Published: August 05, 2008 06:23 pm            

BRUCE KAUFFMAN: Lenny Bruce was comedy’s martyr

“Imagine if Jesus was alive today and we put him to death. Picture all those parochial school kids with little electric chairs around their necks.”

— Comedian Lenny Bruce



The man Comedy Central voted the third best stand-up comic ever, and the man the ACLU undoubtedly would vote the most persecuted, died of a drug overdose this week (Aug. 3) in 1966. While other comedians in the 1950s and ’60s were telling mother-in-law jokes, Lenny Bruce was exploring race relations, homophobia, the nuclear age, sex, drugs and religion. He was, by the standards of the time, more biting than funny, as much social critic as comedian.

“I was just thinking that I’ve never slept in a colored person’s home,” he once observed. “I’ve never even had dinner in a Negro home. There’s a big foreign country in my country that I know little about.” In another routine he commented that if Jesus ever returned to Earth his first act would be to order the Pope to take that expensive ring off his finger and sell it to provide money for the poor. Lenny Bruce thought most established religions were hypocritical.

He was also, by the standards of the time, “dirty,” and as a result he spent more time in courtrooms than nightclubs, valiantly but vainly trying to defend himself from obscenity charges on free speech grounds. He was arrested so often that he began studying the law, becoming such an expert that he once corrected an arresting officer who cited the wrong section of New York’s penal code as the reason for his arrest.

Not that it did him any good, because, as he continually maintained, he was being targeted not because of obscenity per se, but because his routines made him such a prominent anti-establishment figure. A former district attorney admitted, “He never harmed anyone. He was punished first and foremost because of the words he used. We drove him into poverty and used the law to kill him.”

Actually, the drugs he routinely used killed him, but his constant legal troubles destroyed his livelihood and made him paranoid and angry. He considered himself a free speech martyr and he had a point. Later comedians such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinnison were so obscene, even Lenny would have disapproved, yet their reward was wealth and fame, not prosecution. In great part, they have Lenny Bruce to thank.

Indeed, in the end, all of Lenny Bruce’s obscenity convictions were overturned on free speech grounds except one — a New York charge whose appeal he was working on when he died. In 2003, New York Governor George Pataki pardoned him for that conviction, the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.

Bruce Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.

        

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