Lenny Bruce is Dead

A while back I wrote a couple of posts on secular saints: dead celebrities who enjoy post mortem fame that is sometimes even greater than what they had in life - a phenomenon that seems to invert the veneration we give to the saints of the Church. One of these dead celebrities that has reached cult status since he shuffled off this mortal coil, but who I failed to mention, was the comedian Lenny Bruce (1925-1966) (born Leonard Alfred Schneider). I think he didn't leap to my mind at the time because, of all these departed celebrities, while he is quite possibly the most revered, he is ironically the least well known. People will walk around with an image of Marilyn Monroe or Bob Marley on their cloths, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone wear a Lenny Bruce T-shirt in my life. Part of this is because he wasn't apart of the visual media like a Monroe or Elvis Presley were. He didn't have a movie career, and was on Television only sparingly, so there aren't a lot of photo images or video clips that became indelibly marked into the popular culture that could them be turned into a shirt or a poster. 

The other reason, not unrelated, is that even during his life relatively few people actually saw him perform. The lack of movie and TV exposure was one reason, but the other was that his act was so edgy for it's time he eventually couldn't get gigs in night clubs, let alone land a part in mainstream entertainments, and recordings of his shows only got widely circulated in the years following his death. He was arrested for obscenity on numerous occasions, and eventually local police departments applied pressure to club owners not to book him. At least one who did lost his liquor license in retribution. Even his fellow entertainers seemed to keep him at arms length. As Richard Corliss implied in a tribute on the 40th anniversary of Bruce's death, he was only really embraced as a cause célèbre after he died. 

In spite of maintaining only a cult following on both sides of death, he undoubtedly changed the art of stand up comedy for good: no Lenny Bruce - then no George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Sam Kinison Chris Rock, Louis CK or any number of other stand up comics that followed, or at least they wouldn't have plied their trade in quite the same way. All owe something to Bruce, especially George Carlin, and consciously or not they have kept his memory and cause alive.

Bruce's cause does indeed live on, but it isn't disseminated so much by way of officially licensed products hocked to keep his heirs solvent, but as an idea, a symbol employed by artists of various stripes. Since he died the mention Lenny Bruce's name in songs, poems and screenplays has been a metaphor for freedom of artistic expression, and the unjust persecution often suffered by it's most zealous practitioners. He represents rebellion against authority, especially organized religion, especially the Catholic Church: he was a punk rock comedian a decade before there was such a thing as punk rock. 

Lenny Bruce means provocation, not simply shock, as some of his contemporary critics contended. Redd Foxx or Buddy Hackett used profanity and told off color jokes, but Bruce was telling a morality tale in blue. The thing is, it wasn't about profanity for profanity's sake. He wanted to push buttons about race, politics, freedom of speech and religious hypocrisy, and the four letter words were punctuations or crescendos to make sure the audience wasn't missing the point. He always had his finger firmly poised on the rhetorical trigger and he never hesitated to pull it without warning. 

Lenny Bruce means not allowing the listener any safe spaces. Lenny Bruce means that being a liberal isn't enough, because even liberals can use high minded, yet detached sanctimony to hide their bourgeois racism. The name Lenny Bruce means all this and more when it is proclaimed. His true disciples have always been a relative few, all the same they've been completely devoted to spreading his gospel.

The premise of this gospel is simple: words have no meaning apart from that which we give them. It's the suppression of the word, making it taboo, that gives it its power. If these words, those harsh racial slurs and gay invectives that we now only refer to by their initials, are used regularly, as we would some innocuous phrases, and we use them constantly and without remorse, they will eventually lose their meaning, becoming completely harmless. In which case, no one would be offended, children particularly, when someone calls them a name. 

In many ways Lenny Bruce's gospel did convert the culture, even though Bruce himself didn't live to see the triumph. Yet I would argue that the victory was only partial. It is true that in the decade after his death comedy, as with all forms of popular entertainment, got more raw, more edgy, more politically charged. The use of profanity and nudity in mainstream films, for instance, became normal, practically required. Martin Scorsese recounted once that in the late 1960's he was told by a producer that he needed to add a nude scene to his film or it wouldn't get released, where as only a year or two before he would have been told to cut such a scene out. Comics like Carlin and Pryor, whose acts before Bruce's death were conventional enough to them get booked on the Ed Sullivan Show, saw their routines get decidedly more politicized, sexualized, and verbally uninhibited. 

While those comics were clearly walking in the path Lenny Bruce had blazed, the generations that followed used the liberties that were won, but put them to no great purpose. Now it really is just a matter of using "naughty words" and sexual humor to shock or to excite, not to enlighten or sting the conscience. I've read and heard people try to explain the deeper meaning of Seth Rogen or Judd Apatow, but all I see are adults stuck in 8th grade, showing off the new words that they learned, basking in the novelty of breaking some low level taboos. Bruce used all those words then that they do now, all the prepositions and all the verbs, as well as nouns and adjectives, but to challenge the notions and sacred beliefs of a nation, not just get a cheap laugh. 

And what about the idea that insults and epithets will lose their meaning when used often enough? These words are more verboten now than ever. Not that I think the they should be common place, but its the reason that they are effectively banned from public discourse that's so curious. It's one thing to say that they shouldn't be said in anger, but they can't even be said in irony. Many comics today, like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have abandoned the college campus, the very place where freedom of expression should thrive, because of the politically correct atmosphere that prevails. Making references to race, politics, gender or sexual orientation that doesn't fit into a very strict orthodoxy can cause an event to be canceled or shut down by protesters. Is this what Lenny Bruce died for, if like many of his followers, you believe he died as a martyr to freedom of expression?

As Corliss goes to great lengths to describe in his piece, many of Bruce's most relentless persecutors were Catholic cops and judges who took offense at his swipes at the Church. If Catholics failed to heed the Master's call to turn the other cheek, if they used their public authority to seek retribution against a perceived enemy they were called to love, then all they did was prove the hypocrisy Bruce accused them of. Did he take some cheap shots at the Church? I believe so. Was his routine about Christ and Moses paying a surprise visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral a brilliant piece of satire that can serve as an examination of conscience for believers (as well as being just flat out funny)? You bet. But in so constricting what can be said, what opinions can be spoken, what expression is acceptable the modern politically correct police have managed to do something their Catholic counterpart was never able to do: they've killed Lenny Bruce the idea.

If Lenny Bruce payed a surprise visit to a college campus today what would he think? Would he think his gospel was alive? Would he think we are more free to speak our minds than in his day? Would he think all that he suffered for his art, and for his beliefs, were worth while or done in vain? Would he even be allowed to do his act?

I believe that his was a highly flawed gospel, especially his tenet concerning how words function. But he did stand for something important and it's sad to see it was all washed away by the very people who should have preserved his legacy. It's sad to see that the hypocrisy is now coming from those who claim the high ground.