Lenny Bruce (Chicago Daily News)

Before Tony Soprano made the verb for fornication as common as Sunday brunch,

before Eminem rapped about killing his mother, before Andrew Dice Clay rewrote "Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater" as a ditty about wife-beating, before there were Web sites for pope jokes, sex toys, dirty talk and bestiality -- before things changed, there was Lenny Bruce.

"It's a very American idea that Lenny Bruce brought to comedy - that we would have the freedom to speak," said raucous stand-up star Margaret Cho. "He talked about life in general, about the way things were in a way that was very different."

And how.

Bruce talked about race and religion and war and peace. He deconstructed sex and hypocrisy, stupidity and self-satisfaction. He was wicked, profane and, sometimes, whacked out on drugs.

Idolized and reviled, Bruce was a fearless First Amendment hero to some. To others, he was a vulgarian - a cynical hustler named Leonard Alfred Schneider from Bellmore, Long Island, who found he could make big bucks with bad taste.

"I hate him," beat generation novelist Jack Kerouac is reported to have said. "He hates everything. He hates life."

Hero or hustler, Bruce ended up a criminal - convicted in 1964 on an obscenity charge for saying things in a Greenwich Village nightclub that a court ruled the law did not allow.

Acting as his own attorney, Bruce - broke, distracted and in despair - failed to file proper papers for an appeal before his death in 1966 at age 40. Lenny Bruce was gone. His conviction survived.

Now, say supporters of the comedian, justice must prevail - finally. They want Gov. George Pataki to get Lenny Bruce off the hook.

"There never is a wrong time to do the right thing," said Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington, D.C.-based First Amendment attorney, in a petition asking Pataki to grant Bruce a posthumous pardon.

On the phone, Corn-Revere said the move by authorities to punish Bruce was "astounding" and looks particularly absurd in light of evolving views on everything from entertainment to intimate behavior (recently illustrated, he noted, by a Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas sodomy law).

"It sounds like something the Taliban would do," said the lawyer, who contacted Pataki in May on behalf of two legal scholars, Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover.

While researching their 2002 book, "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon," Collins and Skover found that, despite what many believed, Bruce never was cleared of the New York obscenity charge.

That put Bruce in a category of his own.

"We are not aware of another case where a comedian is convicted for words spoken in a nightclub and where the conviction stands," said Collins, of the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va. "The law was unconstitutionally applied."

Skover, professor of federal constitutional law at Seattle University law school, said Bruce's speech was protected as much in 1964 as it would be now.

"Obscenity was used as a prior restraint essentially to shut him down - to stop him from disseminating these ideas in New York State," Skover said. The conviction, he said, "should not be the last word on the 'People vs. Bruce.'"

It may not be: A press aide for Pataki said that while it appears there never has been a posthumous pardon in New York, the governor is giving thought to the Bruce petition. "It's under serious consideration," said spokeswoman Lynn Rasic.

Relief from Pataki would end a story that began April 3, 1964, before the 10 p.m. show at Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street.

Instead of going on stage, Bruce was booked at the Sixth Precinct.

A couple of days before, police had monitored his act. Weary after years of drug arrests and obscenity battles in various cities, the comedian was not in top form. But his material still had some of that old Lenny Bruce buzz.

It was raw, rough, provocative - and politically incorrect. "The whole idea of being offensive was in his DNA," Collins said. "Offensiveness was part of his genetic makeup."

In one bit, Bruce admired the size of Eleanor Roosevelt's breasts - and, according to the story, she didn't mind.

In another, called "Hauling --- to Save Her ---," Bruce said Jackie Kennedy was ducking for cover when she tried to scramble out of a limo after President John F. Kennedy was shot a few months before in Dallas, not trying to get help for her husband, as some accounts said.

Bruce declared men were insatiable sex machines and would sleep with anyone or anything - including barnyard animals. "You want dinner?" says a wife who discovers her unfaithful husband. "So get your chicken to get it for ya."

Referring to Gary Francis Powers, the American spy plane pilot captured and eventually released by Soviet authorities, Bruce spoofed true-blue Americans who claimed no amount of torture could make them divulge secrets. Bruce named the bit "Hot-Lead Enema," and suggested there were means by which even the most ardent patriot could be persuaded to cooperate.

Bruce made bail after his arrest but didn't disappear. The next day he was back at Café Au Go Go. On April 7, police arrested him again.

At trial before a three-judge panel in New York Criminal Court, Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Richard H. Kuh prevailed. By a 2-1 vote, Bruce was found guilty of "giving an indecent performance." Café Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon was convicted of the same charge - a ruling reversed on appeal.

