This is an expanded article that was first posted at SOLOPASSION.
** ** **
(“Please don’t lock up these words”)
He was a man with a disquieting sense of humor every step of the way.*(1.1) He entertained America with a disturbing frankness. His words crossed the law and those in it. He became intolerable to people in power.*(1.2) Words were his catalyst to fame…and failure.*(1.3) He tore into the planks of conventional morality like a buzz-saw.*(1.4) His life became a hamstring of censorship, arrests, trials, persecutions, convictions and appeals.*(1.5) When it was over, not even the First Amendment saved him. He died convicted—a comedian condemned for his words.
His name was Lenny Bruce.*(1.6)
He was a legendary comic, social satirist, free-speech crusader and martyr to the uptight social and moral repressions of the Age of Conformity.**(2.1)
Lenny Bruce was not a philosopher who plunged the deepest issues of ethics and epistemology. However, he was a deep man in his own way. Sometimes his comedy contained a very simple moral message: “You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person---you can only do one thing to make it dirty: kill it.” Lenny Bruce, the moralist, criticized the society that would eschew the women who had “a belly full of baby”---merely because some witch doctor didn’t sprinkle water on her or simply because she didn’t have a “hoop on her finger.” It takes a certain mindset that believes that this woman should be stoned to death.
Lenny Bruce was persecuted by that very same society---because he had the balls to tell them so that they were wrong. (“You need that mad man to stand up and tell you when you’re blowing it, man!”)
It was Lenny Bruce who was killed—driven to an early grave by relentless persecution. The charge: Word crimes. The very idea seems foreign to us.***(3.1) It strikes us a ridiculous farce. He lampooned popes, preachers, politicians, and judges. He wanted to expose “the lie” in life – all of those respectable cover-ups used to hide the dirty truth. His words – comical, critical, and profane – put America’s First-Amendment principle to the test: can offensive speech really be free?***(3.2)
Philosophically, he aspired for the best in humankind (maybe), while prepared to accept the worst (definitely). In fact, he was honest with himself and others: “I am heinously guilty of the paradoxes I assail in our society.”
Bruce could have been left alone had he not said certain things in certain ways, but his personality and his sense of mission made that impossible.****(4.1) Utilizing obscenity as a miner uses dynamite to blow up the deeply impacted prejudices and repressions of middle-class society, Lenny eventually goaded the fury of the Catholic Church, the police and a lot of people who knew nothing at all about him except that he had a dirty mouth. Arrested as many as seven times in a single city, he eventually abandoned his stage career to become a free-speech crusader, employing a score of famous attorneys in a history-making series of trials that ended finally with the defendant exonerated but the man utterly destroyed.**(2.2)
Lenny Bruce was a crusading comic who tore into ridiculous social taboos. He was also a comic innovator. He smashed archaic mother-in-law jokes with his own version: “My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. My wife came home and found us in bed together.” When a patron confronted Bruce telling him that he regarded that sick, Bruce retorted: I said my wife’s mother—not mine!”
It was a radical head-on clash of old and new comedy, of Yiddish and bebop, of burlesque and bohemia. Bruce arrived as a one-man backlash against the tired mainstream 1950s entertainers—-the Lone individualist confronting tradition. His whole act was an impressionistic view of a seamy 1950s America, such as the funny bit on the teenage glue-sniffling fad.
Nobody but Bruce could recycle old premises and crush them into comedic gold, like his used car salesman trying to sell a car that has been damaged in a suicide pack (“There’s a little lipstick on the exhaust pipe. Jes’ wipe if off there”). His comedy moved on from zany fun-house antics to angry rallying against hypocrisy and organized religion. And sometimes he blended the two--serious commentary with fanciful comedy. He had a particular genius for that.
Lenny Bruce is the old story of the individual versus the state. He fought for the right for free speech. He was called “blasphemous,” “obscene” and “sick.” He was also called “the Earl of Angst” and “the Duke of Dissent.” He was a radical, a free-wheeling Jew who employed the argot of the hipster. He punctuated his act with jive-speak (“like wow,” “man,” “dig this,” “cat”) and Yiddish (“schumuck,” “putz,” “shtup”). He was cool incarnate.
Bruce mocked the whole sentimental show-business monolith. He loathed showbiz’s desperate whoring after status, its preposterous smugness, its crybaby sentimentality, and its secret contempt for the public it fawns upon. “Oh, the healthy comedians would never offend…unless you happen to be fat, bald, skinny, deaf, dumb, or blind.” He had broken free the of the traditional comedy cadre. “I don’t have an act,” he exclaimed,” I just talk. I’m just Lenny Bruce.”
In this sense, he was a first-hander. He invented "comic realism."
