Lenny Bruce

From Philosopedia

Lenny Bruce in 1963, his legal troubles growing

Bruce, Lenny 13 October 1925 - 3 August 1966)

Leonard Alfred Schneider, a controversial American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s, was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York. His parents divorced when he was five, and for a decade he moved in with various relatives. Joining the U. S. Navy at the age of 17 in 1942, he saw active duty in Europe, being discharged in 1946.

In 1947 he used Bruce as a last name, his first break as a stand up performer by doing impressions of movie stars on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts.

Arrested in 1951 for impersonating a priest soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana, he was found not guilty. Later, in a semifictional autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, he reported that he had taken in approximately $8,000 in three weeks and had sent $2,500 to a leper colony.

A cynical, surreal, and intensely comic comedian, Bruce in The Essential Lenny Bruce (1967) is quoted as quipping:

• Christ and Moses standing in the back of St. Pat’s, looking around. Confused. Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rococo baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he was wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained glass window is worth 10 G’s [thousand dollars] a square foot.

A freethinker and non-believer, he joked to those in the audience,

• If anyone in the audience believes that God made your body, and your body is dirty, the fault lies with the manufacturer.

A 1964 television appearance by the “filthy-mouthed” Bruce on the “Steve Allen Show” was censored by the network.

Bruce enjoyed a successful career as a comic but in 1961 was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop i San Francisco, having used the words "cocksucker" and riffing that "to" is a preposition, "come" is a verb," and that the sexual climax of "come" is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, they "probably can't come." The jury acquitted him, his popularity depended partly upon people's delight in hearing what he had to say, and he continued performing, getting arrested, spending time in workhouses.

When at the age of 40 he was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home, lying naked with a pair of trousers around his ankles, the Los Angeles Police Department allowed photographers one hour to shoot Bruce’s body, face down and sprawled in a doorway of his dilapidated home. He was interred in Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, California. Cemetery officials, reading that ads invited attendees to bring box lunches and noisemakers, tried unsuccessfully to keep several hundreds of paying their respects. At the event, sports announcer Dick Schaap eulogized Bruce in Playboy, saying,

• Finally, one last four-letter word concerning Lenny Bruce: Dead. At forty. That's obscene!"

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