Quotes of the Day

Imagined conversation in Aug. 1966:

"Lenny Bruce is a menace. He uses dirty words for shock value. He's a junkie who wants to pollute civilized conversation. He's gone too far."
"He just died."
"Oh. What I meant was, he was a poet and a prophet."

Lenny Bruce, who died 40 years ago last week, was the Elvis of comedy. Like the Big E, he had a brilliant, volcanic prime, which unquestionably changed pop culture, and a bloated, drug-addled "maturity." Elvis died at 42, Lenny at the age he had predicted he would: 40. The difficult, self-destructive pathos of their last years only added to their legends; modern saints must also be sinners, to prove they're human as well as divine. And another similarity: a temporary grave marker misspelled Lenny's name, as Elvis' had been on his grave stone. Cue the theremin music.

There were lots of differences, too. Lenny (first name only, please: it's no easier to refer to Lenny as "Bruce" than it is to call Woody "Allen") enjoyed nothing like Elvis' celebrity, though the prototype "sick comic" had a unique notoriety. His corrosive comedy routines, and the occasionally raw language he used to make his satirical points, landed him in the docket on obscenity charges in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. "Factually, the show is indecent," he acknowledged. "The areas that I discuss are not pleasant. However, I do think they have the freight of substance." Dirty words or no, Lenny's real crime was criticizing organized religion in cities where many of the police, prosecutors and judges were conservative Catholics. Cops threatened nightclub owners who booked Lenny. Two owners had their liquor licenses suspended. Another, when Lenny performed at his place, was tried and convicted of sponsoring an obscene show.

The threats and trials had their impact on the comic tagged by New York Daily News columnist Bob Sylvester as "the man from outer taste": no one dared book Lenny. At the end of his eight-year career doing inspired satire, he couldn't get... I was going to say he couldn't get arrested, but that was about all he could get. What he couldn't get was a job. He was a prophet without honor — and, worse, for a would-be-working comedian, without profit. On his 40th birthday he declared himself bankrupt, and nine months later he was dead. People who may have known only vaguely of Lenny Bruce were treated to the indelible image of a bloated, naked man splayed on the floor with a syringe in his arm. For more than five hours after discovering the body, police had allowed reporters and photographers to record the gruesome, demeaning scene. In the matter of Lenny Bruce, the cops had finally granted freedom of the press.

For all his failings, many of which he discussed in his act, Lenny had a persecution complex — because he was so often persecuted! — and a martyr fixation. He identified with one of the few historical figures he unconditionally revered: Jesus. The Christ analogy can be pushed too far (Jesus was not a junkie, though he was a Jew), but there's no question that Lenny was relentlessly and unfairly hounded by the judiciary system. Record producer Phil Spector, who championed the comedian in his last year, claimed that Lenny "died from an overdose of police." Think that's an exaggeration? Well, Martin Garbus, one of Lenny's many lawyers, quotes a prosecutor in the the Manhattan D.A.'s office as saying, "I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him.... We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him."

THE COMEBACK KID

"He used to say that he was being crucified," comedian Mort Sahl recalled, "and... I'd say, ‘Hey, man, but don't forget the resurrection.'" Lenny's trials spanned the last six years of his life; his resurrection took much less time. In the spring of 1967 the movie Lenny Bruce, a filmed record of a 1965 Basin Street West gig, showed those who had never seen him "live" the highs and the lows, the electricity and the longueurs, of a Bruce performance. That summer, Lenny's face was on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, published in 1963, found a new audience, and The Essential Lenny Bruce, transcriptions of his routines edited by John Cohen, sold 250,000 copies in two years. His old albums were reissued, and at least three of his major concerts were put on vinyl. From the sonic archives came more basement tapes than a Dylanologist ever found.

