Profile of Lenny Bruce on Famous Like Me

Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was a controversial Jewish-American stand-up comedian and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s.

Overview

Bruce, like his contemporary Mort Sahl, helped change stand-up comedy from the practice of telling jokes to a more daring and experimental form of entertainment.

His routines took the form of stories, skits, and commentary, often venturing into subject areas considered profane, obscene and otherwise controversial. His penchant for material with high shock value caused his career to be plagued by constant trouble with the law. His obscenity trials are now considered to be significant benchmarks in the case for preservation of First Amendment freedoms.

Bruce was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York. He served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1945. Two years later, he changed his name from Leonard Schneider to Lenny Bruce. In 1951 he was arrested in Miami, Florida for impersonating a priest. He was soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana after he legally chartered the "Brother Mathias Foundation" (a name of his own invention), and, unknown to the police, stole several priest's clergy shirts and a clerical collar while posing as a laundry man. He was found not guilty due to the legality of the NY state-chartered foundation, the actual existence of the Guiana leper colony, and the inability of local clergy to expose him as an imposter. Later in his autobiography, he revealed that he had made approximately $8,000 in three weeks, sending $2,500 to the leper colony and keeping the rest.

Bruce's early comedy career including writing the screenplays for "Dance Hall Racket" 1953 (which featured Lenny and his wife, Honey Harlow, in roles); "Dream Follies" 1954, a low-budget burlesque romp; and a children's film, "The Rocket Man" 1954. He also released four albums of original material, with rants, comic routines and satirical interviews on the themes that made him famous: jazz, moral philosophy, politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, Jewishness, and the Roman Catholic Church. These albums were later compiled and re-released as The Lenny Bruce Originals.

His growing fame led to an appearance on the nationally televised Steve Allen Show. On February 3, 1961, in the midst of a severe blizzard, he gave an historic performance at Carnegie Hall in New York. Recorded and later released as a double-disc set, the Carnegie Hall Concert was considered by many to be the zenith of his creative powers; critic Albert Goldman described it as follows:

"This was the moment that an obscure yet rapidly rising young comedian named Lenny Bruce chose to give one of the greatest performances of his career... The performance contained in this album is that of a child of the jazz age. Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head just as it came into head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind, pure head sending out brainwaves like radio waves into the heads of every man and woman seated in that vast hall. Sending, sending, sending, he would finally reach a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that just came to him from out there - from recall, fantasy, prophecy. A point at which, like the practitioners of automatic writing, his tongue would outrun his mind and he would be saying things he didn't plan to say, things that surprised, delighted him, cracked him up - as if he were a spectator at his own performance!"

Trials and Tribulations

In 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the words cocksucker and to come (for orgasm). Although the jury acquitted him, other communities began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity. The increased scrutiny also led to an arrest in Philadelphia for drug possession in the same year, and again in Los Angeles, California two years later.

By the end of 1963, he had become a target of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, who was working closely with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York. In 1964, he appeared at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. Shortly after he left the stage, he was arrested; the complaint again rested on his use of various obscenities. Three judges and no jury presided over his widely-publicized six-month-long trial. Lenny Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon were convicted, in spite of positive testimony and petitions of support from Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin as well as Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced to four months in the workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon's conviction was eventually overturned by New York's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, in 1970.

In his later performances, Bruce was known for relating the details of his encounters with the police directly in his comedy routine; his criticism encouraged the police to eye him with maximum scrutiny. These performances often included rants about his court battles over obscenity charges, tirades against fascism and complaints of his denial of his right to free speech.

He was banned outright from several U.S. cities, and in 1962 he was banned from performing in Australia, having already commenced a tour there. By 1966 he had been blacklisted by nearly every comedy club in the U.S., as owners feared prosecution for obscenity. His last performance was on June 26, 1966 at the Fillmore in San Francisco, on a bill with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention.

At the request of Hugh Hefner, Bruce (with the aid of Paul Krassner) wrote his autobiography, which was serialized in Playboy in 1964 and 1965, and later published as the book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

In 1966, Lenny Bruce was found dead at the age of 40 from a self-administered morphine overdose, in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. He is interred in the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.

Bruce was survived by his daughter Kitty Bruce, who now resides in Pennsylvania. His former wife, Honey Harlow Friedman lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, until her death on September 12, 2005. His mother, Sally Marr, a comedienne and talent agent, died on December 14, 1997, in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

Posthumous Credits

In 1971 one of his comedy routines was developed into a short animated film, Thank You Masked Man (often cited as "Thank You, Mask Man") which parodied The Lone Ranger. Bruce received credit for co-writing and co-directing this seven minute cartoon and providing his unique narration which included all of the voice characterizations.

The 1974 film Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman, presents a dramatized account of Bruce's life. Eddie Izzard portrayed the comedian in the 1991 stage show Lenny. Similarly, the comedian inspired songs by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Nico, Chumbawamba, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, R.E.M., Steve Earle, and Genesis.

The 1998 documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell the Truth, written and directed by Robert B. Weide, was nominated for an Oscar. Robert De Niro provided the narration.

In response to a petition filed by Ron Collins and David Skover, on December 23, 2003, Lenny Bruce was posthumously pardoned by New York Republican Governor George Pataki for the obscenity conviction arising from his New York appearance. It was the first posthumous pardon in the state's history. Pataki called his decision "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment."

In 2004, Bruce was voted #3 of the "Greatest Standup Comedians of All Time" by Comedy Central behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin. He was also the subject of a six CD retrospective entitled Let The Buyer Beware, overseen by record producer Hal Willner.

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