Fifty years on, why we shouldn’t forget Lenny Bruce

Bruce arrested in 1961 WIKI COMMONS PHOTO

“His humour on the stage rarely evoked a comfortable belly laugh,” the New York Times published 50 years ago, on Aug. 3, 1966, in an obituary for comedian Lenny Bruce. “It required concentration, and then often produced a wry smile and perhaps a fighting gleam in the eye. There were also spells of total confusion as Mr. Bruce rambled in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.”

A lot has changed in the half-century since Bruce’s accidental overdose, but his legacy – that Times description – is not among them. If his show was uncomfortable and meandering in the early 1960s, by 2016 he may as well have been speaking Elizabethan English.

But that’s not an excuse to forget what he stood for.

Bruce became famous for pushing political and legal boundaries. He was the first truly crass comic, imagining conversations about Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts and JFK shouting the N word until it “didn’t mean anything anymore.”

His intentions were good, his ideas progressive. Being Jewish worked for him twofold: it boosted his accessibility during the Borscht Belt’s heydays, and it earned him political solidarity with segregated blacks, criminalized gays and oppressed women against the puritan mainstream.

Though he died at 40, he arguably accomplished what he was born to do. The jury at his first trial, in 1961, acquitted him of obscenity charges for saying “c–ksucker” onstage. His legal precedents paved the way for George Carlin, Louis C.K., Bill Hicks and every other foul-mouthed, angry comic who started working after Bruce to coast on the freedom he paved with his blood and bankruptcy.

Yet despite Bruce’s legacy as one of the world’s most important comics (he ranked third on a vaguely definitive 2004 Comedy Central list of Top 100 Comics), he’d never rank on the public’s favourite list – people either don’t know who he is or just don’t get him. As Canadian culture critic Will Sloan wrote in the online magazine Hazlitt, “I want to be generous to Bruce, because he was exploring uncharted territory… But after listening to nearly all of his extant work, I must conclude that a lot of what we’re left with is simply not good.”

I sympathize, both as someone who likes comedy and as a Jew. It’s hard for anyone born after the 1970s to understand why Lenny Bruce was considered funny. He would rant onstage about race, politics and his own legal troubles for minutes without a laugh from the audience. By the time he died, most venues wouldn’t hire him because undercover cops might be hiding in the audience, waiting to bust him and the club owner. According to the Times obituary, he’d earned $108,000 before the court cases, and by 1964 expected to make just $6,000.

So he died poor, drug-addicted, divorced, misunderstood and largely hated. For half a century, his memory, at least, was treated as that of a martyr for the sake of American free speech. Now that we take free speech for granted – to the extent that progressives argue over Twitter about whether we’ve gone too far, whether taboo topics like rape and obesity are ever funny, and whether, as Brian Moylan wrote in Time, “‘offensive’ is the new ‘obscene’” – Bruce’s sacrifice is dangerously close to being forgotten. If he were alive today, it wouldn’t be the criminal court accosting him, but the people’s court online.

As Bruce slides into a distant memory, though, it’s important to remember context. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, at one of the 1964 trials, explained that Bruce and other “sick comics” worked during “the reign of president Eisenhower and McCarthyism, when nobody was saying anything. They were making human and political commentaries that could not be published in this country. But in the nightclubs, the small nightclubs, these people could perform and perfect their art, simply because nobody other than the audience was paying attention.”

Different audience, different venue. Lenny Bruce wasn’t talking to us. So I’ll admit I don’t always get him – but I don’t want to forget him, either.