Around 1971 two movies appeared (including the Fred Baker documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears) and two New York plays (including Julian Barry'sLenny). In 1974 Bob Fosse's highly praised movie version of Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman in the title role, came out, as did a fat, contentious biography by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! My friend Gary Carey wrote an excellent book, the 1975 Lenny, Janis & Jimi, about three charismatic performers who died of drug overdoses. (Even in that sad showbiz trend, Lenny was first.) A few years later, Bob Dylan released the ballad Lenny Bruce: "He was an outlaw, that's for sure / More of an outlaw than you ever were / Lenny Bruce is gone but his spirit's livin' on and on."

A new millennium dawned, and his spirit was still not stilled. Foremost among the artifacts was The Trials of Lenny Bruce (Sourcebooks, 2002) by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, a comprehensive, smartly written overview of Lenny's mixture of "black music, white powder and blue comedy" legal troubles; the book comes with a 74min. CD, narrated by Nat Hentoff and featuring many of Lenny's most notorious bits. In fiction, Jonathan Goldstein's Lenny Bruce is Dead is mum about its putative subject, but as a free-form monologue it's firmly in the Bruce tradition.

There's a six-disc CD set Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware (Shout! Factory, 2005), edited by Hal Willner and Marvin Worth, that wraps all the familiar bits and much previously unheard material in a handsome 80-page book. It's a must for any advanced Bruceophile. And two years ago, Comedy Central chose the 100 all-time greatest stand-up comedians. Lenny was #3, trailing only Richard Pryor and George Carlin, two social critics who (as Carlin notes) wouldn't have had the careers they did if Lenny hadn't made unfettered comedy possible.

It's a shame he couldn't have survived his own death. Resurrection would have been a great career move for Lenny. He'd have been booked solid for decades.

WHAT DID HE DO?

Some performers are criticized as being "too hip for the room" or "playing to the band." Lenny was plenty hip, maybe excessively so; his performances were crash courses in bop argot and Yiddish. And he did love cracking up the musicians, since he thought of himself as their kinsman: an improv artist with words. But he gained a large following, even though his material, even in his early prime, was deemed too controversial for TV. (Remember, there were only three networks and some independent stations. And this was the 50s. Only Steve Allen, an early and loyal fan, booked Lenny on his shows as early as 1959 and as late as 1964.) But as a nightclub and concert performer, he was king, earning more than $100,000 a year, and attracting a sizable clique who came to hear Lenny talk about ... anything.

Other performers must have dreamed of talking onstage they way they did in their dressing rooms, living rooms, bar rooms, bedrooms. But for whatever reason — because they didn't trust their ad-libability, or because they thought they'd alienate, shock or bore their audience, or because they feared police hassles — they didn't. Lenny knew, from the inside, the rough language people talked. Raised by a mother, Sally Marr, who inhabited the dingier fringes of show business, Lenny had joined the wartime Navy at 17, did a hitch on a merchant freighter, played burlesque houses for four years (often with his then-wife, stripper-singer Honey Harlowe), worked in the lowest reaches of exploitation films (his producer also financed Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda). And when he graduated to classier venues, that salty vocabulary echoed in his head.

Many of Lenny's routines were either tart showbiz tales (his 20min. saga of a lousy comic playing the London Palladium) or just funny-silly (a woman comes home to find her husband in bed with a chicken — a love object that, 10 years later, Woody Allen would turn into a sheep and, 35 years on, Edward Albee would make a goat). But the repertoire he had in mind was much broader, deeper, riskier than those. So, with a mixture of bravery and bravado, Lenny decided to bring the intimacy and threat of uninhibited talk to the nightclub stage. He not only said, I have something to say; he said, I've got to say this. Then he took the final dangerous step, and he said it.

The label that stuck to him — "sick dirty Lenny" — had its drawbacks. Frequent arrests, for example. But the advantage of being outspoken was that he could speak about anything. Most comedians marched to a very conventional tune. A few, like Sahl and Dick Gregory, specialized in political satire; a few others, like Redd Foxx and Belle Barth, did "blue" material, at least by 50s standards. (Today it would barely be aqua.) Lenny's satire was more ferocious than Sahl's, his language saltier and more freewheeling than Foxx's. This combination of topic and tone, and the fact that nobody else was out there with him, meant that Lenny had gigantic areas of social and sexual behavior (and misbehavior) all to himself. In an alternate universe, some comedian might be granted a monopoly on mother-in-law jokes; Lenny, in this world, chutzpah'd himself into exclusive rights to virtually any touchy subject. He had simply no competition.

