and career of Elizabeth Montgomery's-- she was Samantha on "Bewitched"-- is moving. This serious Bruce is not in particular conflict with laugh-out-loud funny Bruce, and often the combination feels illuminating. Sometimes when he tries to combine the two styles-- as in a walking-around-San Francisco's-Castro interview with Robin Williams-- he is less successful,

neither the wit nor the empathy rises high. But who else would end up using Titanic as an example of lack of

serious gay representation in Hollywood movies?

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While in the end, the collection feels slight-- these were, after all, columns for the Advocate-- the essays can elicit enough outright laughs and yelps that you can't but wish that Vilanche would try something larger in scope and depth that would support both his boundless wit and imagination.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com