The free speech education of Lenny Bruce

I originally met Lenny Bruce in 1959 at the Hotel America in New York. He was scheduled to perform at a midnight show at Town Hall. I had already published an interview with him in The Realist that was conducted by mail, and now I handed him the succeeding issue, which featured an interview with psychologist Albert Ellis, including a discussion of the semantics of profanity. The problem words were spelled out rather than using asterisks or dashes, as was the practice in mainstream media. Bruce had been resorting to euphemisms on stage, and he was amazed that I could get away with it. “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.” Bruce magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and he looked up the word “prurient.”

“Itching,” he mused, “what does that mean, that they can bust a novelty-store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopie cushion?”

I explained, “It’s just their way of saying that something gets you horny.” Bruce closed the dictionary, mock-clenching his jaw and nodding his head in affirmation of a new discovery: “So it’s against the law to get you horny!”

We became friends and, a few years later, when Playboy planned to publish his autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” I was appointed his editor. There have been other books since, but “The Trials of Lenny Bruce,” written by a pair of diligent attorneys, Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, is the first fully recorded history of Bruce’s relationship with the 1st Amendment.

Compared to the traditional stand-up comics of the 1950s who told mysogynist jokes about their wives’ cooking, driving and frigidity, Lenny Bruce was a cultural mutation. With empathetic irreverence, he would create mini-theatrical dialogues -- about racism, sexuality, nuclear testing, teachers’ salaries, drug laws, abortion rights, organized religion -- peppered with improvised spoken-jazz riffs. He loved to play show-and-tell with his audiences. When Gary Cooper died, he brought the New York Daily News on stage to share a headline: “The Last Roundup!” And after he heard “Spanish Harlem” on the radio, he bought the record, came on stage with a phonograph and played it. “Listen to these lyrics,” he said. “This is like a Puerto Rican ‘Porgy & Bess.’ ”

When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election in 1960, a young unknown impressionist, Vaughn Meader, seized the opportunity. He began to comb his hair with a flamboyant pompadour that dipped across his forehead. He consciously regressed to the Boston accent that he had tried so hard to lose. And he produced a comedy album, “The First Family,” that broke sales records and turned him into a star. A week after the assassination of JFK, Lenny Bruce kept his commitment to perform at the Village Theater on the Lower East Side. The country was still in a state of shock, and the atmosphere at the theater was especially tense. The entire audience was anticipating what Bruce would say about the assassination. He walked on stage and removed the microphone from its stand. When the applause for his entrance subsided, he just stood there for several seconds, milking the tension. “Whew!” he finally whistled into the microphone. “Vaughn Meader is screwed.” Although Collins and Skover meticulously researched “The Trials of Lenny Bruce” -- finding the transcripts for each one of the trials took years -- one error via a secondhand source must be acknowledged here. Referring to Bruce’s classic opening line at that post-assassination show, the authors incorrectly write: “With a paranoid fix on the jam-packed audience, he broke the silence: ‘Don’t shoot!’ ”

Although Bruce was arrested several times, ostensibly on obscenity charges, his actual offense was blasphemy, as in his routine “Religions, Inc.,” and he knew it. “The reason I’ve been busted a lot these last couple of years is because of [my] religious point of view. That’s what it’s all been about.” In December 1962, Bruce was performing at the Gate of Horn in Chicago. He had been reading a study of anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he was intrigued by the implications of a statement by Adolf Eichmann, orchestrator of the Holocaust, that he would have been “not only a scoundrel, but a despicable pig” if he hadn’t carried out Hitler’s orders. Bruce wrote a piece for The Realist, “Letter From a Soldier’s Wife” -- namely, Mrs. Eichmann -- pleading for compassion to spare her husband’s life. Now, on stage, he credited Thomas Merton’s poem about the Holocaust, and requested that all the lights go off except one dim blue spot. Then he began what was perhaps his most audacious satire, speaking with a German accent: “My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People say I should have been hung. ‘Nein.’ Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you -- that you would have done the same if you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them? Hiroshima, ‘auf Wiedersehen.’ [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung [President] Truman up by the balls ....”

Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges that night. One of the items in the police report complained: “Then talking about the war he stated, ‘If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.” The head of the vice squad warned the manager of the Gate of Horn: “If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? You’ve had good people here. But he mocks the pope -- and I’m speaking as a Catholic -- I’m here to tell you your license is in danger. We’re going to have someone here watching every show.” Chicago had the largest number of Roman Catholics of any archdiocese in the country. Bruce’s jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and ordered the bailiff to instruct all the others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, every one with a spot of ash on their foreheads, had the surrealistic flavor of a wild Brucean image. In San Francisco, a jury had found Lenny Bruce not guilty of obscenity -- arresting officers admitted on the witness stand that his material didn’t arouse their prurient interest -- but in Chicago, the judge refused to permit that line of cross-examination by the defense. Bruce wondered, “What’s wrong with appealing to the prurient interest? We appeal to the killing interest.”

“I figured out after four years why I got arrested so many times,” Bruce would say. “I do my act at, perhaps, 11 at night; little do I know that 11 a.m. the next morning, before the grand jury somewhere, there’s another guy doing my act who’s introduced as Lenny Bruce in substance.... A peace officer ... does the act. The grand jury watches him work and says, ‘That stinks!’ But I get busted. And the irony is I have to go to court and defend his act.”

