The Life and Legacy of Lenny Bruce

 

Controversial  comedy legend social critic, satirist, and screenwriter, renowned for his open, freestyle form of comedy which integrated satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity. Lenny Bruce tragically died on this day 1966. 

Born Leonard Alfred Schneider, on Oct. 13, 1925, in Mineola, N.Y.  As a child during the Great Depression,Lenny had a difficult childhood. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he spent his growing up years moving among his various relatives/ in a singularly Jewish environment. 

Bruce grew up neurotic, hungry for affection, bewildered by the rules and regulations of the adult world and the confusion of two separate worlds—his father’s and his mother’s. He leaned toward his mother’s world. She was Sally Marr, a sometime stand-up comic and entertainer/ 

He saw his father infrequency, and life with Bruce's mother, was erratic at best. Bruce attended six elementary schools, sold pop bottles for spending cash, and stole lunches from other students. 

Bruce's mother was completely uninhibited and supported herself in unconventional ways. For a time she operated a dance studio and furnished adult escorts. As Bruce grew to adulthood, his mother developed her own comedy act and performed in nightclubs. From his mother, Lenny learned to laugh at life's irregularities. 

Bruce left home at the age of 16 and went to live with a couple named Dengler on their Long Island farm. He stayed on the farm until shortly after the beginning of World War II. He joined the Navy at the age of 16 in 1942, and saw active duty during World War II. He fought in North Africa and Italy, and was discharged in 1945 after displeasing his commanding officer by performing a drag act,. He settled in New York City, hoping to establish himself as a comedian.

He met Joe Ancis,who had a profound influence on his approach to comedy. According to Bruce’s biographer, Albert Goldman, Ancis’ humor involved stream-of-consciousness sexual fantasies, references to jazz, and stories of Jewish domesticity.attending Mepham High School.

In 1947, he adopted the stage name of Lenny Bruce, and  began to pursue stand-up, a medium that he would revolutionize in a few years. Before coming to national attention, he performed at clubs and burlesque shows along the East Coast, opening for strippers and intoxicated crowds. It was during these years that he began to experiment with lewd language and controversial topics. 

He first achieved notoriety after winning Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, which was a popular television show at the time. As his career began to take off, he entered the 1950s with an act that helped fuel the social revolutions that were taking place. With the Beat Generation at its prime, Bruce offered a sobering voice to country on the verge of great change. By the mid-50s, he was performing a brand of comedy that assaulted the conventions of the medium. He sparked anger in religious groups and began to catch the eye of law enforcement. 

He managed  to release four albums of original material on Berkeley-based Fantasy Records, with rants, comic routines, and satirical interviews on the themes that made him famous: jazz, moral philosophy, politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jewishness. 

Branded a “sick comic” – though it was the sickness of modern society that he was railing about .The comedian toured the world and commented on everything from religion to racial epithets, with the intent of calling out hypocrisy.

Through the decade he gathered a following. In 1959, he made it on to Steve Allen's networked chat show.Allen introduced Bruce as "the most shocking comedian of our time, a young man who is skyrocketing to fame--Lenny Bruce!" He had a big following by then but Allen's support was enormously valuable, a great step up from the clubs he had been working.

As his fame grew, so did his detractors. Some people thought his social commentary was "a fad" while others wondered if he was a harbinger of new thought in the American people. His comedy frequently included "four-letter words". 

The more critics objected, the wilder Lenny got. Audiences encouraged Lenny toward more “free-form” comedy.form” comedy. He wanted to do less set “bits” and one-liners and more observational material drawn, like a jazz musician, from his feelings and emotions of the moment. When some of his sexual or religious material received negative criticism, it only goaded him into more furious assaults. He took on any topic that he felt discomfort in talking about, whether it was how to remove snot from suede or whether Jacqueline Kennedy was “going for help” or running for cover when the shots were fired in Dallas, a difference between supposed heroism and forgivable human nature. 