One of Bruce’s most famous monologues was “Religions, Inc.” where he laid to waste organized religion. The commands of God and man could not countenance such a comic. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was cast into a dungeon when he mocked the popular gods as fanciful playthings. It was history being repeated in the story of Lenny Bruce.
Bruce also dealt with race issues: Dick Gregory, a black comedian of the times, saw Bruce’s show once. On stage, Bruce peered into the audience: “Are there any niggers here tonight?” he asked, with matter-of-fact candor. Bruce then rattled off a string of ethnic insults, trying to defuse brutal hate words like nigger, kike, wop, gook, sheenie and jigaboo. He thus stunned listeners into thinking about unthinkable things. Gregory later said, after the show: “If they don’t kill him or throw him in jail he’s liable to shake up this whole fuckin’ country.”
As it played out, those events transpired. “You say those words enough times,” Bruce exclaimed, “and you break the violence down in them. That way you won’t have some eight-year-old coming crying because someone in the school yard called him a nigger. The point? That the word’s suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.”
Bruce also tackled the issue of anti-Semitism with a direct left hook: “I am of Semitic background…I assume I’m Jewish. Now, a Jew, dictionary style, is one who descended from the ancient tribes of Judea or one who is regarded to have descended from that tribe. But you and I know what a Jew is: "ONE WHO KILLED OUR LORD!”
The time came to shut this guy up.
The authorities swooped in to shut the mouth of the dirty comic. The First Amendment was under attack. Bruce fought like a Christian tossed to the lions. "I have a right to say the things I'm saying, I'm not hurting anybody. They're just words."
But the issue here is not if one agrees with the words of Lenny Bruce—but to fight to the death his right to say them. The First Amendment is here to protect even the most so-called “offensive” words—-for if we all agreed and loved everything uttered and heard, there would be no need for the First Amendment! Without freedom of speech, we might as well fold tent and forget about this culture. Are we to ignore the Lenny Bruce story and toss him off as a mere "dirty comic" from the by-gone age of 1950s America?
In the end, it was Lenny Bruce who was judging us: “I’m not a comedian. And I’m not sick,” Bruce cried out during one of his many trials. “The world is sick and I’m the doctor. I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.”
Lenny Bruce on the question of politics: “With the choice between communism and capitalism, I’m for freedom, man. Under capitalism, if I don’t dig company A, I can say ‘screw you’ and walk across the street to company B. Communism is like the phone company, man. I can’t say ‘screw you phone company, I’m gonna'---yeah, going to what, putz? Forget it, man. You’ll end up with two empty tin-cans tied to a string.” (‘Hello? Hello? Hello?’)
We must pay the toll to travel the roads of freedom. And Lenny Bruce did. He was his own Socratic maxim was that the unobjectionable life is not worth living. Lenny Bruce fought to liberate words. Don't hold back, don't sugarcoat, and don't be hypocritical. Speak of life--as it is. That was the reason and risk of his humor.
As one Lenny Bruce trial juror said: “The authors of First Amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which they believed essential if a vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful ignorance.”
He spoke about things that upset all philosophical perspectives, and came to conclusions that would leave one feeling cold. When Bruce was ribald, raunchy, irreverent, and tasteless, he was American standing on his rights.*****(1.7) “Show me the average sex maniac,” he challenged his audience once, “the one that takes your eight-year-old, schtups her in the parking lot, and then kills her--and I’ll show you a guy who’s had a good religious upbringing.”
He was a troubled and dire man, a drug-addled comedian. Part of Bruce’s posthumous fame is that he died young and tragically—-found dead and naked on his bathroom floor from a drug overdose. He was 40 years-old. Said one observer: "Lenny died of an over-does of police."*****(5.1) When he died, it became instantly clear how enormously the nation had erred.
He was a misunderstood path-blazer, a ground-breaker--he was an alienated neo conservative or rather a "Liberal" in the old sense of the word--a satirist seeking revenge for outraged moral idealism through techniques of shock and obscenity—this being as old as Aristophanes. To simply trash Bruce as a "dirty comic" is to miss the whole point of his "sermons”, which were ferociously ethical in their thrust.
Lenny Bruce, to his credit, did create new free speech zones for Americans.*(1.8) He mocked the hypocrisy of religious faiths, of political beliefs, of cloaked liberal racism, and of puritan ethics. He was brilliantly funny. He did not shrink from stating his mind and defended his right to do so. Lenny Bruce "held his truth against all men" and he paid the price. But that’s the old story of the individual against the collective.
Lenny was at the end of his ropes, but his sense of humor remained, however it was in tatters: "Fighting my persecution seems as futile as asking Barry Goldwater to speak at a memorial to send the Rosenberg kids to college."
