Lenny Bruce and Freedom of Speech.

[Victor Pross]

Lenny Bruce, Freedom of Speech and Modern Stand-Up Comics

by Victor Pross

“I don’t think Lenny Bruce would be arrested today in New York.” William F. Buckley Jr. once said in a Playboy interview. Buckley’s statement had less to do with vindicating Lenny Bruce than condemning the culture that first created and then canonized “dirty Lenny.” It was Lenny Bruce who made it possible to covey thoughts sprinkled with the occasional “fuck,” “cunt,” “motherfucker,” “shit,” “tits,” and “cocksucker.” Lenny Bruce aimed his comedy at the cerebrum and saw it as his right to pepper his socially redeeming ideas with shocking terminology. The man, his message, and the medium were all different. The societal response was censorial. Lenny cut too hard, too close, and too often. “I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values,” he once quipped. Censorship, arrests, trials, convictions, and appeals. Police, lawyers, judges, and jurors. It was all there, nonstop for five years, in the drama stamped The People vs. Lenny Bruce.

What Buckley didn’t understand [and those who persecuted the confrontational comic] was that Lenny Bruce had to be offensive to convey his message: he had to transgress community standards in order to attack the hypocrisy behind them. When Bruce was ribald, raunchy, irreverent and tasteless, he was an American standing on his rights. It is ironical that Lenny could not have remained within the law and maintained, at the same time, true to himself as an artist. Lenny’s standing conviction is a badge of dissident honor. Hail Lenny Bruce, the lawbreaker!

Lenny Bruce is dead. His DNA code has vanished and his brain [unlike Einstein’s] was not preserved for clinical study. It’s over. He’s gone. It is curtains. The story, however, does not end there--for hereditary traces of Lenny Bruce can be found among those who congregate in comedy clubs. It is here that you can get an idea of Lenny’s world.

Lenny Bruce’s admirers and other rebel types need a Lenny Bruce fix. So, the first thing to do is to make him an icon and then reincarnate him in the persona of one or another new foul-mouthed stand-up. But no one today can rip into an audience and rock the system like Lenny Bruce did. What is radically is the absence of danger, the threat of the big bust, the specter of a rebel comedian being hauled off to jail. And yet, today’s outsiders find a place for themselves in the dark of comedy clubs. In those quarters, there is a trace, an echo of Lenny Bruce—the stand up comic who said that you can break things down by talking about them.

Today, the idea that people can come together, revel in taboo, and laugh at the hypocrisy in their lives and their society is nothing surprising. Dirty words and unfashionable ideas today can enjoy safe harbor in clubs. Such are the testaments to Bruce’s legacy. America’s five hundred or so comedy clubs have become FREE SPEECH ZONES, public places where First Amendment freedom is virtually unrivaled. It is only in a comedy club that one can get a full and saucy taste of freedom. Hear it live, see it face-to-face, savor it. The accolade of ‘free speech hero’ goes to Lenny Bruce.

Other brilliant [and foul-mouthed comics] have followed in Lenny’s footsteps—the spiritual children of Lenny Bruce: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Margaret Cho, Bill Hicks, Sara Silverman walked through the doors that Lenny Bruce opened. But before the door could close, a few no talent toilet fraternity types made their way in. A few of those asinine types such as Howard Stern, Andrew Dice Clay—and more recently Michael Richards—mock the price Lenny Bruce paid. The crucial difference, of course, between these “comics” is that Bruce was a satirist, a brilliantly talented and original comic thinker who used the device of stand-up comedy to make penetrating observations.

Much of the brash influx of today’s comics cater to the simplistic tastes of young males high on testosterone and low on critical thinking. There is a need to separate the wheat from the chaff. Lenny Bruce understood, like no other modern comedian, that comedy should be dangerous—but it must be creative. He was no play-it-safe Joey Bishop. He was a risk taker--and an artist.

Lenny Bruce mocked the hypocrisy of religious faiths, of political beliefs, and of puritan ethics. Today, freedom of speech is a given. The sacrifice has been made. In comedy clubs across the country, the unstated can be stated, the unheard can be voiced, and the unholy can be exposed. Comics are free to be themselves—brilliantly creative innovators or tired foul hacks. Or, as a third alternative, best expressed by the words of Margaret Cho: “I don’t want to end up like Lenny Bruce, but I want to be like him.”

***

[Victor Pross]

Ravi,

I think a lot of the modern no-talent potty mouth "comics," who are neither with wit or insight, would be fodder for Lenny, don't you agree? Stand-up is not the art it used to be: every monkey and his uncle is doing it these days, just as if it were karaokee [spelling?] Do you agree?

V