October 13th Birthday

Lenny Bruce



October 13, 1925 to August 3, 1966. Born Leonard Alfred Schneider, he was an American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist during the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1947, Lenny earned $12 and a free spaghetti dinner for his first stand-up performance in Brooklyn, New York. From that modest start, he got his first break as a guest (and introduced by his mother, who called herself "Sally Bruce") on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts show, doing a routine that involved a "Bavarian mimic" of American movie stars (e.g., Humphrey Bogart).

In 1951, he was arrested in Miami, Florida, for impersonating a priest while soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana after he legally chartered the "Brother Mathias Foundation" (a name of his own invention—but possibly taken from the actual Brother Matthias who had befriended Babe Ruth at the orphanage to which Ruth had been confined as a child), and, unknown to the police, stole several priests' clergy shirts and a clerical collar while posing as a laundry man. He was found not guilty due to the legality of the New York state-chartered foundation, the actual existence of the Guiana leper colony, and the inability of the local clergy to expose him as an impostor. Later in his semifictional autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” (1963), he revealed that he had made approximately $8,000 in three weeks, sending $2,500 to the leper colony and keeping the rest.

Lenny’s comedy originally became famous though through his recordings under the Fantasy Label. He released four albums that included rants, comic routines, and satirical interviews on the themes that made him famous including jazz, moral philosophy, politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jewishness.

Influential San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was one of his earliest supporters and he wrote about Lenny in 1959:

“They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic, and sick he is. Sick of all the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful. He is a rebel, but not without a cause, for there are shirts that need un-stuffing, egos that need deflating. Sometimes you feel guilty laughing at some of Lenny's mordant jabs, but that disappears a second later when your inner voice tells you with pleased surprise, 'but that's true.'”

Lenny Bruce’s legal troubles began on October 4, 1961 when he was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. It was based on a routine he was performing that used the term “cocksucker” and he then followed:

"'to' is a preposition, 'come' is a verb, that the sexual context of ‘come’ is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, he ‘probably can't come.’”

(I say….that is good, isn’t it? - wolverine1959)

In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again resting on his use of various obscenities.

A three-judge panel presided over his widely-publicized six-month trial, with Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon being found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. Bruce was sentenced on December 21, 1964, to four months in the workhouse but was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Unlike Solomon, due to his death, Bruce's conviction was never overturned.

On December 23, 2003, 37 years after his death, Bruce was granted a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction by New York Governor George Pataki. It was the first posthumous pardon in New York state history.

Some Lenny Bruce quotes for you:

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“A lot of people say to me, 'Why did you kill Christ?' I dunno, it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.”

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“Communism is like one big phone company.”

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“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”

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“I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.”

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“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

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“Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.”

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“The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.”

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“Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.”

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Many regard Lenny Bruce as the first of the ‘modern’ comics so it is no wonder that ground breakers like George Carlin, and most of the comics of today, symbolically lay wreaths at his altar with every routine.

Lenny Bruce – Gone but definitely not forgotten.

Thanks for reading.

I’ll get outta your way now.