Bruce was sentenced to four months. For Solomon, it was a $500 fine or 30 days in jail on each of two counts. In anticipation of appeal, Bruce posted bail. Months went by and so did the filing deadline. But by then Bruce was at home in California - a fugitive from a misdemeanor.

Some critics said Bruce deserved what he got. And, in later years, feminist leaders, such as Susan Brownmiller, author of the influential 1975 book "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape," said it was a mistake to make a martyr of a performer they dismissed as foul-mouthed and sexist.

But Bruce's conviction made many civil libertarians furious. How could a person be convicted for telling jokes in a nightclub filled with customers who were there because they wanted to be? This was America? This was New York?

Backers note that the Illinois Supreme Court reversed an obscenity conviction against Bruce in November 1964, shortly after the comedian's Au Go Go trial concluded - further proof, they say, that the Manhattan DA's prosecution was misguided.

"It was legally insupportable and the only reason he didn't get the equivalent of a post-conviction dismissal was that he was crazed because of all he'd been through and fired his lawyers," said Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff, who testified on behalf of Bruce during the trial and narrates a CD accompanying the Collins- Skover book.

Hentoff said prosecutor Kuh went after Bruce "with a vengeance" to win favor with his boss, District Attorney Frank Hogan.

But Kuh, now 82, said he pursued the Bruce charges with the same vigor he prosecuted all cases and the kind of zeal he has employed in his subsequent career as a private litigator.

Still practicing with a Manhattan law firm, Kuh - who briefly succeeded Hogan, but lost a 1974 election for district attorney to Robert Morgenthau - agreed Bruce never would have been prosecuted if contemporary tastes and standards applied four decades ago.

"Everything is different than it was then," Kuh said. "I don't know anyone who would try him now."

So if Bruce paid the price for working in a less liberated world, how about a pardon?

Kuh, who said he owned Lenny Bruce records as a younger man (though none, he noted, with material as raw as the troublesome Café Au Go Go act), preferred not to comment.

Others are eager. Free speech champions, legal scholars and entertainers - including Cho, Robin Williams, comedians Penn and Teller and the Smothers Brothers - who back the petition, say favorable action by Pataki would not only exonerate Bruce but reaffirm First Amendment freedoms.

"We should hold the Founding Fathers to their word," said Penn Jillette.

Even Brownmiller did not take issue with the pardon- Lenny movement - though she took the opportunity to put in a plug for the late singer Billie Holiday, who lost her New York City cabaret license in the late 1940s after a drug arrest. There's a pardon she'd really like to see, said Brownmiller. But as for the move to clear Bruce, the writer had no problems. "I don't object at all," Brownmiller said in a phone conversation. "It was so far in the past."

Bruce was consistently ahead of his time, supporters say. Often that meant trouble.

"It seemed like he was always pushing his luck," said Tom Smothers, who, with his brother, Dick, knows the perils of giving luck too good a shove. In 1969, CBS canceled "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in a clash with the performers over language and content. "We're interested in this because we've struggled with censorship a lot," said Smothers.

But few modern performers were as beleaguered as Bruce - particularly ironic because the comedian was sure the Constitution was on his side.

"He believed the law was its own perfect language," Kitty Bruce Akulonis, 47, the only child of Bruce and his wife, Honey Harlowe, said in a phone conversation from her home in Pennsylvania. "And that the misinterpretation of a word in that language could be the rise or fall of a person."

Bruce studied the law like he was applying to Harvard. "I would spend hours on the phone talking about various First Amendment cases with him," said William Hellerstein, who, as a Legal Aid attorney, handled Howard Solomon's appeal and now is a professor at Brooklyn Law School. "He couldn't believe a court would hold against him."

In 1964, a court did.

Had he been in a better state of mind, Bruce - who battled drugs for years and died on Aug.3, 1966, in his Hollywood home, a syringe still in his arm - would surely have entered a proper appeal after the New York conviction, supporters say. And, they add, like Solomon, Bruce would have triumphed. "The only way [for the appeals court] to exonerate Solomon is to exonerate the act that Bruce performed," said Collins.

So now New York has another chance.

Supporters of the pardon petition - including Akulonis, who has written to Pataki on behalf of her father - say they are optimistic. If there is victory, of course, it will be bittersweet. Though memorialized in books, on stage and in movies, including the acclaimed 1974 film "Lenny," starring Dustin Hoffman, Bruce has been dead for nearly 40 years.

But, said Jillette, Lenny lives on. His audacity as a performer, the brilliance of his best work, and his intrepid spirit helped liberate American entertainment and cleared the way for the insurgents and upstarts who followed, Jillette said. "Eminem is the pardon of Lenny Bruce."