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Lenny Bruce

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<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">
Image:Lennyfce.jpg
<tr valign="top"><th style="text-align:right;">Died</th> <td>August 3, 1966
Los Angeles, California, USA</td></tr>
Lenny Bruce
Born October 13, 1925
Long Island, New York, USA

Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was a controversial American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Leonard Alfred Schneider was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York. His youth was characterized by a chaotic family life which saw his parents divorcing when he was five, and Bruce moving in with various relatives over the next decade. His mother, Sally Marr, was a stage performer who had an enormous influence on Bruce's career. After spending time working on a farm with a family which provided the stable surroundings he needed, he joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17 in 1942, and saw active duty in Europe until his discharge in 1946.

In 1947, soon after changing his last name to Bruce, he earned $12 and a free spaghetti dinner for his first stand-up performance in Brooklyn, New York. From that modest start, he got his first break as a guest on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts Show doing impressions of movie stars. As a "mimic", as these performers were called, Lenny was just getting warmed up. He showed considerable intellect and a knack for pointing out hypocrisy in human life.

Image:Lenny-bruce-mugshot.jpg

In 1951, he was arrested in Miami, Florida, for impersonating a priest. He was soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana after he legally chartered the "Brother Mathias Foundation" (a name of his own invention), and, unknown to the police, stole several priests' clergy shirts and a clerical collar while posing as a laundry man. He was found not guilty due to the legality of the New York state-chartered foundation, the actual existence of the Guiana leper colony, and the inability of the local clergy to expose him as an impostor. Later in his semifictional autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, he revealed that he had made approximately $8,000 in three weeks, sending $2,500 to the leper colony and keeping the rest.

[edit] Career

Bruce's early comedy career included writing the screenplays for Dance Hall Racket in 1953, which featured Lenny, his wife, Honey Harlow, and mother, Sally Marr, in roles; "Dream Follies" in 1954, a low-budget burlesque romp; and a children's film, "The Rocket Man," in 1954. He also released four albums of original material on Berkeley-based Fantasy Records, with rants, comic routines and satirical interviews on the themes that made him famous: jazz, moral philosophy, politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, Jewishness, and the Roman Catholic Church. These albums were later compiled and re-released as The Lenny Bruce Originals. Two later records were produced and sold by Bruce himself, including a 10-inch album of the 1961 San Francisco performances that started his legal troubles. Starting in the late 1960s, other unissued Bruce material was released by Alan Douglas, Frank Zappa and Phil Spector, as well as Fantasy. Bruce developed the complexity and tone of his material in Enrico Banducci's North Beach nightclub the "hungry i," where Mort Sahl had earlier made a name for himself.

His growing fame led to appearances on the nationally televised Steve Allen Show, where on his debut Lenny commented on the recent marriage of Elizabeth Taylor to Eddie Fisher by making his first line an unscripted "Will Elizabeth Taylor become bar mitzvahed?". On February 3, 1961, in the midst of a severe blizzard, he gave a historic performance at Carnegie Hall in New York. Recorded and later released as a three-disc set, the Carnegie Hall Concert was considered by many to be the zenith of his creative powers.

[edit] Legal troubles

In 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the words cocksucker and riffed that "'to' is a preposition, 'come' is a verb" and that the sexual climax of "come" is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, they "probably can't come." Although the jury acquitted him, other communities began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity. The increased scrutiny also led to an arrest in Philadelphia for drug possession in the same year, and again in Los Angeles, California, two years later.

By the end of 1963, he had become a target of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, who was working closely with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York. In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again resting on his use of various obscenities.

A three-judge panel presided over his widely-publicized six-month trial, with Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon being found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. The conviction was announced despite positive testimony and petitions of support from Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin, among other artists, writers and educators, as well as Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced on December 21, 1964, to four months in the workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon's conviction was eventually overturned by New York's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, in 1970.

In 2003 — 37 years after his death — Bruce was granted a pardon by New York governor George Pataki [1], following a petition by Ronald Collins and David Skover -- the petition was signed by several stars including Robin Williams. The pardon was a landmark in legal history.

[edit] Last years

Image:Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore.jpg

In his later performances, Bruce was known for relating the details of his encounters with the police directly in his comedy routine; his criticism encouraged the police to eye him with maximum scrutiny. These performances often included rants about his court battles over obscenity charges, tirades against fascism and complaints of his denial of his right to free speech.

He was banned outright from several U.S. cities, and in 1962 he was banned from performing in Sydney, Australia. At his first show there, he got up on stage and declared "What a fucking wonderful audience" and was promptly arrested. Increasing drug use also took a toll on him. By 1966 he had been blacklisted by nearly every nightclub in the United States, as owners feared prosecution for obscenity. His last performance was on June 25, 1966, at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, on a bill with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. The performance was not remembered fondly by Bill Graham, who described Bruce as "whacked out on amphetamines" and finished his set emotionally naked and a mess.

