Whether on stage or in court, Lenny Bruce broke comedy barriers speaking the unspeakable

By Michael Menta

Comic, “vomic,” prophet, blasphemer, moral equalizer and self-professed money-hungry hypocrite: who the hell was Lenny Bruce? He was the quintessential “sick comic” in the 50s and 60s who used vulgarity and taboo subjects to shock laughs out of the audience; a drug addict who rambled about judges and cops in a nasally Long Island drawl; a hipster who improvised his jokes like a jazz genius. And, of course, he was funny.

Every sphere of conventional wisdom was fodder for a Lenny Bruce routine: race (”How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties”), religion (If Jesus was killed today, Christians would wear electric chairs on their necks), sex (a husband caught cheating with live poultry), and language (“To is a preposition, come is a verb”).

Despite the breadth of his performances, Bruce’s lasting fame has been reduced to his arrests over obscenity charges. Sprinkling his acts with language anticipating George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words,” Bruce’s offensive reputation surpassed fellow sick comics like Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters. David Skover, co-author of “The Trials of Lenny Bruce,” says that Bruce’s “fame, his fortune, and ultimately his life were paid up so that comics from Robin Williams to Margaret Cho would have the freedom that he never had.”

But Bruce was never completely altruistic. He says in “The Trials of Lenny Bruce”: “I really don’t want to be the great wounded bird, flying and trying to break through those weights so we can bring free expression to everybody. I’m a guy who has to work.” Still, he gleefully exposed hypocrisies in “the Establishment.” Like Cool Hand Luke, he was “a natural-born world-shaker.”

Bruce was born in 1925 (with the none-too-world-shaking name of Leonard Alfred Schneider) in suburban Mineola, Long Island. After World War II, he finished a directionless stint in the navy with a calculated discharge: dressing in women’s clothing. It was shortly after his return to Long Island that his comic career began. His mother was performing in a cabaret act that lost its emcee. Bruce stepped in and, after shrugging off his first heckler to laughter, became addicted.

Over the next five years, Bruce worked as a comic in amateur joints and nabbed his first television appearance in 1949 on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Show.” Not quite big time, but enough notoriety to earn him about $450 a week from various clubs (for comparison, school teachers made about $4,000 annually.) He met and married stripper Honey Harlowe in 1951 and forever doomed himself to an increasingly tumultuous personal life.

Bruce always knew about humanity’s dirty fringes, but it was only in 1953, when he moved to playing strip clubs in Las Vegas, that he could finally talk about it. His raunchy, unfiltered style matured. Bruce was poised for the most successful period of his life.

In 1959, Bruce appeared on both the first episode of TV’s “Playboy’s Penthouse” in 1959 and on NBC’s mainstream hit, “The Steve Allen Show.” May of 1959 saw his first major profile in the New York Times, where Gilbert Millstein called him a “scarifyingly funny proponent of significance, all social and some political.” In July, Time magazine unaffectionately anointed Bruce a “sicknik;” something like a beatnik with potty-mouthed logorrhea.

In October, 1961, he was arrested in San Francisco for saying “cocksucker” in his act. He beat the case, but Bruce had to contend with police monitoring his performances from then on, until his final arrest at the Café au Go Go in New York in 1964, again due to obscenity. By then, he was virtually unhirable anywhere outside of San Francisco.

He was arrested so often that he became annoyed, then bored, then obsessed with the law. His amateur legal expertise bled heavily into his act, and soon the rambling improvisations he did were just riffs on his own trials. Before he died of a morphine overdose on August 3, 1966, the forty-year-old Lenny had become a recluse.

“Where he says, ‘I’m not a comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce,’ that meant to me that he realized he had become a symbol,” says Paul Krassner, Bruce’s close friend and co-author of Bruce’s autobiography. Despite consciously courting his succès de scandale—he titled one album “The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce”—the scrutiny of true fame was everything and much more than he ever wanted.

Though George Carlin and Richard Pryor carried his legacy of needle-sharp social criticism, Bruce’s fame will probably remain in drugs and obscenity. He was the iconic iconoclast; a paradox he probably would have despised, loved and mined for comedy. “Fame itself was not the cause of his problems,” Krassner wrote in an email, “but rather it was the ambition of those who prosecuted him, knowing that his fame would rub off on their careers. Lenny understood the game quite well.”