“Lenny Bruce is not afraid”—“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” R.E.M.
Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Schneider on October 13, 1925, died on August 3, 1966. Officially, Bruce died from a drug overdose. Unofficially, he was murdered by the New York County District Attorney’s office.
The Trump Reich is not the first era in U.S. history in which local, state, or federal government has attempted to abolish free speech and destroy opposition; for example, Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs in prison for speaking out against capitalism and World War I. What makes the current era different is that a U.S. president is not only acting like a dictator, he is doing everything possible to ensure the world views him as one, getting these headlines: “Trump Pulls From Dictator Playbook and Hangs Giant Banner of His Face.” Today, one risks imprisonment or having a career derailed not simply for challenging obscenity laws, as did Bruce, or speaking out against a capitalist war, as did Debs, but for hurting a president’s feelings. So, it’s an especially good time to celebrate Lenny Bruce.
At the time of his death, Bruce was blacklisted by almost every venue in the United States, as owners feared that they too would be arrested for obscenity. One of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted Bruce’s last 1964 obscenity case, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, later admitted, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. . . . We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”
“As a child,” Bruce recounted, “I loved confusion: a freezing blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and find a new direction.” At age 16, Lenny ran away from home and boarded with the Dengler family, working on their Long Island farm in the 1940s. The Denglers had a roadside stand, and city and suburban folks loved the idea of fresh farm eggs, but the Denglers didn’t have enough chickens to meet the demand, so they would buy eggs wholesale, and a teenage Lenny repackaged them in Dengler cartons; and he would later recount, “With my philanthropic sense of humor, I would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an authentic pastoral touch.”
Bruce’s rebellions against authority, on stage and off, remain legendary among comics. Fed up with the navy in 1945, Bruce told medical officers he was overwhelmed with homosexual urges, and this tactic worked to get him discharged. He then fell in love with Honey, a stripper at the time, and they married in 1951. To raise money so that Honey could leave her profession, Lenny created the “Brother Mathias Foundation,” in which he impersonated a priest and solicited donations. Bruce was arrested for that scam but was lucky and found not guilty.
On stage, Bruce was fearless. He worked as an MC at strip clubs, and following one performer, he himself came on stage completely naked and said, “Let’s give the little girl a big hand.” In Bruce’s time, it was still common for some Christians to accuse Jews of killing Jesus, and this would put most Jews on the defensive—but not Lenny. In his act, Lenny would “fess up” that not only did the Jews kill Jesus but that it was his Uncle Morty who did it. In one variation of this bit, he said that what in fact Jews really had covered up was that his Uncle Morty had killed Jesus with an electric chair, but that Jews thought that Christian women wouldn’t be as attractive wearing necklaces with Jesus in an electric chair dangling over their chests, so Jews made up the crucifixion story.
However, as Bruce became more famous for his risk-taking humor that fearlessly mocked authorities, his luck eventually ran out. He was arrested multiple times for obscenity during his stand-up act as well as for drug possession. Bruce believed that authorities went after him mostly because he made fun of organized religion, and his friend George Carlin agreed, “Lenny wasn’t being arrested for obscenity. He was being arrested for being funny about religion and in particular Catholicism. A lot of big city cops . . . tend to be Irish Catholic,” noted the Irish Catholic Carlin.
In the years before his death, Bruce became increasingly preoccupied by how to prevent his arrest for drug use. In his autobiography, Bruce wrote, “For self-protection, I now carry with me at all times a small bound booklet consisting of photostats of statements made by physicians, and prescriptions and bottle labels.”
In 1964, Bruce was arrested in New York on obscenity charges, and despite petitions and protests from many renowned people, he was convicted and sentenced in December 1964 to four months in a workhouse.
In July 1966, free on bail during the lengthy appeals process, Bruce got a visit from Carlin and his wife. Carlin recalled, “He was completely immersed in his legal battles. . . . He didn’t appear in clubs anymore—the Irish cops and judges had indeed shut him the fuck up. He was just about bankrupt, having spent all his income and intellect trying to vindicate himself. We visited for a while and he was as affectionate and lovable as ever. That was the last time we saw him alive.” Twelve days after their visit, Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose.
Lenny Bruce may not have been the funniest comedian in U.S. history, but his anti-authoritarian defiance is unsurpassed among comedians, many of whom to this day honor him for his trailblazing free speech advocacy. In Resisting Illegitimate Authority (2018), to illustrate the diversity among anti-authoritarians, I profile twenty U.S. anti-authoritarians, including Lenny, with an emphasis on what can be gleaned from their lives, including lessons about survival, triumph, and tragedy.
Sometimes it is luck that makes the difference between anti-authoritarians having a triumphant or tragic life, and Lenny did not have the luck of coming to prominence in a more anti-authoritarian era, as was the case with his friend George Carlin, whom I also profile. In a more anti-authoritarian era, Carlin’s 1972 Milwaukee disorderly conduct-profanity arrest for his “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” bit was dismissed by a laughing judge, and it actually helped Carlin’s career, even getting an invitation from Johnny Carson to discuss it and promote his album on national television.
Another luckier U.S. anti-authoritarian is Noam Chomsky who, in the early 1960s, challenged and resisted the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam at a time when very few Americans were doing so. He refused to pay a portion of his taxes, supported draft resisters, got arrested several times, and was on Richard Nixon’s official enemies list. Chomsky anticipated going to prison, and he later recounted how only luck and a changing era saved him from prison, “That is just what would have happened except for two unexpected events: (1) the utter (and rather typical) incompetence of the intelligence services. . . . [and] (2) the Tet Offensive, which convinced American business that the game wasn’t worth the candle and led to the dropping of prosecutions.”
Lenny Bruce was often referred to as a “sick comedian,” but he famously said, “I’m not a comedian. And I’m not sick. The world is sick and I’m the doctor. I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values. I don’t have an act. I just talk. I’m just Lenny Bruce.”
Today, it is an understatement to say that mainstream U.S. society is sick with what Lenny called “false values.” Tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of how a sick U.S. society has gotten even sicker? In 2024, an in-your-face scumbag bully was elected president—this time with the popular vote, a majority of American voters who were either blind to what he is all about, or saw what he is all about and were unbothered by him being a scumbag bully because he is their scumbag bully.
Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes about how society, culture, politics, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (2022). His Web site is brucelevine.net
