Who Was Lenny Bruce?

Watch some comedian on Comedy Central hopscotch from bleeped-out word to bleeped-out word in front of a live audience, and the idea of an entertainer being arrested for using expletives may seem quaint. But only 41 years ago the comedian Lenny Bruce was not only arrested but convicted of obscenity in New York City for his irreverent stand-up act. Despite his legal troubles, his raw, flippant style has been imitated ever since. Luckily for all those who followed him, standards have since relaxed.

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island in 1925, was a high school dropout and a failed con artist who was performing in burlesque clubs when he began to gain a reputation for his edgy acts. In 1959 Steve Allen invited him on his popular late-night TV show, introducing him as “the most shocking comedian of our time.” While most comedians of the time joked about their mothers-in-law or delivered lines like “Take my wife, please,” Bruce lambasted racist stereotypes, poked fun at anti-Semitism, and chatted about drug use. He did a sketch of someone discovering airplane glue and declaring, “I’m the Louis Pasteur of junkie-ism.” Later he said, “You and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed our Lord . . . though it seems there ought to be a statute of limitations on the crime. . . . It was 2,000 years ago. Why do you keep busting our chops about it?”

There is a sweet earnestness to those early routines, an impish energy as he flashes his smile while being mildly outrageous. The dark stuff came after his divorce in 1959, when he started hauling both himself and his audiences onto the couch, holding his and their neuroses up for all to see. But instead of offering therapy, he doused them in cold water. He aped a man begging his wife to come back to him, a guy “getting hot” in an ambulance, and mocked how awkwardly white people could act around African-Americans.

He was first arrested for obscenity in San Francisco in October 1961. He was acquitted, but from then on he was mercilessly hounded by the police, picked up 15 times in two years for obscenity and drug possession. The arrests wore on him and affected his routine. Expecting police in his audiences, he intentionally stomped across the line of what was acceptable, not for humor but for provocation. His routines began to focus more on his arrests, becoming tediously preachy, the laughs few and far between, his sparkling punch lines buried in the rubble of his diatribes, which were increasingly fueled by drugs.

On March 31, 1964, he did an act at Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, and as he wound through a desultory monologue on Gary Powers getting an enema, Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts, and creative ways for men to exercise their insatiable sex drives, Herbert Ruhe, a police inspector, listened in the front row.

A few days later Bruce and the owner of the club were arrested for violating a law that prohibited “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure . . . entertainment.” During the ensuing trial Ruhe recounted the jokes, butchering them with bad timing, much to Bruce’s consternation. A sociologist described the act as “a sort of verbal diarrhea—instead of defecating on a stage in a literal sense, he does it through orality” (strangely graphic testimony for the prosecution side of an obscenity case).

Bruce’s attorney, Ephraim London, who was known for taking First Amendment cases, defended the comedian as a social satirist. He called the prudish What’s My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen to the stand, and she said that “as a nightclub performer, [Bruce] employs these words the way James Baldwin or Tennessee Williams or playwrights employ them on the Broadway stage—for emphasis or because that is the way that people in a given situation would talk.”

During the trial the poet Allen Ginsberg and a hundred other writers and artists joined together to declare Bruce a satirist “in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain.” The irony was that despite his tawdry vocabulary, Bruce was in his way an uncompromising moralist. He was sensitive and easily offended, seeing in every human action moral contradictions, deceit, and hypocrisy. He once said, “There are words that offend me. Segregation, now that offends me.” He said on stage, “There’s a big foreign country in my country that I know very little about. And more than that, when whites talk about riots, we really lose our perspective completely. A man from Mars could see what’s really happening—convicts rioting in a corrupt prison.”

He began to resemble a character in one of his routines about the perverse strategies employed by people in jams. He dismissed his lawyers and begged the panel of three judges to let him perform in the courtroom to show the what it was all about. It was to no avail. On December 22, 41 years ago today, he received a four-month sentence. He was released pending an appeal.

By then he was bankrupt, out of work, and addicted to heroin. During a 1966 interview with the journalist Nat Hentoff, Bruce slumped in his chair, a trench coat failing to hide the weight he had gained, his eyes hung with heavy bags, He was barely able to drag a phrase of out his dusty mind. “It’s chic to arrest me,” he slured, nodding off. Shortly after that interview he was found dead, surrounded by drug paraphernalia.

Though today “wardrobe malfunctions” can cause mass hysteria, our standards for what a person can say in a nightclub or even on Broadway have relaxed enormously. Lenny Bruce has posthumously been regarded as a trailblazer who was wrongly prosecuted. In 2003 Gov. George Pataki of New York issued a pardon for him as a “declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”

Despite the failures of his later career, despite the rage that could overpower and sour his humor, Bruce remains one of the most influential American comedians, the inventor of the sardonic and introspective style of monologue. Those who don’t quite get that kind of comedy focus on the scatology, dirty words, and sex obsession. Those who do keep seeing in it new ways to examine—and laugh at—our contradictory ways of life.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.