The New York Times
May 23, 2003, Section B; Page 1;Metropolitan Desk

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Absolution For a Martyr To the Profane

 

by CLYDE HABERMAN

 

NOT everyone who emerged reasonably intact from the 1960's learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, to borrow a Paul Simon lyric.

 

Not everyone was charmed by the social commentary of this man of letters, because he veered toward four letters.

 

Not everyone believed, as you hear to this day, that when Lenny Bruce succumbed to a drug overdose in 1966, he died for our sins. "He didn't die for my sins," the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler once grumped.

But even if they may not think of Lenny Bruce as the greatest martyr since St. Sebastian, many people can't stand that he carried the stigma of a criminal conviction to his grave. His crime, if that is even the right word, was to have spoken his mind, profanely. Two years before he died, a New York court found him guilty of obscenity charges -- "word crimes," if you will.

 

It wasn't as if he had stood on the street screaming filth at children. He performed his routine in a Greenwich Village nightclub, Cafe au Go Go, before a paying audience that knew going in what to expect. Today, you can hear those kinds of words on any New York corner, not to mention on cable television, only the jokers using them generally lack the comic punch and biting commentary that made Bruce a legend even before he self-destructed at age 40.

 

With a sense that a wrong needs righting, a campaign began this week to urge Gov. George E. Pataki to grant Bruce a posthumous pardon. That, apparently, is something that has never been done in New York. But there also seems to be nothing to forbid it.

 

Behind the appeal are First Amendment lawyers and scholars, joined by some well-known performers like Robin Williams, Margaret Cho and Tom and Dick Smothers. To them, Bruce was a martyr who ditched the weary mother-in-law jokes and made stand-up comedy actually stand for something.

 

In separate letters to Mr. Pataki, the lawyers and the entertainers used identical language: "A posthumous pardon would set the record straight and thereby demonstrate New York's commitment to freedom -- free speech, free press and free thinking."

 

Why raise this 60's ghost now?

 

Because "there is never a wrong time to do the right thing," said Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington lawyer who is a leader of the campaign. An ally in New York, the lawyer Floyd Abrams, said: "Obviously, this is all symbolic. Most things after death are. But symbolism matters here, more than usual, because Lenny Bruce was really persecuted for religious, political and social views that he expressed."

 

Fueling the campaign is research done by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, who wrote a book last year called "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon" (Sourcebooks). The authors discovered, to their surprise, that the obscenity conviction still stood.

 

Many people had incorrectly assumed that it was overturned decades ago, along with a companion verdict against Howard Solomon, who owned the nightclub. A state appeals court reversed the Solomon conviction in 1968, a decision that was affirmed in 1970 by New York's highest court.

 

But those rulings did Bruce no good. An "autodidact obsessed with the First Amendment," as the writer Nat Hentoff put it, the comic had insisted on handling his own case. Mishandling is more like it. His appeal went nowhere. And then he died.

 

HIS supporters insist they are not retroactively applying today's more relaxed standards on language. "The Solomon decision indicates that even under the prevailing standards of the time, the Bruce conviction should never have taken place," Mr. Corn-Revere said. "The fact that the conviction remains on the books is an anomaly and a disgrace to the First Amendment."

 

What does the governor think? Who knows? A spokeswoman had no comment. Also silent was Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney. His opinion might be worth hearing, given that he was quite critical of how the Bruce case had been handled when he ran for office in 1974.

So what happens now is anyone's guess.

 

It may be useful to recall another institutional wrong later made right. This was an acknowledgment by the Roman Catholic Church that it had wrongly condemned Galileo in 1633 for showing that the Earth moves around the sun. It took only 359 years, until 1992, for absolution to come.

 

"I hope Governor Pataki doesn't take that long," Mr. Collins said.

 

Presumably, he won't. But to be on the safe side, the pro-Bruce camp may not want to hold its breath.

 


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