He did have detractors, who could get more rabid than Lenny ever was. In 1961, comedian Shelley Berman told TIME, "I don't dislike him, but people needed Lenny Bruce for the same reason they needed Hitler." (Hmmm. I don't think Lenny's four-letter word was Jews.) And Jean Shepherd, whom I cherish as a radio monologist, later railed against the Lenny Bruce threat — of the hip people lording it over the square — saying it was "a new kind of Jew burning, I think it could lead to a new kind of gas oven." (Goldman, Bruce's biographer, wrote, on no evidence, "Hitler was Lenny's ultimate hero.")

Lenny made plenty of enemies. But in saying what he thought, at great price, he liberated stand-up, and all showbiz behavior. A live performance, for comics and rockers and actors, was henceforth designed not to seduce the audience, to play to the old expectations of charm and propriety, but to confront, challenge, titillate, outrage it. I think only jazz musicians had tried that before. Secure in their improv skills, they dared to investigate the farthest reaches of aural experimentation. And if the ringsiders didn't get it — if a Charlie Parker was literally playing only to the band, and sometimes even they couldn't follow him — too bad. If Miles Davis did a whole set with his back to the customers, well, were they there to see his face or hear his music? In fact, who cares why or if they were there?

Lenny Bruce did care if he was connecting with his audience. To a comedian silence is death; and he wasn't quite Zen enough to dig the sound of no hands clapping. In 1959, talking with Paul Krassner, he defined a comedian as someone who stood in front of an audience and got a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds. But his routines weren't a collection of jokes; they were skits, theater pieces that got laughs from the asides as much as the punch lines. And each bit was populated with two, three, many characters. It was like a classic sketch on Your Show of Shows, except that Lenny played all the parts: Sid Caesar's, Carl Reiner's, Howie Morris' and Imogene Coca's. He wasn't a great mimic — all the voices had his nasal Long Island timbre — but he was a confident actor. And since each routine tended to evolve as he performed it, Lenny was less a sick comic than a Method one.

And not, despite what you may have heard, a particularly angry one. He was as amused as outraged by the shameless hypocrisy of his targets. In his satire he aimed up, at the powerful, not down, at the pitiful. He often made himself and his weaknesses the subject of his comedy. His material wasn't mean. To compare him to two later comics, one good, one awful, Lenny didn't play the angry old man, like Carlin, fuming at everybody's idiocy, or the stud-bully, like Andrew Dice Clay, spuming a bully's polluted derision. In the 1959 interview, Krassner asked, "Do you think there's any sadism in your comedy?", and Lenny recoiled. "What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I — well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a brass buckle."

As Lenny matured, walking a lonely road in so many aspects of his craft, he relied less on boffo laffs. "Please don't applaud," he'd sometimes say on stage. "It breaks my rhythm." And in his last years, when he'd devote maybe an hour of his act to a recitation of his trial trials, Lenny was often still funny, but in a much drier, more serious context. (At the very end, he could be so stoned he could barely hold a mic, let alone an audience's attention.) Krassner asked Lenny how these lectures on the law squared with his old 15-25-second rules, and he replied, "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce." That might sound pompous, but, truly, Lenny had become sui generis — his own genre.

LENNY AND TIME

In a Jul. 13, 1959, summary of new comedians, TIME coined the phrase "sicknik" (after beatnik, itself inspired by the 1957 Soviet satellite Sputnik) and applied it particularly to "the usually vicious barrage of Lenny Bruce. ... [M]uch of the time he merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the way of the world (on religious leaders: ‘They have missed the boat. "Thou shall not kill," they say, and then one of them walks comfortingly to the death chamber with Caryl Chessman.')."

