Sick Comedy

Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment For The Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week, along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, we explore a different aspect of American History. This week, BackStory is exploring the history of American profanity, so be warned, there will be profane language. And as historians, we’re also mindful of the history of violence and oppression. So, there will be certain words that even we won’t say.

Josh Lambert: Asshole, tits, ass, cocksucker, schmuck, motherfucker, prick, putz, balling, clap, fag, piss, and son of a bitch.

Joanne Freeman: Those were the words police charged comedian Lenny Bruce with saying during a 1962 performance. Josh Lambert actually gets to say those same words without much consequence today.

Josh Lambert: It is pretty fun to do it as dispassionately as I can, as if I do it all the time.

Joanne Freeman: He’s a scholar of obscenity, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, and author of the book Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture. Lambert says Lenny Bruce developed a reputation as a so-called Sick Comic in the 1950’s and 60’s by pushing the bounds of what could be said out loud in the public square.

Josh Lambert: I think we can understand that there would have been people around Lenny Bruce’s time who would have felt genuinely weird and gross when they heard him say a word like shit or tits or fuck. And they wanted to protect other people from feeling as grossed out or as disturbed as they felt.

Joanne Freeman: Police officers started regularly attending Lenny Bruce’s shows, and it wasn’t because they were his fans. Cops started staking out his performances, noting what he said, and then arresting him on obscenity charges. In 1964, Lenny Bruce stood trial in New York and became a kind of cause célèbre.

Josh Lambert: Fascinatingly, Allen Ginsburg organizes a committee to sort of advocate on behalf of Lenny Bruce, and he gets all sorts of different people to sign a petition in support of Lenny Bruce, people like James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag, and lots and lots of other major cultural figures. Again, this doesn’t mean that they were necessarily friends of Lenny Bruce or even fans of Lenny Bruce, but it was people who felt like the liberalization of obscenity law was an important thing, was an important change in the culture. And it would set that cause back if Lenny Bruce were to be convicted, if people like Lenny Bruce in the future couldn’t perform the kind of material they wanted to.

Joanne Freeman: But then Lenny Bruce decided to do something strange.

Josh Lambert: Lenny Bruce really liked to perform his material to courtrooms, even though it never seemed to work out really well. No judge ever said, “Oh, great. Yeah, you did a few jokes for me. I really appreciate that.”

Josh Lambert: So, why does he try to perform his act in court? Josh Lambert has one theory.

Joanne Freeman: Anyone who has a small child understands this. It’s one thing if a kid says a word and you say, “Don’t use that word ever again.” But if you say to them, “Well, there’s a whole bunch of words you should never say,” their first question is gonna be, “Which ones?” And then you have to tell them all the words, which they’re of course gonna say. So, I think Bruce understood this, that in calling them out for using a word like motherfucker, the court had to say the word motherfucker over and over again and include it in the trial transcript and publish it.

Joanne Freeman: So, there was that irony of the only way to punish him for this stuff was to reproduce the language, and thus it sort of undermines the whole idea of shutting him up.

Josh Lambert: And Lenny Bruce, like perhaps no one before him, managed to shock the country into facing the First Amendment in the fullness of what it represented. But did Lenny Bruce think of himself as a civil rights icon?

Joanne Freeman: I think with any particular choice that he made or moment that he spoke or thing that he said, it’s pretty hard to figure out, “Was that a deliberate act of civil disobedience? Or was that him just fucking around?”