This is excerpted from The Truth Seeker 141st anniversary print issue. Check them out online HERE.
By Paul Krassner
While editing Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, I met with him in various cities where he performed. In Milwaukee, three plainclothes police walked into his dressing room at the dinner club where he was working. They told Lenny that he was not to talk about politics or religion or sex, or they’d yank him right off the stage. The night before, a group of Catholics had signed a complaint about his act. The cops told him that he shouldn’t say “son of a bitch” in his impression of a white-collar drunk.
In October 1961, Lenny
was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco for
playing a character who used the word cocksucker to describe a
cocksucker. He got busted for aptness of vocabulary. The officers said
they came because of an anonymous phone call the previous night,
although the doorman insisted that there had been no complaints or
walkouts.
“We’re trying to elevate this street,” a sergeant told
Lenny. “I took offense because you broke the law. I can’t see any way
you can break that word down. Our society isn’t geared to it.”
Lenny replied, “You break it down by talking about it.”
In Chicago, Lenny had been released on bail and was working again
at The Gate of Horn, but the head of the vice squad warned the manager:
“If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going
to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion,
I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? You’ve
had good people here. But he mocks the pope–-and I’m speaking as a
Catholic–-I’m here to tell you your license is in danger. We’re going to
have someone here watching every show.”
And indeed, the
Gate’s liquor license was suspended. There were no previous allegations
against the club, and the current charge involved neither violence nor
drunken behavior. The only charge pressed by the city prosecutor was
Lenny Bruce’s allegedly obscene performance, and his trial had not yet
been held.
Chicago had the largest membership in the Roman
Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny’s jury
consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor
and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the
spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the
others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors and twelve
jurors, every one with a spot of ash on their foreheads, would have all
the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy.
Variety
reported: “The prosecutor is at least equally concerned with Bruce’s
indictments of organized religion as he is with the more obvious sexual
content of the comic’s act. It’s possible that Bruce’s comments on the
Catholic Church have hit sensitive nerves in Chicago’s Catholic-oriented
administration and police department.”
On the fourth day of his
trial, thirty girls from Holy Rosary, a Catholic college, dropped in on a
tour of the court. Judge Ryan requested them to leave because of “the
nature of the testimony. Lenny said, “That was the thing that really did
me in, in front of the jury.”
Judge Ryan instructed Lenny’s
attorney to make a formal move for postponement. This the attorney did,
but then the judge denied the motion, forfeited Lenny’s bond, issued a
warrant for his arrest and asked the state’s attorney to start
extradition proceedings. Next day, the jury found Lenny guilty. The
judge gave him the maximum penalty–a year in jail and a $1,000
fine–“for telling dirty jokes,” in the words of one network newscaster.
A week later, the case against the Gate of Horn was dismissed, but it
had become obvious that Lenny was now considered too hot to be booked in
Chicago again. In San Francisco the jury found him not guilty of
obscenity. Arresting officers admitted on the witness stand that his
material didn’t arouse their prurient interest. But in Chicago, Judge
Ryan refused to permit that line of cross-examination by the defense.
Nor would he allow the head of the vice squad (“I’m speaking as a
Catholic”) to take the stand, on the grounds that his testimony would be
extraneous.
“Chicago is so corrupt it’s thrilling,” Lenny said.
In
less than two years, Lenny was arrested fifteen times. “There seems to
be a pattern,” he said, “that I’m a mad dog and they have to get me no
matter what–-the end justifies the means.” Lenny’s problem was that he
wanted to talk on stage with the same freedom he exercised in his living
room. In May 1966, he sent me his doodle of Jesus Christ nailed to the
cross, with a speech balloon: ‘Where the hell is the ACLU?”
On
August 3, while his New York obscenity conviction was still on appeal,
he received a foreclosure notice on his home. Lenny died that day from
an overdose of morphine. Four years after his death, the New York Court
of Appeals upheld a lower court’s reversal of his guilty verdict.
