Lenny Bruce

Comedian

• Born: October 13, 1925
• Birthplace: Mineola, New York
• Died: August 3, 1966
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Comedian

Bruce became famous during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s for his comedic nightclub routines that satirized the hypocrisy of American society. Arrested numerous times for using obscenities in his act that are commonplace today, he is considered a martyr for free speech onstage.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; social issues

Early Life

Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider, the son of working-class Jewish parents Myron Schneider and Sadie Kitchenberg, a stage performer and actor who worked as Sally Marr. Bruce’s mother and father divorced when he was a child, so Marr raised her son with the assistance of other relatives. After attending grade school on Long Island, Bruce ran away from home at the age of sixteen. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and shipped out for North Africa aboard the USS Brooklyn. A shell-passer during World War II, he saw action in Africa, Italy, and southern France. He was discharged in 1945 after allegedly dressing in women’s clothes for the express purpose of getting out of the military.

After leaving the Navy, Bruce returned home to New York to live with his mother, who was then teaching night classes in dance and comedy and occasionally performing at nightclubs. He gained his first show-business experience in 1947, filling in as master of ceremonies at the Victory Club, where his mother was appearing. He soon began performing stand-up comedy at clubs in New York, on Long Island, in Greenwich Village and Jackson Heights, and in New Jersey, working for little or no pay. Originally, he did one-liners, traditional jokes, impressions, and standard sketches, but his act evolved as he included more original material.

In the late 1940’s Bruce was chosen for a slot on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a nationally broadcast series before a live studio audience, where he garnered the largest ovation on an applause meter. Success made Bruce a hot commodity, and he was booked into comedy clubs from Milwaukee to Broadway at $450 a week. However, as he continued experimenting, adding more confrontational avant-garde material, audiences diminished, and he was forced to accept low-paid work at second-class establishments. Discouraged, Bruce enlisted in the merchant marine and set sail for Europe, where his main preoccupation was touring as many brothels as possible at every port of call.

Life’s Work

In 1951, Bruce returned to the United States, where he married “Hot” Honey Harlowe, a stripper he had met in Baltimore. Before their divorce in 1957, they had a daughter, Brandy Kathleen “Kitty,” born 1955. Bruce was arrested for the first time in Miami in 1951, posing as a priest collecting funds for a British Guiana leper colony. Let off with a fine, he and Honey relocated to Pittsburgh, where Bruce rejoined the comedy circuit, playing mostly burlesque theaters. By 1953 he had gravitated to California, where over the next several years he honed his craft, refining his sharp-edged routines and perfecting his sense of comic timing. He also wrote screenplays for several low-budget films, including Dance Hall Racket (1953)—in which he appeared with his mother and his wife—Dream Follies (1954), and The Leather Jacket (1955).

By the late 1950’s, Bruce was playing quality nightclubs in San Francisco, earning good wages, and gaining a reputation as a uniquely unconventional comic to whom nothing was sacred. Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner, a fan, helped Bruce gain a high-paid spot at the Cloister nightclub in Chicago in 1958 and later published Bruce’s autobiography serially in the pages of his magazine. The following year, when several recordings of Bruce’s San Francisco performances were released (including The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce and Togetherness: Lenny Bruce’s Interviews of Our Times), he appeared on the nationally televised Steve Allen Show. By 1961, at the height of his career, when he was making thousands of dollars weekly, he performed at Carnegie Hall, with every seat filled.

Bruce’s downfall began soon afterward. In late 1961 he was arrested in Philadelphia for narcotics possession, only to have the charges dropped when the narcotics or drugs in question turned out to be legally prescribed. A month later, he was arrested for using obscenities during his act in San Francisco. Though he was tried and acquitted in 1962, his troubles were only beginning. Over the next several years, he was arrested numerous times for obscenity in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. He was convicted in Chicago and in New York City—despite a public petition of protest signed by eighty prominent Americans, including Arthur Miller, Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, Elizabeth Taylor, and Paul Newman—and sentenced in both places to prison terms.

Released on bail while awaiting appeals (which would overturn the convictions), Bruce, addicted to drugs and suffering various physical ailments, found it difficult to secure work. In 1962, he was prohibited from performing a planned tour of Australia, and the following year he was banned from entering England. Most American nightclubs, afraid of legal difficulties surrounding the comedian, refused to hire him. By 1965 he was declared bankrupt. In mid-1966, then engaged to Lotus Weinstock, he made his last performance at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Weeks later, he was found dead in Los Angeles, at age forty, of a morphine overdose.

Significance

During his abbreviated but influential career, Bruce single-handedly changed the style and direction of American comedy. Using Beat-type delivery blended with bebop and jazz rhythms in skits and sketches, impressions, and imagined interviews, he humorously and bluntly challenged accepted notions of race, religion, politics, sexuality, drugs, homosexuality, abortion, the use of language, and other controversial aspects of society. Compared during his lifetime and afterward to history’s great satirists (Aristophanes, Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain), Bruce made possible the untamed, boundary-shattering comedy of such later performers as Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, and Howard Stern. Modern films and literary works routinely contain all the words for which he was arrested, without prompting undue outrage. Bruce’s life and death have inspired several plays and films, and dozens of musicians have paid tribute to him in song. In 2003, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon for his 1964 obscenity conviction—the first such pardon in state history.

Bibliography

Bruce, Lenny. How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972. Bruce’s autobiography provides insight into his sometimes troubled life.

Cohen, John, ed. The Essential Lenny Bruce. London: Pan, 1999. This new edition of the original 1960’s work offers uncensored transcriptions of some of Bruce’s highly original and controversial comedic sketches, presented by topic.

Collins, Ronald K. L., and David M. Skover. The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2003. An illustrated work, supplemented with a compact disc containing some of Bruce’s memorable routines, this focuses primarily on the freedom-of-speech issues he encountered.

Goldman, Albert, and Lawrence Schiller. Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce. New York: Penguin, 1992. This work contains a detailed biography of the comedian, accounts of his legal troubles, and analyses of his comedy style.

Guse, Joe. The Tragic Clowns: An Analysis of the Short Lives of John Belushi, Lenny Bruce, and Chris Farley. Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace, 2009. This work presents biographical studies and psychological profiles that compare and contrast the factors that led to the untimely deaths from drug overdoses of the three comedians.

Thomas, William Karl. Lenny Bruce: The Making of a Prophet. North Haven, Conn.: Archon Books, 2000. An insightful study of the comedian, written by a film photographer and scriptwriter who met Bruce in the mid-1950’s and shared many experiences with him.