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Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic: because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying. Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman really a goony child?) Bruce said what he thought; Clay says what his character thinks. So Clay and other entertainers on the edge are playing out fantasies -- their own and their audience's -- of the baddest boy in school, of the kid your parents prayed to God you would never become.
In the wonderfully gross, fiercely moralistic movie Heathers, a nasty teen queen is asked, "Why are you such a megabitch?" Her answer: "Because I can be." Because of freedom of expression, comics and musicians can now be as nasty as they wanna be. And nasty is the word. In the erotic masterpieces of literature, sex was an expression of pleasure, and often of love, between equals. Today's sex talk, from Kinison and Clay and the 2 Live Crew, is almost exclusively from the male-pig viewpoint. A woman's role, their line goes, is only to serve and service a man.
The new comics' barbs at minorities are just as rank and rankling. But there is nothing novel about immigrant baiting in America. It flourished a century ago -- when humor directed at Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish newcomers was a music-hall staple -- and continued unabated in Hollywood's racially derisive treatment of blacks. The reason then was the same as it is today: people felt threatened by the outsiders and so made fun of them. In the new version, a raunch artist taps into the grudge a white working-class male may hold against the beneficiaries of affirmative action and liberal sympathy: minorities, the handicapped, gays. They get all the breaks, he figures; now what about me? His counterattack is to bad-mouth them with paranoid intensity. And that's where the sick threat and thrill come in.
But is this thrill a threat to the public weal? Since the traumas of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, many Americans have gradually closed off their minds to the nature of atrocity. They cope with the world's horror by numbing themselves to pain. They can shed tears over cute-tender stories of stranded whales or a baby in a well, but all too often everything else -- from a politician's promise to the Chernobyl disaster -- is so much show biz, ironized with shrugs and sick jokes. Today's children were bred in this atmosphere. With many of their parents past caring, how can the kids not be past shock?