The Times (London)

June 2, 2003

Features; Times2; 16

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A move to pardon Lenny Bruce may offend those who put PC before freedom of speech, says Clive Davis
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Sorry Lenny, the last laugh might be on you

by Clive Davis

Lenny Bruce, they say, never recovered from the trauma of being convicted for obscenity in a New York court and sentenced to four months in a workhouse.

 

Controversy had dogged his career -to some of his detractors it seemed that the American iconoclast was every bit as addicted to the sound of righteous indignation as he was to more shadowy substances.

He had already aroused the ire of the authorities in Britain, where he hade made highly publicised appearances at Peter Cook's Establishment Club. In America police arrests were a regular part of his life. When he was detained during a run at the Cafe Au Go Go in 1964, Bruce embarked on what ultimately proved to be a disastrous confrontation with authority. Alarmed that a conviction in New York would undermine his chances of working elsewhere, the comic came to see the case as a life-or-death struggle. Saul Bellow and Bob Dylan were among the luminaries who rallied to his cause. All to no avail. Bruce lost the case. Having fired his lawyers, he attempted to fight on alone, but slowly sank into despair. The issue became his obsession on and off-stage, and his career steadily declined. Within two years, he was dead of an overdose.

 

Four decades later, First Amendment lawyers and admirers of Bruce's work are hoping to redress an injustice. In a legal petition launched this month, the group -including the comedian and actor Robin Williams -are calling on New York State's Governor, George Pataki, to issue a posthumous pardon which "would set the record straight and thereby demonstrate New York's commitment to freedom -free speech, free press and free thinking."

 

Whether the authorities will be moved by the appeal remains to be seen. A spokesman for Pataki would only say that the case is "under review", but New York State has never issued posthumous pardons before. As one of Bruce's long-time supporters, the columnist and free speech advocate Nat Hentoff told me: "My guess is that he's not going to win any votes by approving it."

 

Many of Bruce's fans had assumed, in fact, that the slate had already been wiped clean, since the club's owner, Harold Solomon, later won an appeal against his own conviction. It seems that Bruce's own shortcomings as a self-appointed lawyer undermined his day in court -his case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

 

Nevertheless, the principles on which he campaigned are now part of America's social and cultural fabric.

The petition campaign is led by two legal scholars, Ronald Collins and David Skover, who last year published an acclaimed study-cumbiography, The Trials of Lenny Bruce. The book also includes a one-hour CD, narrated by Hentoff, a defence witness in the 1964 trial, featuring some of the material that landed Bruce in court.

 

"Legally speaking, Bruce's obscenity cases did not alter the law of the land," Collins explains. "Practically speaking, however, his legacy is incredible: almost singlehandedly it turned comedy clubs into free-speech zones. We have not witnessed an obscenity prosecution for word crimes in a comedy club since." Today, the content of most of the freeranging monologues would go unremarked in a comedy club. The environment has changed so profoundly that Bruce himself is perhaps no longer the icon he once was.

As the mischievous London comic and Bruce admirer Ian Stone points out, fashions have moved on. "I was very interested in his work years ago. When when you listen to tapes of his act, it is a kind of museum-piece. You have to remember the context of the times to understand how big an impression he made."

Does this mean, then, that comedy's free speech battles have been won?

 

Not really. Taste is a delicate, ever-evolving concept. A poll conducted a short time after the September 11 attacks suggested that nearly 40 per cent of Americans would accept government restrictions on humour inspired by the tragedy. When Stone, a masterful exponent of self-mocking Jewish humour, took his show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000, the organisers objected to its title, A Little Piece of Kike. Asterisks were duly inserted. Both sides in that particular issue clearly had a point. Words on a poster can cause pain. As ethnic minorities know only too well, racial epithets hurled by Bernard Manning have a very different impact when they are juggled by a North London Jew or a Sikh from Ealing.

 

While it may be true that comics are protected by the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment, Nat Hentoff points out that speech codes now in force on many American campuses mean that, if Bruce were alive today, he would probably not get many invitations to perform there. Hentoff, a hugely respected jazz critic who has achieved the rare double of writing a column for both the conservative Washington Times and the counterculture paper of record, The Village Voice, finds that the threat to free speech now comes from the liberal Left, rather than the authoritarian Right.

 

"There seems to be a general view among college administrators and students," he says, "that there's a constitutional right not to be offended."

Collins is equally concerned: "No doubt about it, today Lenny Bruce would be persona non grata on many PC college campuses. Perhaps he was the first non-PC comedian, albeit with a message worth considering. If the purpose of a college education is indeed the exploration of truth, then to deny such explorations by way of word codes is to corrupt the educational process.

 

"If it were not so ironic, it would be comic -a point that Lenny Bruce would surely make."

 

A LIFE OF ONE-LINERS DESIGNED TO SHOCK (Lenny Bruce lines)

 

If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

 

Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.

 

Communism is like one big phone company.

 

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

 

I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do.

 

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.

 

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

 

Guys are like dogs. They keep coming back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a cat one time...they're gone.

The "what should be" never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no "what should be", there is only what is.

 

My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. My wife came home and found us in bed together.