I know what you're probably thinking: Lenny Bruce has been dead for fifty years (this August 3 will mark that anniversary). Why such a headline, as if his passing is still news? Why two posts about a comedian fewer and fewer people remember, and who, when he was still relevant, was thorn in the Church's side?
The answer to the first question is contained in the preceding post: I'm not writing of the Leonard Albert Schneider of history, who indeed died in 1966. I'm writing of the Lenny Bruce of faith, who's memory and cause lived for decades, but has now been killed by the heirs of the very counter-culture who once used his name as a synonym for freedom of speech. The radical activists of today line up on the same side of the issues as Bruce did, but instead of having blunt conversations over uncomfortable topics, they want to shut off conversation that violates their emotional safe space. They are guilty of the very heresy Bruce preached against: making certain words taboo, thus giving them the unnecessary power to wound.
As for his ongoing popularity, or lack there of, Lenny Bruce is one of those artists who's influence is greater than his personal success. Few people know who Gram Parsons was, but without him you probably wouldn't have had country rock. The same can be said of The MC 5 and The New York Dolls, who were forerunners of punk. As he predicted, Orson Welles has been revered in death, but wasn't respected in Hollywood during his life. It took at least a decade for critics to come around to recognizing Citizen Kane (1941) as a game changing masterpiece, and he spent most of the rest of his career fighting for artistic control of his films, struggling to find work and financing both inside and outside the system. But without him there's no film noir, and probably not as much non-linear story telling in movies.
But the Lenny Bruce of faith is about more than just making the world safe for Sarah Silverman. He's one of those cultural figures who came to prominence in the '60's, didn't survive the decade, but who's shadow was cast long and tall over the culture in general for decades. He has influenced our attitudes toward free speech and artistic expression whether we know it or not. He was commenting on race and war when it was unpopular to do so, and on gay rights, albeit somewhat cryptically, before it was on the general public's radar. So he is still important, maybe more important today than before because the cause of free speech he suffered for is in danger again.
I ended the last post wondering what Lenny Bruce would think if he visited a college campus today - as he once mused about a fictional visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral by Christ and Moses. Unlike the Biblical visitors, he might be happy with what he sees. In many ways his side did win: it's hard to deny that the majority of college professors are the spiritual descendants of the Lenny Bruce of faith. The academy, as well as the entertainment industry, is safe to champion the cause of minorities, be they ethnic, cultural or sexual. I'm sure Bruce would approve of the inclusion and tolerance for those on the cultural margins presently found in most universities.
But now the tables are turned. Those who were once the "mad ones" of Kerouac's On the Road are now controlling the leavers of the institutional machine that free speech activist Mario Savio said needed to be laid upon and jammed. Those who were sitting in in 1968 educated the next generation of the establishment. Through them old orthodoxies have given way to new, and are defended with more rigger than what came before. If Lenny Bruce came back what would he think of the fact that words he used to spin into a stream of consciousness poem of irony and satire are now forbidden? What would he think that any reference to race or gender or sexual orientation that doesn't comply with strict speech codes can get the speaker put in front of human rights commissions? What would he think that stand up comics, most of whom draw their material from what they observe, are more and more abandoning the college circuit because their observations, no matter how innocuous, are sometimes condemned as offensive?
The answer to this question depends on if the Lenny Bruce of faith is the same as the Leonard Schneider of history. I do believe speech codes and safe spaces violates the spirit of the Lenny Bruce of faith. I don't know enough about the man to say what the flesh and blood Leonard Schneider would say. Many who did know him and defended him, people as diverse as George Carlin, Steve Allen and Dorothy Kilgallen, are gone. Maybe Mort Sahl could answer the question. Would Lenny Bruce be content that his side won, so let the losers roast? Is this really all about power, and since the power is in the hands of progressives they can limit speech as they see fit? Even though I disagree with many things he said, particularly about the Catholic Church, I'd hate to think the flesh and blood man who suffered so much for the cause of free speech only wanted it for himself, and his comrades.
As for his swipes at the Church, I'm a bit philosophical. When asked once if he was familiar with Bruce's Christ and Moses at St. Pat's routine, Archbishop Sheen, one of the targets in the one man sketch, claimed not to know who Lenny Bruce was, let alone heard the bit. His shots against the Church, and even his own religious tradition, weren't necessarily new, it's just the first time anyone even remotely main stream expressed them publicly. Fulton Sheen and Cardinal Spellman, another object of Bruce's scorn, weren't harmed, and probably were unaware that they were being ridiculed. St. Patrick's is still standing on 5th Avenue, between 50th and 51st streets. The Catholic Church goes on. As I wrote before, there is truth to the routine that should serve as an examination of conscience for Catholics, and even if he was being unjust, we should be unafraid of words: the Church has suffered worse in her history.
I believe the most difficult commandment that Jesus gave us to follow is the call to love our enemies. I don't think this command requires us to be passive doormats, though. We should answer thoughtfully, and if we can, wittily, and always with charity. But we need the opportunity to answer back. My worry is that the ability to speak freely is being suppressed, ironically, in the name of inclusiveness and tolerance. This is the death knell of a free society, and I know this contravenes the tenets that the Lenny Bruce of faith promoted. I don't condemn, I don't come to bury his memory. I come to lament the death of a rhetorical enemy, knowing that his passing hurts all of us. It's more than about the passing of a man in time, or his memory from the collective consciousness: in this case it's about the death of a powerful idea, and all of us being able to freely express ours.
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.
