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Tuesday, December 23, 2003
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MERRY CHRISTMAS, LENNY
"I have this dream where President Kennedy goes on television and says, 'My fellow Americans, tonight I'd like to introduce you to all the niggers in my administration. Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!' Then maybe, just maybe, a 5 year old black kid wouldn't run home crying when some redneck calls him a nigger."
Lenny Bruce wasn't so much a comedian in the traditional sense as he was a revolutionary of the form. He didn't have an "act." There was no set form to a performance, although he became famous for a very few set pieces such as "The Palladium", "Tits n' Ass" and "To is a Proposition, Come is a Verb." For the most part, Lenny Bruce was more like a free-form jazz musician than a comedian as comedians were then known. He would go on stage and see where his mood took him. Sometimes he was brilliant. Sometimes, particularly in the last 18 months of his life, he was horribly bad.
Lenny Bruce didn't want to make you laugh so much as he wanted you to think. He wanted his audience to see the hypocracies in modern life. He used "dirty words" as a means to do this. His forays into sexual politics and social interaction included words that shocked the staid mores of the early-to-mid sixties. For the words he used, Lenny Bruce was prosecuted relentlessly. Some would argue that he was prosecuted to death.
Lenny Bruce was also what would today be called a junkie. He was arrested on occassion for drug possession, prosecuted and convicted. Through his drug arrests, he always maintained his professionalism. He didn't miss shows and he was often better stoned than not. It was when he began to be prosecuted for his words that he spiralled out of control. His drug intake escalated and his perfornances grew scattershot, often consisting of nothing more than reading from, and arguing with, a trial transcript.
In the period from 1964-66, Bruce was on trial in multiple jurisdictions for obscenity, often at the same time. It became impossible for him to work as nightclub owners became afraid of themselves being prosecuted. For nothing more than words. Words that most of you use in everyday conversation. Words that I throw around on this blog without a second thought. At one point, Lenny Bruce was looking at several years in prison for the use of the word "cocksucker" during a public performance before a paying audience of adults. The world would be a very different place today were it not for Lenny Bruce. This may sound like a trite and overdramitic thing to say, but in a lot of ways, Lenny Bruce died for your freedom.
New York was one of the jurisdictions where Lenny Bruce was arrested, tried and convicted for obscenity. Today, Governor George Pataki granted the first posthumous pardon in the history of the state of New York onto Leonard Alfred Schneider, AKA Lenny Bruce. Pataki, in his proclomation of pardon stated that it was "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment." Hopefully, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California will follow suit.
Merry Christmas, Lenny.
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