In honor of the centennial of Lenny Bruce’s birth on October 13, 1926, here’s a recent Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary, Lenny Bruce - Swear to Tell the Truth. Now, some of you may be asking, “Who is Lenny Bruce?”
Well, in recent years, fans of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have seen Bruce portrayed by Luke Kirby in an Emmy-winning turn.
Stepping back, though, Bruce was, in 25 words or more, the forerunner of all the boundary-pushing comedians of the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and beyond. Pryor and Carlin are the two most prominent to recognize the role that Lenny Bruce played in making their own styles of comedy possi…
In honor of the centennial of Lenny Bruce’s birth on October 13, 1926, here’s a recent Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary, Lenny Bruce - Swear to Tell the Truth. Now, some of you may be asking, “Who is Lenny Bruce?”
Well, in recent years, fans of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have seen Bruce portrayed by Luke Kirby in an Emmy-winning turn.
Stepping back, though, Bruce was, in 25 words or more, the forerunner of all the boundary-pushing comedians of the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and beyond. Pryor and Carlin are the two most prominent to recognize the role that Lenny Bruce played in making their own styles of comedy possible. His humor was, mildly put, not in step with the ethos of the buttoned-up ’50s, as it skewered the Catholic Church, the U.S. government, racists and bigots, politicians, and the military while speaking, occasionally in four-letter words, about sex, racism, organized religion, homosexuality, U.S. presidents, the Vietnam War, and his own First Amendment right to say these things without fear of prosecution.
His humor is particularly firmly rooted in the mid-century, with an allusive style that peppered his routines with references to ’30s and ’40s movies and ’50s and ’60s newsmakers, which makes it harder for 21st-century audiences to “get.” One of his signature bits, “Father Flotsky’s Triumph,” is a pastiche of Warner Bros. prison flicks, larded with the names of B-movie actors who came and went before the dawn of the ’50s. Other routines aren’t quite as anchored in time: “Thank You Mask Man” was turned intoan animated short that became a staple of ’70s moviehouses, along with Bambi Meets Godzilla, and only requires the general sense that he’s talking about the Lone Ranger. Yet other routines require little contextualization, such as “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.”
Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of his death by overdose. He had been persecuted, marginalized, and, ultimately, broken by the legal battles he’d had to fight against police and prosecutors for the so-called “obscenity” of his material. An NYC district attorney who prosecuted Bruce’s final case said, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. . . . We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”
Since his death, Lenny Bruce has been commemorated and eulogized in song by such luminaries as Nico and Bob Dylan.
Please note that, however progressive Bruce can be considered to have been relative to his peer group and times, a few of the terms and a few of the characterizations he employed, most often ironically or pointedly against bigots, may provoke offense today.