The Dirty Thoughts of Lenny Bruce

by Sleeveless Brian



For all the commotion that Lenny Bruce caused in his day, he is certainly little remembered. Or at least he is remembered for the wrong reasons.

Ask a person what Lenny Bruce is famous for, if he or she knows who he was at all, they're likely to remember only his frequent arrests for obscenity. Talking dirty.

But looking at his time, the late fifties and early sixties, there were standup comics with a much "dirtier" repertoire than Lenny Bruce's. Redd Foxx, for example, had much more obscenity and sexual content in his act. Even Moms Mabley, an old lady, was far "dirtier" than Bruce.

Why was it that Lenny Bruce was harassed and frequently arrested? I suspect it was because in addition to a few lewd words and thoughts in his routine, he attacked American hypocrisy.

To be sure, in addition to liberal use of obscenities, Mr. Bruce also deflated icons. In one of Lenny's many court cases, a prosecutor complained to the judge, with a straight face, that Mr. Bruce referred to several comicbook superheroes as "faggots" and "dykes." One of my favorite bits has Lenny doing the Lone Ranger as an old Jew (Bruce himself was Jewish) and revealing to the world that Tonto is actually his concubine.

Decades before political correctness, Lenny Bruce was pointing out the absurdity of this wasp hero in the hillbilly-filled old West running around with a faithful sexless Indian companion. Bruce, unlike today's self-appointed social critics, used humor to make this point very effectively.

But to me, Bruce was at his most effective and most brilliant when he pointed to the ways we use words-- or not using words-- and social niceties to hide the problems and hypocrisies in our society. In what is probably his most famous bit, he underlaid his monologue with a character, an imaginary audience member:

"The reason I don't get hung up with, well, say, integration, is that by the time Bob Newhart is integrated, I'm bigoted. And anyway, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin are geniuses, the battle's won. By the way, are there any niggers here tonight?

(Outraged whisper) "What did he say? ïAre there any niggers here tonight?' Jesus Christ! Does he have to get that low for laughs? Wow! Have I ever talked about the schwarzes when the schwarzes had gone home? Or spoken about the Moulonjohns when they'd left? Or placated some Southerner by absence of voice when he ranted and raved about nigger nigger nigger?"


http://www.wam.umd.edu/~molouns/amst450/delillo/1950s.html

Read the rest here.