Lenny Bruce

So, the actual title of the book is “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.” However, as I learned when putting this title on the video review on YouTube….that particular title pulls the pervies to my page, and when I fail to talk dirty, they give me lots of dislikes. So the blog at least will simply be Lenny Bruce. Also on the video upload on Rumble, I just called it Lenny Bruce.

Lenny Bruce, aka The King of the Damned. Why? Because he was a MAJOR free speech advocate in the 1950s and 60s.

Many people, judging from Google’s search results, seem to think Lenny Bruce is a fictional character from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, sort of a plot device to deus ex machina her out of her problems and help her career along when needed. And that’s exactly wrong. Mrs. Maisel is fictional, but Lenny Bruce was all too real.

He was born Leonard Alfred Schneider on October 13, 1925, and he joined the US Navy in WWII. When he got out of the Navy he tried comedy, didn’t have much luck, jumped into the merchant marines, and when he got out of the merchant marines, he married Honey Harlow, who was the love of his life. They were married from 1951 to 1957 and had one daughter Kitty Bruce. And that’s the rough biopic on Lenny Bruce.

His career as a dirty comic started to really take off while he was with Honey, and then it REALLY took off after their divorce. And it was interesting, because having read the book, I started to really SEE The Start of Cancel Culture.  How everything kind of started to disintegrate and free speech started going away. Each little tabby in my book denotes something Lenny would have gotten canceled for in the 21st century.

Fortunately, when it started, it was the police and the courts trying to cancel Lenny Bruce. I say fortunately, because that he can fight legally. But don’t get me wrong…it still sucked. Because they had the power to arrest him and make his life suck and they did. But ultimately the Supreme Court determined that was illegal, the police and the lower courts couldn’t do that. Unfortunately, the idiots everywhere have decided Ok, well if you can’t do it, we’ll do it for you. And that has become the ethos for the last 40 years: If the courts can’t do it, we will.

And so, this has created some intellectual dishonesty. Everyone loves to claim Lenny Bruce as one of theirs. But he was brilliant. He was wickedly funny. He told the truth as he saw it. The leftists like to claim it because he was cool, he was hip, he was Lenny Bruce and the religious right tried to cancel him. And there’s some truth to that, the religious right did try to cancel him and get him pushed off the main stage, because they disliked his take on politics, and religion, and segregation. But hmmmm…. Who else does that? Who else tries to cancel those they politically disagree with? Or with whom they don’t share religious views?

But here’s some of the things Lenny Bruce said that would get him run out of town on rails if he said them today:

When Lenny was in the Navy, and he decided he’d had enough of Navy life, he decided to dress in women’s clothing. Now, this was lampooned famously on MASH, the TV show set during the Korean War, with the character of Klinger. Well, it worked for Bruce, and he was discharged. And in his book, he says “A transvestite is a nut who likes to dress up in women’s clothing.” Hmm…. that’s politically incorrect today.

“As with drug addicts, Horus’s homosexual traits were environmental. He wasn’t “born that way.” He was introduced once to a group that gave him identity. He was a stock boy at Macy’s and after one summer in Atlantic City, he came back a faggot. He could have just as easily come back a junky, or a water skier, or a Jehovah’s Witness. The point is, he came back as something.” That’s a direct quote. This entire paragraph, in the 21st century…screw the rails, the mob would come with pitchforks and torches!

Identity politics started then, apparently, because it gave Horus an identity.

Lenny had a whole chapter when he married Honey and they spent some time in Florida, and he dressed up as a priest and was going around soliciting money to help the leper colonies. I think he did donate some of the money to the lepers, but he kept some for himself, too. He did the leg work! But he found in one town, that women would cry rape, to get out of their own agency. They would voluntarily engage in sexual congress with a man, then say it was rape when they got caught.

He didn’t say that rape has never happened. He just said some women lied about it. But the very idea that women might lie about such a thing would get him canceled.

His first arrest was in San Francisco…for using the word Cocksucker. Now, today that is just a random word you might sling out. He was using it directly to describe a homosexual act. He used it on stage. And this got him arrested for obscenity. Apparently…women never sucked cock before Lenny Bruce mentioned it on stage.

Another direct quote from the book “Friends of mine are always showing me antisemitic articles: Look at what this bigoted bastard wrote! And then I dug something. Liberals will buy anything any bigot writes.”

God that is so true! You could say anything, and liberals will lose their minds. No matter if it’s true, false, satire, comedy…somebody said it, they take it at absolute face value. There is NO sense of humor on the left! I mean none…you’re not allowed to laugh at anything! Because what ever you’re laughing at…it’s gonna offend somebody. So just kill your sense of humor and bury it. You’re not allowed.

Concepts that Lenny had that were WAY ahead of his time…thoughts that are still relevant today because God forbid anyone work for a living, they just want to get rich right now:

“Four years of working in clubs. That’s what really made it for me. Every night. Doing it doing it doing it. Getting bored and doing it different ways. No pressure on you and all the other comedians are drunken bums who don’t show up, so I can set try anything.”