"The ideas I have are now imprisoned within me, and unless this court acts, will not be permitted expression..." Even though Lenny's satire was brutal, he still had many childlike qualities. One of these was his faith that he would eventually find justice. This was evident by his appearance at the San Francisco field office of the FBI on October 10, 1965. He lodged a complaint that the courts of New York and California were conspiring to violate his rights. As the lower courts were failing to abide by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to obscenity, no action was taken by the FBI in this matter. In fact, in internal memos, the Feds referred to Lenny as a sick, obscene entertainer.*****(5.2)
Nearly almost forty years after Bruce’s death, he got a pardon—forty years too late! The best epitaph would be a quote from George Pataki: "Freedom of speech is one of the great American values, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism."****(4.2)
The Lenny Bruce story is a sobering example of what can go horribly wrong when citizens and others are persecuted for word crimes – for speaking their minds in their own way and by the light of their own reason.***(3.3)
Make no mistake about it: Lenny Bruce was a First Amendment hero.
**
NOTE FROM ADMINISTRATOR:
For other identification, please see here.
* Plagiarized from The Trials of Lenny Bruce The Fall and Rise of an American Icon by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover. The original passages read as follows:
(1.1) (Chapter One online)
He was a man with an unsettling sense of humor.
(1.2) (Chapter One online)
He entertained America with disturbing frankness. His words crossed the law and those in it. He became intolerable to people too powerful to ignore.
(1.3) (Chapter One online)
Words were his catalyst to fame; to failure, as well.
(1.4) (Chapter One online)
He tore into the planks of conventional morality like a furious buzz-saw...
(1.5) (Chapter One online)
Censorship, arrests, trials, convictions, and appeals.
(1.6) (Chapter One online)
When it was over, not even the First Amendment saved him. He died convicted-a comedian condemned for his words. He was Lenny Bruce.
(1.7) (quoted in a review by Heather Joslyn here)
When Lenny was ribald, raunchy, irreverent and tasteless, he was an American standing on his rights...
(1.8) (quoted in a review by Nick Gillespie here)
Lenny Bruce...create[d] new free speech zones for Americans.
** Plagiarized from Ladies and Gentlemen - Lenny Bruce!!! by Albert Goldman. The original passages read as follows:
(2.1) (Synopsis from jacket cover online)
Such a man was Lenny Bruce, the legendary comic, social satirist, free-speech crusader and martyr to the uptight social and moral repressions of the Age of Conformity.
(2.2) (Synopsis from jacket cover online)
Using obscenity as a miner uses dynamite to blow up the deeply impacted prejudices and repressions of middle-class society, Lenny eventually provoked the wrath of the Catholic Church, the police and a lot of people who knew nothing at all about him except that he had a dirty mouth. Arrested as many as seven times in a single city, he eventually abandoned his stage career to become a free-speech crusader, employing a score of famous attorneys in a history-making series of trials that ended finally with the defendant exonerated but the man utterly destroyed.
*** Plagiarized from Pardon Lenny Bruce by Ronald K.L. Collins & Robert Corn-Revere. The original passages read as follows:
(3.1)
Word crimes. The very idea seems foreign to us.
(3.2)
He lampooned popes, preachers, politicians, and judges. He wanted to expose “the lie” in life – all of those respectable cover-ups used to hide the dirty truth. His words – comical, critical, and profane – put America’s First-Amendment principle to the test: can offensive speech really be free?
(3.3)
It is a sobering example of what can go horribly wrong when citizens and others are persecuted for word crimes – for speaking their minds in their own way and by the light of their own reason.
**** Plagiarized from review of Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware! by Shelton Hull. The original passages read as follows:
(4.1)
He'd have prospered into old age had he simply shut up with certain things said in certain ways, but his personality and his sense of mission made that impossible.
(4.2)
The best epitaph would be a quote from George Pataki, on the occasion of the pardon that brought Lenny Bruce's story full circle and sparked this recent wave of fine products available: "Freedom of speech is one of the great American values, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism."
***** Plagiarized from Lenny by Gordon Williams. The original passages read as follows:
(5.1)
My mother once told me that it wasn't an overdose of drugs that killed Lenny; it was an overdose of cops.
(5.2)
Even though Lenny's satire was brutal, he still had many childlike qualities. One of these was his faith that he would eventually find justice. This was evident by his appearance at the San Francisco field office of the FBI on October 10, 1965. He lodged a complaint that the courts of New York and California were conspiring to violate his rights. As the lower courts were failing to abide by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to obscenity, no action was taken by the FBI in this matter. In fact, in internal memos, the Feds referred to Lenny as a sick, obscene entertainer.
OL extends its deepest apologies to Ronald K.L. Collins, David M. Skover, Robert Corn-Revere, Shelton Hull, Gordon Williams, and the heir or heirs of Albert Goldman.
NOTE: There are obviously many more plagiarized passages, especially from the Collins and Skover book, but they were not available online. They will be identified once the book and other sources are consulted.