For the younguns, I should note that Chessman was the literate, seemingly rehabilitated criminal whose execution many liberals protested. And I'll add that his comment seems, if not hilarious, certainly pertinent. In one sentence, Lenny managed to criticize three kinds of hypocrites: the state, which kills its citizens in defiance of Biblical law ("‘Thou shalt not kill' means that," he often said, "not ‘Amend Section A'"); the liberals who choose which convicts should be spared (the book-loving kind); and the ones who, like some medical professionals today, ignore the strictures of the AMA to assist in the execution process. Honestly, who's sick here? Well, maybe Lenny was sick for his time. But he was never one to turn down free publicity: he called his next album The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce.

To gauge contemporary views of Bruce (and for many other reasons), a scan of the Time archive is instructive. In articles from 1961 to 1966 the magazine called Lenny "the sickest of them all," the "four-letter comedian," the "triple-sick Comedian," the "tried-and-blue Comedian," "the sick, beat comic" and "the man who made the four-letter word a popular mixer before being ruled obscene by the courts." When in 1963 the Home Office of Great Britain refused him entry to do a London nightclub gig, Time punned: "Wherever he roamed, Lenny seemed to be in sick transit."

Here is TIME's Milestone in its Aug. 12, 1966, issue: "Died. Lenny Bruce, 40, nightclub performer, leading outpatient of the sick-comic school; of suspected narcotics poisoning; in Hollywood. Son of an ‘exotic dancer,' trained as a burlesque comedian, Bruce was never in tune with this world, and he soured totally in the 1950s after his beautiful blonde wife became a drug addict, leaving him with an infant daughter. From Manhattan to Hollywood, he viewed life as a four-letter word and, with gestures, commented blackly on it, never lacking for listeners and finding some curious champions (among them: Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Poet Robert Lowell). His path led ever lower after a Manhattan criminal court, in 1964, convicted him of being ‘obscene, indecent, immoral and impure.'"

By the following year, though, Time's tone had softened: "Many of today's young monologists, in the style of the late Lenny Bruce, specialize in acutely perceived, often bitter commentary, not to say four-letter words." And in two rave reviews of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Time called the novel "a coda of rage and savagely honest self-lashing reminiscent of the performances of the late Lenny Bruce." Also: "The similarities between Portnoy's delivery and that of the late Satirist Lenny Bruce are readily apparent. While Bruce used scatology in his nightclub performances as a tool, primarily to uncover social hypocrisies, his savage humor also gained its neurotic style from conflicts about appearance and reality [that's society's conflicts, folks, not Lenny's]. For example, Bruce was constantly asking why portrayals of people doing something as beautiful and useful as making love were considered obscene while portrayals of murder and violence were not."

Lenny had become acceptable to TIME because he had freed Philip Roth to write Portnoy's Complaint. He was a cause worth rallying around — posthumously. The new Caryl Chessman.

LENNY AND ME

I've had a personal stake in Lenny Bruce for nearly a half-century. I first heard about him in 1959 from the cartoonist Arnold Roth, who was a crucial contributor to the Harvey Kurtzman magazine Humbug, and who lived in Philadelphia, as I did. With a kindness that I think back on with gratitude and bafflement, he befriended this gauche but eager 14-year-old and, in the genial tutorial that was our conversations, recommended that I listen to Lenny's albums.

I got the albums — Interviews for Our Time and The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce — and Lenny, with a hipster snap of his fingers, quickly became my first stand-up crush. I was hooked by the humor, its breadth and pungency, even if I didn't always pick up on the references. Sure, I knew that Orval Faubus was Arkansas' segregationist governor, and I laughed when Lenny had him ignorantly approving of his daughter's engagement to Harry Belafonte ("Nice Italian boy, eh?"), but the allusions to 30s movies and the talent agency MCA sailed over my head. That didn't matter. I memorized some of the routines, and when he appeared on Steve Allen's Sunday night variety show, in the spring of 1959, I preserved the bit on my tape recorder.

