Hater Hall of Fame: Lenny Bruce Edition

Leonard Schneider aka Lenny Bruce,  Born October 13, 1925  Died August 3, 1966

Leonard Schneider was born in Mineola, New York to Myron and Sadie Schneider; his parents divorced when he was five, and Lenny lived with various relatives throughout the next decade.  Lenny attended Mepham High School in Bellmore, New York, but dropped out and decided to join the U.S. Navy in 1942.  He saw active duty in Europe, but was discharged in 1946 after convincing a team of navy shrinks that he was experimenting with homosexual urges.  In 1947, Schneider legally changed his name to Lenny Bruce, and with some encouragement from his mother – who was a stage performer herself – he began doing impressions, one liners, and movie parodies in small nightclubs.  Around this same time he also met a burlesque dancer named Honey Harlow – whom he described as having “alabaster breasts” – after dating for a while, the two were married on June 15, 1951 (they divorced in 1957).  The newlyweds soon moved to Miami Beach, where Honey worked as night club dancer/stripper.  Before moving to Florida, Bruce organized a charter from New York State legalizing the Brothers Mathias Foundation, and received a license to solicit and disperse funds for a leper colony in New Guiana.  On April 23, 1951 he was arrested in Palm Beach for solicitation, but the charges were later reduced to vagrancy and panhandling.  He was found not guilty in the case because the charter was legal, the leper colony did exist, and the local clergy didn’t actually know if he was an imposter – unfortunately, those poor New Guiana lepers only received $2,500 of the $8,000+ that Father Lenny raked in over a three week span.  He narrowly escaped this brush with Johnny Law, it wouldn’t be his last run-in with police and the U.S. judicial system though. 

Bruce started to receive bookings at small nightclubs after his appearance on the TV show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scoutsin 1948.  His unique act eventually led to an increase in popularity, and Bruce soon went from working seedy bars and jazz clubs to doing major TV appearances.  Although he would only appear on TV six times in his career, it was clear to audiences that Lenny Bruce was unlike any comedian during this era.  His routines were laced with profanity, and often involved social commentary on topics like organized religion, racial prejudices, and the government.  This edginess inevitably led to varying opinions in the mainstream media.  Some felt like Broadway columnist Hy Gardner, who called Bruce a ”one-time-around freak attraction”; others echoed the sentiment of a writer from San Francisco named Herb Caen:

They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic, and sick he is. Sick of all the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful. He is a rebel, but not without a cause, for there are shirts that need un-stuffing, egos that need deflating. Sometimes you feel guilty laughing at some of Lenny’s mordant jabs, but that disappears a second later when your inner voice tells you with pleased surprise, ‘but that’s true’.”

Bruce’s raunchy persona also led to more altercations with the police - he was arrested 9 times in a 3 year span for either obscenity or possession of narcotics – and basically led to him being blackballed in clubs across the United States.  His last performance was at The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on June 25, 1966, a concert that also featured Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention.  On August 3, 1996, Lenny Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home, and the autopsy listed his official cause of death as “acute morphine poisoning by an accidental overdose”.  Thirty-seven years after his death, Bruce received the first posthumous pardon in New York’s history when Governor George Pataki overturned his obscenity conviction from 1964.                       

Bruce’s material is not as relevant as it once was, but I still think it’s pretty damn funny:

“The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be’, there is only what is.”