Show up. Do the work. Weird concept…and it’s not overnight. Nothing’s overnight. You get those one in a million people who get a viral something to take off and BAM…They get that instant success. But it’s rare, it’s not something that just happens for most people. And most of those who get the viral video, plugged away for a few years before that big success. They worked for that viral video. It’s not really something you can MAKE happen.

“Dr. gives a shot because a patient won’t feel as if they got their money’s worth without it. But the doctor also knows that constant inappropriate use of antibiotics is breeding strains of bacteria that’s resistant to drugs.” This is actually more relevant for MRSA because people over sanitize everything and then we get this rise of superbugs. I mean covid is a virus so there are key differences there. But the fact remains, people go to doctors for every little thing, then are surprised when they get sick. Your body has to have something to work with. If you over immunize it, it has nothing to do on its own.

“I knew in my heart by pure logic that any man who calls himself a religious leader and owns more than one suit is a hustler as long as there is someone in the world who has no suit at all.” I’m not gonna name names…. but I think we can all think of at least one “man of god” who is raking in the money, while people starve in the streets outside his house. And that’s a sin.

He liked public trials, when he was on trial, because the constitution guaranteed them. “The sixth amendment of the constitution which provides for public trial. Of course, only gangsters and communists’ reference that document. Because why was anyone who was innocent want to exercise their constitutional rights?”

And that thought has been reinforced ad nauseum since at least 9/11 because hey…. Why wouldn’t you want the government to be able to listen to you if you’re not doing anything wrong? And that is a flawed argument. The real question is: Why would you ever WANT the government listening in on you? It is none of their damn business what private citizens are doing.

Hi FBI guy! I think ours is named Chad. At least my husband’s FBI guy is Chad. Do couples get to share an FBI guy?

When his conviction for obscenity was overturned….and it wasn’t overturned directly, someone else had a free speech case go before the Supreme Court, and his own conviction was overturned as a result of that hearing. Lenny’s response to hearing this was “The only really saying the constitution won’t permit them to convict me. But if they had their choice…”

Of course, “their choice” is to pass that buck on to private citizens in the form of cancel mobs.

“The people who try to blow up trains are “good nuts” and should be sent to a mental institution. But “bad nuts” who only try to hurt themselves through the use of narcotics should be sent to jail.” Now, this was before the DEA existed in the 1970’s. But we’ve been imprisoning people for doing things that only hurt themselves since the 1960’s.

He compares marijuana use as a gateway drug to drug abuse to Catholic bingo parlors as a gateway to full on gambling addiction.

What starts drug abuse is feelings of isolation.

Now, if any of the above offended you, then congratulations! You would have been one of the pearl clutching old maids calling for Lenny’s head during his obscenity trial. But if you’re with me so far, maybe there’s hope yet.

He included some letters and commentary from people who wrote to or about him that are very true. One of them was from the Reverend Sidney Lanier “Your comments are aimed at adults. And adults don’t need and shouldn’t have anyone to protect them from hearing the truth in whatever form it appears, no matter now noble the motive for suppression.”

I mean…tell me that Lenny wouldn’t have been horrified by and endlessly mocked this idea of safe spaces. There is nothing inherently safe about planet earth. You are not here to be safe. You are here to be competent, to grow up, to learn to live with your fellow man. There are 7 BILLION people on this planet. Most of them give not two shits about you. In fact, I would say outside of your 20 closest friends and family, NONE of them give a shit about you, so why would you try to force safe spaces, when safe spaces DO NOT EXIST!

Letter from Stephanie Gervis-Harrington from the Village Voice, “Sitting in on Lenny Bruce’s current New York obscenity trial, one gets the feeling of being present at an historical event. The birth of the courtroom of the absurd.”

The Courtroom of the Absurd absolutely fits the definition of Cancel Culture.

From Lenny himself “I have become possessed of winning—vindicating myself rather than being vindictive.”

And he was ultimately vindicated. Lenny Bruce died on August 3, 1966, of a heroin overdose. Some of his closest friends and family feel like he was persecuted and hounded to death. By the courts. Which again, that feeling of isolation drives people to do drugs, so maybe they were right, maybe that persecution and isolation pushed him to do more and more drugs until the final overdose happened.

Ultimately after his death free speech did skyrocket, for a time at least. All of the great comedians of today: Lewis Black, Joe Rogan, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Henry Rollins, Hugh Hefner…anybody who’s ever stood outside of what’s “approved” at the time, did so by standing on the shoulders of Lenny Bruce.

 On December 23, 2003, New York governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction. Better late than never, I guess. At least SOMEONE acknowledged that the man had been persecuted.

If you’re one of those people who says “I believe in free speech but…” then you don’t believe in free speech. Just admit that you’re one of those shrieking fascist harpies that would have canceled Lenny Bruce. There is no but. I believe in Free Speech. Full stop.

This is a bad time to be an advocate of free speech. Fascists are not just the far right. It’s anyone shutting down discourse solely on disagreeing with the discourse.

Final thought from the book “Believe it or not, I have a dread of being a martyr.” Too late, Mr. Bruce. Too late.

This was an amazing book, wickedly funny, which I would expect nothing less from Lenny Bruce.