I didn't feel part of a vanguard, or more adult for "getting" Lenny. I just thought the guy was funny. Similarly, I found the breadth and pungency of his stuff startling but not really shocking. So far as I recall, it didn't upset other members of my middle-class Catholic family, since the only record player was in the dining room, where anyone could hear or overhear the LPs, and nobody gave me an angry shout to turn that junk off. So, by applying contemporary community standards (our house), I'd rule that Lenny Bruce was not obscene.

I was too young to see Lenny at a night club, but my older brother Paul and his bride-to-be Pat Thompson drove across the Delaware to Pennsauken, N.J., where Lenny was playing at the Red Hill Inn. (Consulting The Complete Lenny Bruce, Daniel V. Smith's devotional and very valuable website, I'd judge that this was either April or November 1960.) After the set, Lenny came over to the bar, where my brother was. When Paul said he had a kid brother who was a big fan. Lenny picked up a paper coaster and wrote on it: "To Richard — Your friend, Lenny Bruce." A relic sadly lost.

On Feb. 11, 1961, I attended his concert at Philadelphia's Town Hall. It would be his last performance in my town except for three appearances at Central Magistrates Court after a drug bust. (Prescription drugs; he was acquitted.) And in 1964 I drove up to New York to see his Easter weekend stint at the Village Theater (later the Fillmore East). Four shows, all 11,000 tickets sold; I caught the late show, midnight, on Saturday. He did plenty of material about his legal vexations, but Lenny was still a spieler who could mesmerize his audience for two hours plus — a great gig. (There was to be another series of Village concerts in November, canceled after pressure from city authorities.) I also followed the installments of his autobiography that Hugh Hefner (like Krassner and Steve Allen, a prime Bruce stalwart) published in Playboy. It was a good time to be a Lenny fan. But not to be Lenny.

I was in Rome in August, 40 years ago, when I read in the International New York Times that Lenny had died. My clear (possibly fallible) memory is that the headline spelled his name "Lennie." Since there were no TVs in the hotel, I was spared seeing those obscene photos of the corpse.

The summer after Lenny's death I walked through Tompkins Square Park in the East Village as the Fugs, the ragged band of Beat poets who had played at Lenny's memorial service, were performing in the bandshell. Words Lenny had been busted for using now were being sung in public, where anyone could hear them. That's how fast the culture changed.

THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION

That is, I want to make the case that Lenny was unfairly, illegally, prosecuted. Want evidence? May it please the court...

A lot of people believe that the provocation for Lenny's obscenity charges was not four-letter words but the irreverent bits he did on organized religion, which to Lenny was not far from organized crime. His most famous early routine, "Religions, Inc.," painted the Pope, Billy Graham, New York's Cardinal Spellman and other other hierarchs as crass showbiz figures. Another bit, Christ and Moses, had the two great figures of Judaism and Catholicism visiting Saint Patrick's Cathedral, appalled by the wealth of the Church and the poverty it permitted in its faithful. Though laced with hipster argot, these pieces were straightforward moral tracts, making the point that the clergy had forgotten their core message and turned their religion into a business.

This observation was not entirely novel, even in the 50s. But it shocked and angered the fuzz. Chicago's vice squad boss visited the Gate of Horn's owner Alan Ribback and told him: "If he ever speaks against religion, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here... [If h]e mocks the Pope — and I'm speaking as a Catholic — I'm here to tell you your license is in danger." True to its word, the City of Big Shoulders and small minds revoked the Gate of Horn's liquor license for three weekends on the charge of putting on a "lewd show." Lenny's Chicago trial began on Ash Wednesday, 1963; he was not encouraged to see that the judge and the jury all had ash crosses on their foreheads. Convicted; later overturned.

Sometimes the forces aligned against Lenny were secular and corrupt. The night after his first drug bust, in Philadelphia in 1961, a lawyer and a bail bondsman told him that he could get the charges dismissed for $10,000. The wages of justice were high in Philly. (The judge dismissed the case.)

