October 13 - Lenny Bruce

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On this day, in 1925, Leonard Alfred Schneider was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York. Lenny’s parents, a shoe salesman and a stage performer, divorced when he was 10. As a result he never saw much of his father but his mother had a big influence on his subsequent career. He bounced around the homes of various relatives until he fudged his way into the United States Navy in 1942 at the age of sixteen. He was assigned to the USS Brooklyn and saw fighting in Northern Africa and Italy. Lenny brewed up his first batch of official controversy in 1945. He performed a comedic routine for his shipmates dressed in drag. When the ships officers expressed displeasure with the show, he deliberately told the ships doctors he was having homosexual urges and was promptly given a dishonorable discharge (Lenny was later able to have it changed to Under Honorable Conditions due to unsuitability).

Following his stint in the Navy, Lenny eventually settled back in New York City, hoping to become a standup comedian. He quickly found that he was just one of thousands of comics looking to make their mark on the industry. One of his first performances was as a last minute replacement MC for one of his mother’s shows at the Victory Club. He called himself Lenny Marsalle and garnered a handful of laughs for his adlibbed introductions. His first official standup up gig came in 1947. He changed his name again, this time to Lenny Bruce, and was paid $12 and a free dinner. Shortly after that he made an appearance on the radio program Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts where the tables were turned and his mother introduced him.

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To supplement his meager income as a comic, Lenny also wrote screenplays in the early days of his career. Three of them were actually produced during the Fifties: Dance Hall Racket (which featured Lenny, his wife Honey and his mother), Dream Follies and The Rocket Man. Through the process of writing, he met Frank Perilli, who became one of his managers, and William Karl Thomas, who would write three unproduced screenplays with Lenny and most of the material for his first three comedy albums. Throughout this time, Lenny was also rooming with Buddy Hackett, with whom he made a television appearance in 1957, calling themselves the Not Ready for Prime Time Players nearly two decades before the troupe on Saturday Night Live. That appearance was one of only six on network television in Lenny’s lifetime, a seeming oddity for someone who has been ranked number three on Rolling Stone’s all-time greatest comics list. The reasons for that will quickly become apparent.

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If you know anything about Lenny at all, it’s probably his multiple arrests for obscenity that stand out in your mind. His legal troubles began long before that however. In 1951, Lenny married Harriet Jolliff, whose stage name was Honey Harlow. She was a stripper and had spent a year in a Florida prison for theft. Lenny was determined to keep his wife off the pole, as it were, and tried to manage her career into more legitimate venues. Honey resisted his efforts so Lenny decided to make enough money that she didn’t need to work at all. He stole some priests’ vestments and ran a charity scam, getting people to donate money to a leper colony in Guyana. He claimed he made about $8,000 in three weeks before getting arrested for impersonating a priest. The charges were eventually dropped for two reasons: the foundation he claimed to represent was one he had legally chartered and a donation of $2,500 was actually made to the leper colony. Realizing that he couldn’t change his wife’s mind on her choice of occupation, Lenny would sometimes appear on stage with her in a double act. The marriage was doomed, however. The couple had a daughter together but was divorced by the end of the decade. Lenny’s proclivity for posing for mug shots, though, was just heating up.

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Lenny was fired for the first time from a gig at a comedy club in 1957. He reportedly delivered material considered to be “blue” (code for saying things one just doesn’t say in polite company, usually things of a sexual nature). Since his entire comedic style was born and honed in strip clubs, being a bit ribald while mixing in a heap of cursing shouldn’t come as a surprise. It was clearly more than the mainstream clubs could handle at the time. Lenny was branded a sick comic (a label he leaned into for the rest of his life, and was virtually blackballed from television. His handful of appearances after that had to be written out word for word, approved beforehand and contractually not deviated from.

Lenny wouldn’t be arrested for uttering obscenities until 1961, when he said the word cocksucker and riffed on the phrase “to come” during a set at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. He would be acquitted by a jury on those charges but it set him up as the poster boy for pushing the envelope on free speech. Following that performance, law enforcement agencies around the country began to pay more attention to his routines. He would be arrested multiple times on obscenity charges over the next few years in places as far flung as West Hollywood, Chicago and London, England (his troubles in London would actually result in him being barred from entering the British Empire altogether). None of the charges ever stuck. Until a performance in his home town in April 1964.

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During sets on two different nights at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, the audience was littered with undercover police officers. Following his second act, Lenny and the clubs two owners were arrested for allowing an obscene show to be performed. The Manhattan District Attorney was serious about prosecuting this case and the trial dragged on for six months. Despite supportive testimony from the likes of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Bob Dylan, Lenny (and one of the owners, Howard Solomon) was convicted and sentenced to four months in a work camp. He was granted bail during the inevitable appeal process which would at least theoretically let him continue performing, but the damage was now done.

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Because of his conviction, Lenny found himself now blacklisted by virtually every club in the country. Almost no owners were willing to risk jail time by having him perform in their venue. His part time drug use began to blossom into a full time occupation. In December 1965, he gave a performance at the Berkeley Community Theater which became the basis for his final live album. His final performance took place on June 25, 1966 in San Francisco, the same city he was first arrested for obscenity. On a double bill with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore Auditorium, the show promoter described Lenny as being whacked out on amphetamines. It’s no surprise that he was found dead on floor of his bathroom a few weeks later on August 3. The official cause of death was acute morphine poisoning. He was only 40 years old. His New York conviction was still in the appeals process at his death. Howard Solomon would see his conviction overturned, but Lenny's would stand until 2003. At that point, then Governor George Pataki would issue the first posthumous pardon in the state's history, ironically heavily lobbied for by Lenny's ex-wife, Honey.

Lenny’s legacy reaches far beyond what one might predict looking at his life. His comedy was too stream of consciousness and, frankly, out there to gather a mass audience. It isn’t always about the numbers, though. In Lenny’s case, it’s entirely about who was in that audience. He had a profound influence on a large number of arguably more famous comedians, including Woody Allen, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. It’s interesting to note that the subject of his life continued to endear itself to award giving organizations for decades after his death. Cliff Gorman won a Tony for portraying him on Broadway in Lenny, Dustin Hoffman was nominated for an Oscar for the film version and Lenny’s story plays a large role in the Oscar nominated biopic of Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. Twenty years later, a documentary on Lenny, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, was also nominated for an Oscar. As for all the charges of obscenity, most people nowadays wouldn’t even blink at his routines. Whether you think that’s because Lenny sandblasted the way for everyone or it’s the inevitable conclusion of society in general will always be up for debate, but I think that Lenny himself would have encouraged that discussion.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Dave Smith