I was captured by the Lenny Bruce line "We're all gonna die" and its inverse.
I've been reading a few papers recently about the role of the comedian Lenny Bruce in Underworld (woohoo! finally feeling inspired), and switched gears for my paper.

According to Elizabeth Rosen's paper, "Lenny Bruce and His Nuclear Shadow Marvin Lundy: Don DeLillo's Apocalyptists Extraordinaires" (2006), DeLillo's descriptions of Bruce are spot-on stylistically but not historically. Rowan's thesis is that DeLillo has created a 'historically inaccurate' Bruce shouting the line "We're all gonna die!" in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis to support the apocalyptic tone as a prophet figure.

Delillo chooses meticulously research a character, emulate his style of comedy and speech, and even place him in clubs he played but deviate from the details. I think this prophet reading of Lenny Bruce is very substantiated, but I think that Bruce's scenes are important because they support DeLillo's point that "Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge" (542).

In real life, Bruce was renowned for his obscenity arrests, which were only part of his larger challenge to his audience to see the hypocrisies in our everyday life. In Bruce's act he talks about "Ordinary life trying to reassert itself" (593).

Furthermore, I think the line "We're all gonna die" directly plays into this theme. Death, or the fear of it, is pervasive thoughout the book. However, nobody dies spectacularly- it's commented on how undramatic the Texas Highway Killings are, or how Albert's mother slowly dying- even Lenny Bruce dies on the floor of a bathroom, alone- not from carnage or bombs or gore.
Nick resists this and imagines a special mobster death for his father.

Lenny is the anti-Nick- looking to pull from hiding the dialogs of our leaders, Jackie Kennedy's real motives after her husband's assassination, how a war affects your weekend... all the things we squirrel away and are afraid to discuss. The exact things represented by Nick's move to Phoenix, his job as an executive at a waste firm, neatly packaging and removing from our consciousness all these things/thoughts/history.

So while DeLillo takes artistic license with Bruce's character, I don't think it's as overstated as in the Rosen paper. The essence of Bruce's comedy still shines through loud and clear, from behind the icon from the past prophet role. In Underworld, Bruce's role is to be a counterpoint to Nick, this whole Underworld of things we're unwilling to discuss and hide from. He's still demanding we confront the banal, find humor in it, correct the injustices in our world, etc.