Lenny wanted to perform his act for the judge (or jury). But the prosecution insisted that his words be read aloud by the arresting officer. As he would later recount it: "A peace officer, who is trained to recognize clear and present danger, not make-believe, does the act. The Grand Jury watches him work, and they go, ‘That stinks!' But I get busted. And the irony is, I have to go to court and defend his act."

The cops' minds could often be dirtier than Lenny's. A gesture in which he holds the mic as a Bishop would a censor and blesses the audience was somehow taken as "masturbating the microphone." And the People's transcript of his act had numerous mistakes, some of them distorting innocent remarks into prurient ones. For example, "a suit three sizes too big" was rendered as "a shit three sizes too big"; "the Loew's Pitkins" came out "the lowest tit"; and "Ladies and Gentlemen" was recorded as "Raymond jumps me now"! These changes were socko as comedy, perhaps, but deficient in stenographic competence. Apparently, pornography is in the ear of the behearer.

The 1964 New York trial, in which he and Café Au Go-Go owner Howard Solomon were charged with obscenity, should surely have earned Lenny's derision. He did often joke that, "In the Halls of Justice, all the justice is in the halls." And he could give bitter voice to the campaign of so many Catholics against an obstreperous Hebrew: "I am a Jew before this court. I would like to set the record straight, that the Jew is not remorsefui." But the poignant thing is that Lenny firmly, naively, believed in the majesty of the law. "My intent is not one of contempt," he proclaimed before the bar. "Communication is my desire." To John M. Murtagh, presiding judge of the three-man court that heard his case, Lenny begged, "Please, your Honor, I so desperately want your respect." And then: "Don't finish me off in show business. Don't lock up these six thousand words."

His pleas went unanswered. The Court voted 2-1 to convict him (four months in the Rikers Island workhouse) and Solomon (30 days or a $1,000 fine). The dissenting judge, J. Randall Creel, soon resigned, and later wrote, in a letter to Time, that the majority decision had been a "fatal judicial wrong done Lenny Bruce—a wrong that is one of the reasons for my retirement from the bench." The third judge on the case was Kenneth M. Phipps. According to testimony in The Trials of Lenny Bruce, "Judge Phipps also wanted to acquit Bruce but ... Judge Murtagh threatened to assign him to traffic court for the rest of his term if he did." Maybe Lenny died from an overdose of judges.

The Long Island kid who hadn't graduated from high school did become one of the most scholarly comedians of his time. Now Lenny thought he could prepare labyrinthine judicial arguments on his own. As he got more involved in his own defense, he exasperated his lawyers, some of whom were helping him for free. (On meeting one of his representatives, William Kunstler, the two went into a bathroom and shot heroin.) The Hollywood Hills home of Lenny the "law junkie," as Collins and Skover call him, was filled with law books and legal briefs. Lenny wanted to appeal his New York conviction himself. He dreamed of playing his biggest room ever, the Supreme Court.

But first he died.

In 1967, Solomon's conviction was overturned on appeal, while Lenny's conviction stood. Thus, as Collins and Skover write, "One man stood convicted (Bruce) and the other exonerated (Solomon) — for the same show." Poor Lenny: he fought the law and the law won.

In 2003, responding to a petition from Robin Williams, Margaret Cho and others, New York Gov. George Pataki granted Lenny a posthumous pardon from his 1964 conviction.

In one of his arguments, Lenny made the important point that the important word in the First Amendment is not "speech" but "freedom" — "on the right to say it." OK, now everybody can say it. Thank you, masked man. But the legacy of Lenny the First Amendment martyr tends to obscure the achievement of Lenny the comedian. He wasn't always on his game; like a jazzman, there were nights when the notes came out flat. But when he soared, as he so often did, he took the listener with him into that verdant jungle of ideas, Lenny's mind. That's not sick, folks; that's healing. Oh, and did I say he was funny?

• RICHARD CORLISS
• Remembering the brilliant comic who blazed a trail for free speech and was killed by "an overdose of police"