October 13 marked the centennial of the birth of Lenny Bruce, a trailblazing comedian of the 1950s and '60s whose name has resurfaced in recent years after he was portrayed on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
His no-sacred-cows approach to comedy led him to be lumped among the "sick comics," a subgenre of comedy that blossomed at the height of the Cold War. Worse for him, it also meant that he was arrested time and again for supposed "obscenity" in his comedy routines. In today's free-for-all cross-platform environment for comedy of all sorts, it's hard to imagine, perhaps, a time when a comedian would've been persecuted by the police for the supposed obscenity of his material.
His material was, in fact, "blue," as the term went, meaning he used profanity where appropriate, including Yiddishisms such as "schmuck," "putz," and "tuchus." But, more than that, his targets were not the hoary standbys of standup comics—battleaxe mothers-in-law, nagging wives, stupid kids—but, as noted, previously untouchable figures and topics such as the police, the president of the United States, the Catholic Church, sex, racism, organized religion, homosexuality, the Vietnam War.
This, more than anything else, put him in the Establishment's sights, and, after years of arrests and trials for obscenity, punctuated by occasional arrests for narcotics possession, Bruce was worn down, bankrupted, and, finally, marginalized. He OD'd and died in 1966 at the age of 40.
In later years, George Carlin and Richard Pryor were the most prominent of the many comedians who acknowledged their debt to Lenny Bruce, whose efforts made every topic under the sun fair game for comedy and criticism.
Because Bruce's humor was often extremely topical and allusive, playing either off the news items of the day back in the mid/late '50s and early '60s or off the storehouse of prewar and wartime B-movie, old-time radio, vaudeville, and theater trivia in Bruce's head, it can seem impenetrable to a 21st-century audience. I didn't include one of his best-known bits, Father Flotsky's Triumph, for that reason, as it starts with a recitation of '30s and '40s actors and actresses whom he's "casting" in his imaginary prison drama.
Instead, a trio of relatively more-timeless short bits that address, respectively, racism, sex, and pop culture:
How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties
To Is a Preposition, Come Is a Verb
Lenny Bruce's life has been depicted in a variety of media, starting with the 1971 play Lenny, in which Cliff Gorman played Bruce.
Then, most notably, in a 1974 film adaptation of the play, directed by Bob Fosse, with Dustin Hoffman as Bruce (in 1979's All That Jazz, Roy Scheider as Fosse is depicted as having completed The Stand-Up, a similar film starring…Cliff Gorman):
And an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary narrated by Robert DeNiro:
Finally, Hugh Hefner prevailed upon Bruce to write an autobiography, which he did in serialized form for Playboy, the compiled version then called How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a riff on Dale Carnegie's hugely popular 1936 self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Here's the first page of Chapter One:
Even had he survived his travails and lived into the freewheeling age of comedy that his efforts engendered, Bruce would've turned 100 this year. While we can't know the odds of that having happened, I think the times in which we live need a lot more Lenny Bruce and a lot less Riyadh Comedy Festival.
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