Usually, that would consist of a list of offensive words taken out of context. Inspector Herbert S. Ruhe, a former CIA agent in Vietnam, was assigned to monitor Bruce’s show at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. He submitted his notes to Richard H. Kuh, an assistant district attorney, who took the matter directly to Manhattan Dist. Atty. Frank Hogan. Bruce would later comment on Ruhe’s courtroom performance: “This guy is bumbling, and I’m going to jail. He’s not only got it all wrong, but now he thinks he’s a comic. I’m going to be judged on his bad timing, his ego, his garbled language.”

Ruhe also testified that Bruce had engaged in obscene conduct. “Bruce moved the microphone backwards and forwards for a few minutes, something like this” -- simulating a masturbatory act -- “he was making a gesture towards his crotch.” Later, appealing to a three-judge panel, Bruce pleaded: “Your honor, the gestures, masturbations, were gestures of benediction. I did a bit on Catholicism. How perverse [my attorney] would be to defend me for gestures of masturbation. They were meant to be gestures of benediction .... The court hasn’t heard the show .... [P]lease let me testify. Let me tell you what the show is about .... Finally to talk to the court .... Please, your honor, I so desperately want your respect .... Don’t finish me off in show business. Don’t lock up these 6,000 words.”

In an incongruous fantasy at the Au Go Go, Bruce had confessed, “The most beautiful body I’ve ever seen was at a party in 1945. I was in the bedroom getting the coats. The powder-room door had been left intentionally ajar, and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt .... Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen ....” Bruce was arrested for giving an obscene performance, and at the top of the police complaint was “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits.” Ultimately, Bruce fired all his lawyers and defended himself. He was found guilty, even though the law stated that, to be obscene, material must be utterly without any redeeming social importance; thus, if one single person felt that Bruce’s performances had the slightest bit of redeeming social importance -- and there were several who so testified -- then he should have been found not guilty.

Bruce’s most relevant argument concerned the very obscenity statute that he’d been accused of violating. As his legal homework, he had obtained the legislative history of that statute from Albany, and he discovered that in 1931 there had been an amendment proposed that excluded from arrest in an obscene performance: stagehands, spectators, musicians and -- here was the fulcrum of his defense -- actors. The law had been misapplied to him. Despite opposition by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the amendment had finally been signed into law by then-New York Gov. Roosevelt. “Ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” observed Lenny the lawyer, “is a great deal more offensive than saying Eleanor has lovely nay-nays.” Before sentencing, prosecutor Kuh recommended that no mercy be granted because Bruce had shown “a complete lack of any remorse whatsoever.” Bruce responded, “I’m not here for remorse but for justice. The issue is not obscenity but that I spit in the face of authority.” The face of authority spit back at Bruce by sentencing him to four months in the workhouse. In the press room of the Criminal Courts Building, a reporter asked, “Do you believe in obscenity?” Bruce replied, “What do you mean? Do I believe we should pray for obscenity?”

Bruce was a comedic pioneer who only wanted to exercise the same freedom to communicate without compromise on stage that he had in his living room. What’s shocking about “The Trials of Lenny Bruce” is not his utterances so much as the contrast between what he got arrested for and what is now taken for granted by the audiences of talented performers such as George Carlin, Margaret Cho and Chris Rock, and in the critical reception of such taboo-breaking cable-TV series as “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under.” Today, Robin Williams freely pantomimes cunnilingus, and the cable-TV series “South Park” proudly presents a sponsored, highly scatological episode about priestly child abuse. Bruce realized that prosecutors and judges were more interested in the advancement of their own careers than in his free-speech rights. In fact, wrote Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, “Three lawyers in Kuh’s bureau, appalled at Bruce being set up ... begged Kuh to hear Bruce for himself, and then decide whether Bruce ought to be busted. Kuh ... refused, adding, ‘Stay out of this unless you want to be switched to the rackets bureau.’ ” And, according to one attorney, “After the trial of Bruce was over, I had a call from Judge Creel, who ... said Judge Phipps also wanted to acquit Bruce but that [Chief] Judge Murtagh threatened to assign him to traffic court for the rest of his term if he did.” In a documentary about Hogan, the New York district attorney, former Asst. Dist. Atty. Vincent Cuccia confessed: “[Bruce] was prosecuted because of his words. He didn’t harm anybody, he didn’t commit an assault, he didn’t steal, he didn’t engage in any conduct which directly harmed someone else. So therefore he was punished first and foremost because of the words that he used. It’s wrong to prosecute anybody because of his ideas. It was the only thing I did in Hogan’s office that I’m really ashamed of. We drove him into poverty and used the law to kill him.”

“The date of Lenny Bruce’s death,” in 1966, the authors of “The Trials of Lenny Bruce” conclude, “is as good a marker as any of the moment when words alone -- any performance words spoken in comedy clubs -- ceased to be targets of prosecution.” The book comes with an CD containing relevant excerpts from interviews and Bruce’s performances, ranging from his poetic descriptions (a judge with “thick fingers and the homemade glass eye”) to his bit about prosecutors using in court the same words that Bruce got arrested for: “[Bruce] said ‘blah-blah-blah’ -- then I dug something -- they liked saying ‘blah-blah-blah.’ ” Moreover, hidden in the gray attache case that Bruce always carried into court was a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, which captured Kuh reveling in those words as he cross-examined witnesses for the defense.

“The Trials of Lenny Bruce” serves as the missing link between two of Bruce’s statements: “In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.” And, “I love the law.” Indeed, as club owners became increasingly afraid to hire him, he devoted more and more time and energy to the law, and when he finally got a booking in Monterey, he admitted, “I feel like it’s taking me away from my work.”