Weapons of mass instruction
I am a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.
- Lenny Bruce (1926 – 1966)
I have this great little book called 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed To Know by Mickey Z. What I like about it is that it investigates a variety of actions and people that have contributed, one way or another, to our collective liberation.
As Mickey Z says in his introduction, “from taking up arms against one’s oppressor to using art and words as weapons of mass instruction, these 50 episodes celebrate a different form of patriotism . . . one based on challenging tradition and taking action.”
So, here’s a bit on Lenny Bruce:
“Lenny Bruce was a revolutionary comedy figure because he brought honesty into a form which previously had been little more than an empty crowd-pleasing truth,” says George Carlin.
To say Bruce revolutionized comedy is putting it rather mildly. His impact extended beyond mere entertainment to alter American culture. Perhaps the single greatest indicator of his uniqueness lies in the fact that many of his classic stand-up bits are no longer funny. His primary topics – religion, politics, sex – are hardly taboo anymore (thanks, in part, to Bruce) and thus his scathing attacks seem tame by today’s standards.
Not so in the early 1960s when Bruce faced the repressive wrath of state power. As a former assistant district attorney admitted some 30 years after Bruce’s death, “He was prosecuted because of his words. He didn’t harm anybody; he didn’t commit an assault; he didn’t steal; he didn’t engage in any conduct, which directly harmed someone else. So, therefore, he was punished, first and foremost, because of the words he used . . . We drove him into poverty and used the law to kill him.”
On June 13, 1964, a petition made the rounds denouncing the legal assault on Lenny Bruce. Signed by a veritable who’s who of the time (e.g. Woody Allen, Richard Burton, Bob Dylan, Dick Gregory, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, William Styron, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg), the petition read, in part:
Lenny Bruce is a popular controversial performer in the field of social satire in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain. Although Bruce makes use of the vernacular in his night-club performances, he does so within the context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his listeners. It is up to the audience to determine what is offensive to them; it is not a function of the police department of New York or any other city to decide what adult private citizens may or may not hear.
Within two years the battle had claimed Bruce. He was found dead in his apartment . . . never to witness the enduring effect of his efforts. “The greatest gift I derived from knowing him and his work was the importance of honesty, in the words and on the stage,” Carlin states. “Lenny made being full of shit old-fashioned.”
Or, as Lenny himself explained: “Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.”