In the comments section attached to a Lenny Bruce video on YouTube someone has accused the stand-up of being anti-Semitic and a “life hating Christian monster”.
Since Bruce, who was born Leonard Alfred Schneider on 13 October 1925, died at the age of forty due to a drug overdose they might partially have a legitimate, if insensitive, point to make with the latter charge. However, the former indicates the late satirist’s work continues to be misunderstood nearly forty-one years after his death. After abandoning a more conventional style of humour that consisted of impersonations and bird calls, the Jewish comedian adopted a digressive and hip act that was full of political insights and what was viewed by some as vulgarity. According to the biographer Albert Goldman, “Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman.”
Predating by decades those activists who reclaim terms like “queer” to subvert their negative connotations, Bruce’s routines were also replete with words like “kike” and “nigger”.
The play that was written about the New Yorker features him making the following statement during a gig:
If President Kennedy would just go on television and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet”, and if he’d just say “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” to every nigger he saw, “boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” ‘til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.
While Bruce’s analysis seems rather naive given he was performing at a time when African-Americans were still fighting for basic rights, he had a sharp understanding of the power of language and who benefits from certain words being judged to be offensive.
“Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government”, he argued.
He also understood that minorities suffered because things that should have been thought indecent were not.
On the Steve Allen Show in the late 1950s, Bruce, in a rambling and only occasionally funny monologue, maintained that “segregation” and “shows that exploit homosexuality, narcotics and prostitution under the guise of helping these societal problems” were odious to him.
Naturally the powers that be did not agree with his opinion.
In the ensuing years, Bruce found himself in strife on eight occasions for saying, among other things, “cocksucker” and “where is that dwarf mother-fucker?”
Lenny, the 1974 movie that starred Dustin Hoffman as Bruce, suggested that the drug busts he was also subject to were part of a broader plot to ruin his career.
Although the legend of Bruce as a free speech champion whose drug use worsened as his problems with the system increased contains a considerable amount of truth, it is obvious from old television footage that he was taking dope prior to his celebrated run-ins with the law (before he was famous Bruce was arrested for pretending to be a priest for the purposes of persuading people to donate to a “charity”).
Even if Bruce’s notoriety ensured he found a larger audience, his later shows – when he could find a club that would employ him – were little more than him reading and responding to transcripts from his trials.
In an article on “Salon.com”:http://archive.salon.com/opinion/freedom/2003/08/26/lennybruce/ that discussed Bruce’s obscenity woes and recent attempts to limit individual freedoms in the United States, Gary Kamiya contended that “(the comic) makes a very difficult martyr – he was too irascible, too self-destructive, too perverse, too unclassifiable. But he was a martyr nonetheless – a heartbreakingly vulnerable renegade who was broken by the final tail-fish of the dying dragon of American Puritanism.”
Lenny Bruce passed away on 3 August 1966.