Wall Street Journal

29 May 2003, D-8

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In the Fray: Posthumous Pardon For Lenny Bruce Is No Joke

(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

 

by Nat Hentoff

 

`You don't understand," Lenny Bruce once told his mother, Sally Marr, herself a comic. "I'm not a comedian. Do comedians get arrested all the time?"

 

The last time the stand-up piercer of what later became known as political correctness was busted and convicted of obscenity was on Nov. 4, 1964, for a gig at New York City's Cafe Au Go Go. As he told me during his trial, an arrest in New York, of all cities, would practically destroy his chances of working anywhere else. He was right, and his accelerating disintegration led to his death from a drug overdose on Aug. 3, 1966.

 

On May 20, a petition for a posthumous pardon was sent to New York Gov. George Pataki by an array of First Amendment scholars and litigators -- Floyd Abrams, Laurence Tribe and American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen, among them. Also asking the governor "to demonstrate New York's commitment to free speech" were notably irreverent satirists Robin Williams, Margaret Cho, and Tom and Dick Smothers.

 

Gov. Pataki may not share the view of a Washington Post editorial on Bruce's death: "Lenny Bruce believed in free speech with a passion that was often masked by the jokes he told. He was a social satirist, one of the boldest and one of the best." But even if the governor ignores the petition, Floyd Abrams spoke for the signers, including this writer, when he told me:

 

"As we look back on the prosecution of Lenny Bruce, it was less about `bad language' than about supposedly bad thoughts -- thoughts about religion, culture and sex that must be protected in a free society."

 

In one of his "bits" that was a factor in Bruce's arrests in some cities, Christ and Moses, having returned to earth, are standing at the rear of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Watching then-Cardinal Francis Spellman officiating, Christ says to Moses: "We went through Spanish Harlem where there were 40 Puerto Ricans living in one room. What were they doing there when" -- pointing to Cardinal Spellman -- "this man has a ring worth $10,000?"

 

As for his use of words that at the time were not allowed even in the urbane pages of The New Yorker (where I then was a staff writer), Bruce's comedic as well as insistent semantic point was that if people didn't use language to cover up, from themselves, what they actually do, life would be much more open and honest.

 

"I want to take the covers off," he said. "Whatever you do, you should say the words." He used to tell of an out-of-town buyer who, having checked into a hotel, "called for a hundred-dollar prostitute. A few minutes later, there's a knock on the door, and a bearded writer comes into the room."

By far the most comprehensive and accurate chronicle of the debt owed to Bruce's liberation of comedy by such performers as George Carlin, Richard Pryor and now Chris Rock is a current book, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon (published by Sourcebooks; available in bookstores and from Amazon.com).

 

Attached to the book is a one-hour CD, narrated by me, that includes some of Bruce's routines that got him busted -- and a series of never-before-released secret tapes of a number of his actual court trials, including the last one in New York, at which I was an unavailing defense witness. Bruce would come to court with a briefcase, a tape recorder nestled inside.

 

The co-authors of the book, which I expect will also be used in law-school courses on the tumultuous history of the First Amendment, are Ronald Collins, scholar-in-residence at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., and David Skover, a law professor at Seattle University in Washington. As Prof. Skover has pointed out, Lenny Bruce is still a criminal, convicted of word crimes, in the formal annals of New York State.

 

Back on Nov. 4, 1964, the dissenting judge, James Creel, in People v. Bruce, New York Criminal Court, wrote: "The performances of Lenny Bruce here in question are found to be not obscene . . . the motions to dismiss made by defense counsel . . . based on the grounds that Penal Law 1140 A is unconstitutional are sustained and granted." Judge Creel went on to denounce "This nihilistic state of Judge-made law as to obscenity."

 

No court would convict Lenny Bruce today, but the speech codes at many politically correct colleges and universities would preclude his being invited to pull the covers off there. The resistance on most campuses to these politically correct regulations is being led by conservative students in their independent newspapers, which are often challenged by purportedly liberal administrations. Lenny Bruce would certainly dig the exposure of these college officials' hypocrisy.


---Mr. Hentoff last wrote for the Journal on horn player Ruby Braff.


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