Lenny Bruce: Hear the Performances That Got Him Arrested (NSFW)

Lenny Bruce: what come­di­an today — or coun­ter­cul­tur­al pub­lic speak­er of any kind — does­n’t name him as an influ­ence? But his­to­ry has remem­bered the cut­ting-edge fun­ny­man of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s as not just an influ­en­tial fig­ure, but some­thing of a mar­tyr to that quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can cause of free speech. One need only read the sto­ry of Bruce’s many legal trou­bles, a suc­cinct ver­sion of which you can find at The Tri­als of Lenny Bruce Home­page, to under­stand that the author­i­ties of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry inter­pret­ed that cause quite dif­fer­ent­ly than we do now. Doug Lin­der, the author of that piece, describes Bruce’s fall from the peak of his career — a 1959 appear­ance on nation­al tele­vi­sion (intro­duced by Steve Allen as “the most shock­ing come­di­an of our time, a young man who is sky­rock­et­ing to fame”), a packed house at Carnegie Hall two years lat­er — to his ear­ly death, five years on, after the rav­ages of bank­rupt­cy, drugs, and court­rooms.

What hap­pened to this promis­ing comedic lumi­nary? All too many come­di­ans flame out due to addic­tion and finan­cial issues, but Bruce had the con­sid­er­able bur­den of run­ning afoul, again and again, of “obscen­i­ty” laws: at a San Fran­cis­co jazz club, at West Hol­ly­wood’s famous Trou­ba­dour, at Los Ange­les’ Uni­corn, in Chica­go, and so on. Bruce may have thought him­self safe in the com­par­a­tive­ly un-Puri­tan set­ting of Green­wich Vil­lage, but even there, on the fate­ful night of March 31, 1964, a CIA agent sat in the audi­ence of one of his per­for­mances and dili­gent­ly col­lect­ed evi­dence against him. An arrest, ardu­ous, high-pro­file tri­al, and con­vic­tion fol­lowed. Though New York’s high­est court would reverse this con­vic­tion in 1970, the dam­age had long since been done, and Bruce him­self had died four years ear­li­er.

You can hear the dar­ing mate­r­i­al that con­demned Bruce above, from the out-of-print album What I Was Arrest­ed For: The Per­for­mances that Got Lenny Bruce Bust­ed. (His rou­tine “To Is a Prepo­si­tion; Come Is a Verb,” which espe­cial­ly ticked off the inves­ti­ga­tors, appears just above.) Fifty years after the tri­al, would any of this “obscene, inde­cent, immoral, and impure dra­ma, play, exhi­bi­tion, or enter­tain­ment,” as the law says, “tend to the cor­rup­tion of the morals of youth and oth­ers”? As All Music Guide’s Sean Car­ruthers writes of the album, which first came out in 1969 and again in 1975, “It’s amaz­ing what just a few years can accom­plish in terms of chang­ing social val­ues — by the time this was re-released, there was­n’t real­ly a whole lot here that would get peo­ple too upset.” And so, in per­haps the most telling tes­ta­ment to the ulti­mate vic­to­ry of Lenny Bruce, that 20th-cen­tu­ry Socrates, the world has become safe for any one of us to pub­licly utter words like — well, bet­ter to hear them straight from the sage of obscen­i­ty’s mouth, right?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Com­e­dy Rou­tine Becomes a NSFW Ani­mat­ed Film (1968)

Lenny Bruce Riffs and Rants on Injus­tice and Hypocrisy in One of His Final Per­for­mances (NSFW)

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

“Tele­vi­sion Taboos”: 1949 Pho­to Spread Sat­i­rizes the Moral Codes of Ear­ly Tele­vi­sion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.