At the request of Hugh Hefner, Bruce (with the aid of Paul Krassner) wrote his autobiography, which was serialized in Playboy in 1964 and 1965, and later published as the book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Hefner, a long-time foe of censorship, had supported Bruce's career, featuring him on the television debut of Playboy's Penthouse in October, 1959.

[edit] Death

On August 3, 1966, Bruce was found dead at the age of 40 in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. A syringe and burned bottle cap were found nearby, along with various other narcotics paraphernalia. His official cause of death was acute morphine poisoning caused by an accidental overdose.<ref>Collins, Ronald, Skover, David (2002). The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon. Sourcebooks Mediafusion, 340. ISBN 1-57071-986-1.</ref>

He was interred in Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, California, but an unconventional memorial on August 21 was controversial enough to keep his name in the spotlight. The service saw over 500 people pay their respects, led by legendary record producer Phil Spector. Cemetery officials had tried to block the ceremony after ads for the event encouraged attendees to bring box lunches and noisemakers. Dick Schaap famously eulogized Bruce in Playboy, with the memorable last line: "Finally, one last four-letter word concerning Lenny Bruce: Dead. At forty. That's obscene."

Bruce had survived by his daughter, Kitty Bruce, who resides in Pennsylvania as of the 2000s. In the 1970s, Kitty Bruce was romantically involved with the late comedian Freddie Prinze. His former wife, Honey Harlow Friedman, lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, until her death on September 12, 2005. His mother, Sally Marr, a comedienne and talent agent, died on December 14, 1997, in Los Angeles, California, at age 91.

[edit] Posthumous credits and legacy

Image:Lenny Bruce Mugshot 4-27-63.jpg

  • In 1971, one of Bruce's comedy routines was developed by San Francisco filmmaker John Magnuson (who also directed 1967's "Lenny Bruce Performance Film") into a short animated film, "Thank You, Mask Man" (often cited as "Thank You Masked Man") which parodied The Lone Ranger (see link below). Bruce received credit for co-writing and co-directing this seven-minute cartoon and providing his unique narration, which included all of the voice characterizations.
  • In 1971, Lenny, a play by Julian Barry based on Bruce's life and work and starring Cliff Gorman, opened on Broadway. The play was developed into a 1974 film of the same title by Bob Fosse and starred Dustin Hoffman.
  • Eddie Izzard portrayed the comedian in the 1998 London production of Julian Barry's play.
  • In response to a petition prepared by Robert Corn-Revere and filed by Ron Collins and David Skover, on December 23, 2003, Bruce was posthumously pardoned by New York Republican Governor George Pataki for the obscenity conviction arising from his 1964 New York performances at the Cafe Au Go Go. It was the first posthumous pardon in the state's history. Pataki called his decision "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment."
  • In 2004, Bruce was voted No. 3 of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time by Comedy Central behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin, both of whom cite Bruce as an influence (Carlin was arrested as an audience member for refusing to show identification at Bruce's 1964 show at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, after the police stopped the show and arrested Bruce for obscenity).
  • A six-CD retrospective titled "Let The Buyer Beware", overseen by record producer Hal Willner, was released in 2004.

[edit] Books by or about Bruce

By Bruce:

  • Lenny Bruce, Stamp Help Out! (1961 and/or 1965, self-published and sold at his concerts and in hip bookshops like City Lights in SF)
  • Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (Playboy Publishing, 1967)

By others:

  • Julian Barry, Lenny (play)(Grove Press, Inc. 1971)
  • Kitty Bruce, The (almost) Unpublished Lenny Bruce (1984, Running Press) (includes a graphically spruced up reproduction of 'Stamp Help Out!')
  • The Essential Lenny Bruce, compiled and edited by John Cohen (Ballantine Books, 1967)
  • Ronald Collins & David Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall & Rise of an American Icon (Sourcebooks, 2002)
  • Don De Lillo, Underworld, (Simon and Schuster Inc., 1997)
  • Bradley Denton, The Calvin Coolidge Home For Dead Comedians, an award-winning collection of science fiction stories in which the title story has Lenny Bruce as one of the two protagonists.
  • Albert Goldman, with Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce!! (Random House, 1971)
  • Frank Kofsky, Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic & Secular Moralist (Monad Press, 1974)
  • Valerie Kohler Smith, Lenny (novelization based on the Barry-scripted/Fosse-directed film) (Grove Press, Inc., 1974)
  • William Karl Thomas, Lenny Bruce: The Making of a Prophet (Archon Books, 1989)

[edit] Trivia

[edit] External links

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[edit] References

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Persondata
NAME Bruce, Lenny
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schneider, Leonard Alfred (birth name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION comedian and social critic
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Long Island, New York, USA
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1966
PLACE OF DEATH Los Angeles, California, USA
de:Lenny Bruce

it:Lenny Bruce he:לני ברוס pt:Lenny Bruce simple:Lenny Bruce sv:Lenny Bruce

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