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
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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?