He was a comedian who talked about sex in a way nobody on a public stage had done before. No euphemism or innuendo - lots of four-letter and 12-letter words. He attacked injustice and hypocrisy full blast and lacerated the Catholic church: "Why are there Puerto Ricans starving in New York while Cardinal Spellman was wandering round wearing a $8000 ring?"   You didn't ask questions like that, certainly not on stage. 

Branded a “sick comic” – though it was the sickness of modern society that he was railing about – Lenny was essentially blacklisted from television, but he got booked at ever more prestigious venues.

On February 3, 1961, in the midst of a severe blizzard, he gave a transcendent performance at Carnegie Hall, recorded and later released as a three-disc set, “The Carnegie Hall Concert.“ 

In the words of his biographer Albert Goldman: "he finally reached a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that came from him from out there - from recall, fantasy, prophecy. His tongue would outrun his mind and he would be saying things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up."

It was staggering and it had tremendous impact on later comedians, most notably Robin Williams. The whole modern idiom known as stand-up proceeds down a path opened by Bruce.

 In the fall of 1961, however, Bruce's career would begin its downward spiral. Just a week after being arrested in Philadelphia on a narcotics charge, On October 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity, and also for drug possession.  

Bruce became a target for Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, a staunch Roman Catholic close to the Archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman. After being arrested in Philadelphia for drug possession and in Los Angeles for obscenity, he was arrested twice in New York's Greenwich Village.

At the time, Greenwich Village was a well-known location for artists and free thinkers to gather. During his six-month trial in 1964,Bruce received positive testimony and petitions of support from – among other artists, writers and educators – Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron, James Baldwin, Dorothy Kilgallen and Herbert Gans. Club owners and presenters were often charged as well, for sponsoring “obscene” performances, and gigs started drying up. 

Bruce was found guilty, and sentenced to four months in a workhouse, and he was released on bail during his appeal process (the conviction would be overturned in 1970).

In his television appearances he would include details of his encounters with the police, making them objects of ridicule, ranting against fascism and lack of freedom of speech; this would increase police pressure against him. Bruce was also banned from publicly performing in a number of cities, and due in part to his drug use, was banned from many nightclubs. All  his struggles wore hum down.

He became increasingly agitated and unbalanced. In August 1966 he made his final recording, which began as a microphone test and descended into mad gibberish punctuated by vulgarities. His last performance took place on June 25, 1966, at The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, on a bill with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention.

On August 3, 1966, Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home at 8825 W. Hollywood Blvd. He died of an acute overdose of morphine.In his last days he had experimented with LSD taken sleeping pills, and worried his friends with his heroin abuse. Nobody was in the house when Lenny died. He had been typing—the electric typewriter was on, and he had been in mid-sentence: “Conspiracy to interfere with the fourth amendment const.” 

He was found by his friends, in the bathroom, a needle in his arm. It seemed strange. Lenny would not have simply thrown a sash around his arm and jabbed the needle in. None of the paraphernalia he used to shoot up, including a spoon and matches, were around. When the police arrived, they arranged the body for some photographs and added a few touches—like a box of syringes found under the sink. There remain conflicts between the police reports and eyewitness testimony. Confusion over such basic facts as whether the drug was morphine or heroin, and whether the injection was administered by Lenny (accidentally or as a suicide attempt) or by someone else, have left the death of Lenny Bruce as controversial as his life. 

 His remains were interred in Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, Calif. Dick Schaap eulogized Bruce in Playboy with the memorable line: “One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That’s obscene.”

In a short time after Bruce’s death, he became a folk hero for free speech. Numerous books, articles, films and stage productions have focused on his short but eventful life. He is recognized as a prophetic truth-teller for what he revealed about the contradictions and hypocrisies in American society. 

