The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page C01

 

Lenny Bruce Pardoned For His Language

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer

You know what they say about the wheels of justice, so perhaps it's no surprise that Lenny Bruce was pardoned yesterday, decades after he was convicted of obscenity, died of a heroin overdose and became a martyr to the First Amendment cause.

New York Gov. George Pataki (R) issued what may be the first posthumous pardon in state history, almost 40 years after the vulgar, once-vilified comedian's performances at Greenwich Village's Cafe au Go Go upset authorities. The state went after Bruce for the many "obscene" words he used that evening, but according to biographer and legal scholar Ronald K.L. Collins, that was "a front."

"It was the hook that the authorities -- the police and prosecutor -- used," says Collins, who last May spearheaded a petition to overturn Bruce's conviction. (Collins petitioned Pataki along with Seattle University law professor David Skover, with whom Collins co-authored "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon" in 2002.) "The reason Lenny Bruce was really busted is because he was saying things that were politically, morally, culturally offensive to people."

Being offensive was an art to Bruce, long before the advent of shock jocks, at a time when other comedians "were doing mother-in-law jokes," as Collins puts it. He found it was a powerful weapon. He took on organized religion with ferocity, doing bits about the pope and about Saint Paul's sex life. He had riffs about Tonto's sex life, too, and about a man having sex with a chicken, and about Eleanor Roosevelt's breasts, though that was not the word he preferred to use. He had a scathing bit about Jacqueline Kennedy after the shooting of her husband.

And throughout it all, Bruce knew he was treading a minefield. By '64, he had been busted several times in various cities on obscenity charges, though never convicted. After his conviction that year, his appeal was thrown out for technical reasons, and he became a pariah on the comedy club circuit because of the threat he posed to club owners. Depressed and addicted, he died in 1966 at 40.

It's tempting to look back on Bruce's conviction as a quaint relic of a more prim time. Consider how much has changed since then. Today, bad words are routinely used for humorous effect in movies or a sign of authenticity in hip-hop, or merely gritty and realistic on cable television shows. Many comedians, from George Carlin (remember the Seven Dirty Words?) to Chris Rock have been influenced by Bruce's legacy. Among the comedians who signed a letter accompanying the petition to Pataki were Robin Williams, Penn and Teller, and the Smothers Brothers, according to the attorney who wrote the language of the petition, Robert Corn-Revere.

Bruce's material was "mild compared to most comedians working today," says Ron Simon, a curator at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York. Simon points to the new movie "Bad Santa." "Every other word is some type of obscenity."

But if the perimeters of the debate have changed, its substance hasn't. Society still struggles to figure out where to draw the line between what's free speech and what's offensive. And some media outlets haven't changed as much as others. Many of the words in Bruce's act, for example, are unfit for publication in this newspaper. Recently, the FCC caused an uproar when it appeared to rule the F-word acceptable on public airwaves when used as an adjective -- that is, with an "-ing."

If anything, the pardon of Lenny Bruce completes the burnishing of his image that happened after his death. His bust, says Collins, "was the last time that a comedian was arrested and convicted for word crimes in a comedy club. . . . The name Lenny Bruce has become synonymous with free speech in America."

It's fitting, then, that Collins was recently asked to write a biography of Bruce for a legal dictionary. The caustic comic will take his place with Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the annals of legal history.