[lbo-talk] "Lenny Bruce needs no pardon"

[Kenneth Campbell]

I have a pdf of the governor's pardon, if anyone wants it to print out,
frame it, and join Colby's desire to throw things at it.

The "chill" Bruce endured for commenting on national drama was visible
in every comedian's demeanor after 9-11. The first I saw step up toward
the "line" was Jon Stewart. But he was sweating on camera as he did.
Mahr took the actual sacrificial hit.

Ken.

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lenny Bruce needs no pardon

Colby Cosh
National Post
Friday, December 26, 2003


Now here's the courageous political decision of the week: On Tuesday,
New York State Governor George Pataki granted the pioneering comedian
Lenny Bruce a pardon on his notorious 1964 obscenity conviction. Sadly,
Lenny has been dead since 1966 and is unavailable for comment. But we
can say with confidence that Gov. Pataki's grandstanding is exactly the
sort of thing he would have torn to shreds in his act. Maybe it'll be
his first routine tonight in that Big Nightclub in the Sky. "Hey, give
'em credit. It only took them 20 times as long to apologize as it did
for me to die." Then again, maybe the bizarre announcement is just the
Governor's own way of establishing his comedic credentials.

The posthumous pardon, urged on the state by a group of celebrities
including Robin Williams and the Smothers Brothers, is the first in New
York's history. The idea seems likely to catch on. Although a posthumous
pardon helps nobody practically, it encourages the statist premise that
the authorities can alter the past. It is specifically intended, as Gov.
Pataki made clear, to cultivate the notion that America has now finally
gotten civil liberties right -- that the government's termination of
Bruce's career could not happen now. On top of all that, it allows a
bunch of coattail-riding mediocrities to feel that they're part of
Lenny's legacy. Instead of what they are, which is -- the term bubbles
up unbidden from the Lenny lexicon -- a bunch of schmucks. What does
Robin Williams really imagine Lenny Bruce would have thought of him?
Schmuck, schmuck, a thousand times schmuck.

It is New York State that needs to ask pardon, not Bruce. And it is
curious to find comedians, who have promoted the conventional version of
Bruce's final months, taking action that suggests otherwise. The comic
crossed the fatal line in 1964 when he did a routine about the Kennedy
assassination, joking that the late president's wife hadn't been
reaching out for help in the famous Abraham Zapruder footage, but had
merely been trying to get out of the line of fire. "She hauled ass to
save ass," he cracked half-admiringly. In a state dominated by Catholic
Democrats, this was beyond heresy. When word got back, a state employee
was sent to Lenny's shows to make note of every last little four-letter
word he used. And he used a lot.

The legal definition of "obscenity" generally requires some arousal of
prurient interest, which would have been hard to prove in front of an
impartial tribunal. Bruce's comedy was cerebral, not smutty. But having
dared suggest that the First Lady possessed the same survival instincts
as any other animal, Bruce was doomed. With an obscenity rap on his
record, no club owner would take a chance on hiring him and getting
snagged in a prosecutorial net. After losing the case, Bruce fired his
lawyers and set to work on his own appeal, becoming a tiresome and
incompetent amateur barrister. The conviction ruined his comedy and his
career, and soon he was dead of a morphine overdose.

It takes a bit of deliberate squinting to lay direct blame for Bruce's
death at the state's door: His drug use preceded the New York trial,
which wasn't his first, and it would have caught up with him eventually.
There can be no question, however, that he was bullied into penury and
misery by politicians, and not just because of one bit, but because of
all his controversial material about race, money, sex and religion.

Now, although Lenny's running commentary was cut off in mid-sentence, we
are supposed to feel that everything's all right. But the sensitivities
that allowed Lenny Bruce to be abused have multiplied and his comedy
cannot now really be aired on radio or television in North America. He
insulted religious groups; he deconstructed ethnic slurs, speaking them
aloud in the process; he described women in ways we cannot now stand to
hear. Hasn't anyone noticed that Bruce is name-checked endlessly,
treated as the Jesus Christ of American comedy, without ever actually
being exposed to the public?

Some seem to feel he would be celebrating this week if he were alive,
rejoicing in a supposed Nirvana of intellectual freedom. What
balderdash. I suspect he would be fully embroiled in some other sordid
struggle; he would have said the "wrong thing," deliberately, about the
Columbine shootings or the World Trade Center attacks. He'd have been
sued, or assassinated, or thrown in jail on some other chintzy
pretext -- perhaps a "hate crime" rap. He was, after all, Lenny Bruce.

In a sense, his persecutors were only fulfilling their appointed role.
As one civil libertarian put it, "In order to give value to his gestures
of defiance, Lenny did need a lot of opposition. If you are going to
break a taboo, it has to be a taboo." Does anybody think taboos are in
short supply these days?