A Remembrance of Lenny Bruce

“Beneath beautiful appearances, I search out ugly depths. And beneath ignoble surfaces, I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue.  It’s a relatively benign mania which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.”

-Flaubert Gustave-

Today, October 13, 2012, is the birthday of Lenny Bruce.  Had he lived, he would be 88 years old.  That would be quite fortuitous, considering the pervasive nature of his drug addictions.

I say addictions.  Besides the escalating abuse of heroin, amphetamines and alcohol, Lenny abused the English language by stand-up comedic utterances which you and I often think; but are constrained to speak aloud.

Lenny has passed into obscurity over the 44 years since his death.  His good friend Phil Specter scooped up all the damning photos taken at the death scene, in an attempt to hide his ignominious end from the public.  Alas, Larry Flynt procured the most devastating photograph of all; and published it on the back cover of Hustler: a naked Bruce in a fetal curl around a commode.

Flynt, a most arrogant righteous leftist schmuck, probably meant to portray the wages of sin to the increasingly jaded voyeurs who thumbed lasciviously through his publications.  Unfortunately, that image of a man defeated in all ways, consigned to death, is the one that supplants all the others that I once possessed.

In 1968, I was a disc jockey on a middle-of-the-road format station with mediocre ratings.  All stations are sent free albums by recording companies and producers in the hope that their product would be aired.  In the mail one day came a vinyl LP of Lenny Bruce.  It was a ‘sampler’; a collection of recordings, gathered from the artist’s other releases.

This find compiled thirteen of Lenny’s most memorable stand-up routines.  Since it was never going to be played on old KEEZ-FM in the middle of Andrew Kostelanitz and Mitch Miller, I took it home with me.  In the subdued lighting of my tiny apartment, in a swirl of smoke, my best friend and I played that album until the routines were committed to memory.  With my startling gift for mimicry, I could resurrect Lenny from the grave and bring a party to its knees in hysterical fits of laughter. 

Good times, those.  Best friend stole the album and would not give it back.  No importa, mi hijo.  I got Lenny right here.  He is still with me: alive, sick and rapping on my beaney bag.

In the depths of his nadir, working gigs in San Fernando Valley strip joints, Lenny found his MAN.  With the universal surrender of ‘FUCK IT!’ shrugging off the conventionality of a prudish society, he began an obscene canoodle of our Freedom of Speech that took him…and us…to a clarity of truth that we savor…and cherish even now.

Lenny was condemned by that grimly proper mid-century society: arrested, convicted, and hounded out of existence by 1966.  But the nabobs of morality could not shut him up.  Nor could they silence his disciples—Mort Sahl, Phyliss Diller, Dick Gregory—Richard Pryor.

In the global Ethernet, in our everyday cursive; and in our flip verbal banter, obscenity has become passé.

We are hurtling towards a global village replete with abundance for all.  The snarling dogs of war, religious bigotry and corporate greed will lose their power to enslave us.

In peace, harmony and the contentment of world-wide full bellies, we will speak in a common tongue and do stand-up gigs for each other…into the night.