Since his death, Bruce has been considered an icon of comic social commentary, and an inspiration to many other social commentators.Recognized for his impact on comedy, as well as on censorship and the contours of satire, Bruce was persecuted and prosecuted as he pushed against the limits of free speech and acceptability. Lenny Bruce remains an enigma, a complex character whose place in entertainment and First Amendment history is neither fully understood nor appreciated.

What makes Lenny Bruce’s legacy so unique is that he not only had a deep effect on stand-up, but also the first amendment. He made America re-evaluate what it means to be a truly free nation. For stand-up comedy, he was the first comedian to talk about the harsh realities of life in an open and free manner. This alone paved the way for modern stand-up, where so many comics talk about how they digest the world.

 After his death, he inspired songs by Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, and Simon and Garfunkel. He is also immortalized on the cover of The Beatles iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, joining the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, and Oscar Wilde. Following pressures from fellow comedians, 

In 1971 the Broadway show “Lenny” sparked a Lenny Bruce revival, and in this radical half of the decade, students clamored for the re-issue of his albums, and previously unavailable works. Lenny was nominated for more Grammy awards posthumously than during his lifetime. The 1974 film version of “Lenny” starring Dustin Hoffman brought even more attention to Bruce, along with Albert Goldman’s biography.

The documentary film Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth (1998), directed by Robert B. Weide and narrated by Robert De Niro, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Lenny Bruce paved the way for future outspoken counterculture-era comedians, and his trial is seen as a landmark for freedom of speech in the United States. Obscenity laws loosened in the decades following Lenny’s death. While this wasn’t a direct result of his stage presence, increased discussion surrounding First Amendment rights were certainly triggered by people like Lenny. 

These free speech protections are important because they provide a necessary check against tyrannical state power. Lenny Bruce was a remarkable man who was not afraid  to speak  his mind.At a time when the powers that sought to limit the scope of acceptable discourse. Lenny fought until his last breath for the right to challenge orthodoxy. and the freedom to offend  and help shape and make comedy what it is today: An art form that prides itself on encouraging anyone to say anything. Without him, there would be no Richard Pryors or George Carlins, as the price to be funny would still be insuperably high.

 Unfortunately, Bruce had to pay the highest price for his comedic successors to enjoy the privilege of freely performing. This price, however, was not paid in vain. We now live in a world where the state (at least, in the United States) has no authority to put people in cages for telling jokes,

Lenny Bruce was a man of words. He tested the limits of free speech through his comedy, went to prison and finally died fighting for the freedom of speech that many are still struggling with today. He was a Martyr. His act was declared obscene and he was relentlessly pursued by authorities who sought to stop him. 

 He believed that people give words power and that the words themselves are meaningless. He wanted us to understand that it’s the intention that counts. He challenged us to think more deeply and more honestly. He wanted people to be shocked by corruption, repression, hypocrisy, racism and greed, not by four letter words, labels and sexual references.  In one set he used the N word along with other racist labels, saying the words over and over again to make the point that the words are meaningless unless you give them power. He said that the word that really offended him was ‘segregation’.

Comedians as well as making us laugh serve as  objective, independent, and uncensored reflectors  of society. Because comedians nowadays are willing to express bold opinions about important topics, they introduce us to new ideas and encourage discourse. That wasn’t always the case, If you’re a fan of stand-up comedy, you owe more than you think to Lenny Bruce, If he were around today, no doubt he'd still be telling his offensive, obscene, profanity-peppered truth.

In December 2003, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction, the first such posthumous pardon in New York history. In granting Bruce the unprecedented pardon, Mr Pataki seemed to be in agreement with folk singer Bob Dylan, who wrote, "Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn't commit any crime; he just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time."

Lenny Bruce on the Steve Allen show  April 5 1959

Lenny Bruce - The Truth." 

Lenny Bruce, as shown in the documentary "Swear to Tell the Truth." 

The truth is, what is.  And what should be is a fantasy.  A terrible, terrible lie.  That someone gave the people long ago."  Lenny Bruce