Yes, he made jokes about the Catholic Church.
No, here, he's not dressing like a priest to make a point.
He's wearing a "Nehru jacket," made popular
by the late Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India.
August 3, 1966, 60 years ago: Comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead at his home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He was 40 years old.
He was born Leonard Alfred Schneider on October 13, 1925, the same day as Margaret Thatcher. He didn't live to see her rise to power, and God only knows what the "Iron Lady" (or, more accurately, the "Iron" "Lady") would have thought if she knew about this fact.
He was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York, and grew up in nearby Bellmore. While Alan King moved to Long Island after growing up in Brooklyn and becoming famous, Bruce was the 1st Long Island native to make it big in comedy, preceding such names as Eddie Murphy, Joy Behar, Rosie O'Donnell, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin James and Jim Breuer.
He was the 1st comedian to get big by using profanity and "sick humor." Typical of his material: "My wife caught me in bed with her mother. She said, 'You're sick!' I said, 'Why? She's your mother, not mine!'"
Bruce would joke about anything. Especially sex. And religion. Particularly the Catholic Church. In his routine, he called Pope John XXIII "John Baby." That, plus the fact that he was Jewish, pissed off a lot of conservative people in "the establishment."
He was often arrested for obscenity, for using "dirty words" onstage, or for talking about sex onstage. In a rare TV appearance, on The Steve Allen Show on April 5, 1959, he said, "There are words that offend me. Uh, let's see: 'Governor Faubus,' 'segregation' offend me. Uh, 'nighttime television' offends me. Some nighttime television. Uh, the shows that exploit homosexuality, narcotics and prostitution, under the guise of helping these societal problems."
October 13, 1960 was his 35th birthday. Dick Schaap was doing a profile on him for Newsweek magazine. At the same time, Schaap was covering the World Series. He invited Bruce to sit with him in the press box at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh for Game 7. Bruce admitted that he had never been to a baseball game before. It turned out to be one of the greatest games of all time, with Bill Mazeroski hitting a home run in the bottom of the 9th inning, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates a 10-9 win over the New York Yankees, and winning the Series in a major upset. Bruce told Schaap he'd enjoyed the game. But in his memoir, Schaap said that, as far as he knew, Bruce never went to another.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, if "the establishment" decided you needed what we would now call "canceling," it meant you wouldn't get hired. And any place that would hire you might get closed down. It also meant that you could get arrested for using profanity onstage. That was the conservatives closing you down. The conservatives doing the canceling.
Bruce was convicted of obscenity in New York on November 4, 1964. He was sentenced to 4 months in a workhouse. He appealed, and was freed pending that appeal.
That appeal was never heard: On August 3, 1966, at age 40, he was found with a needle in his arm at his home in the Hollywood Hills. It was known that he had a drug problem, but this was a little too convenient for his fans. They came to believe that he was murdered.
In 1972, Julian Barry staged the play Lenny on Broadway. Cliff Gorman won a Tony Award as its star. In 1974, Bob Fosse, better known for his dance-filled musicals, directed a film version. Dustin Hoffman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
In 2003, Governor George Pataki of New York gave Bruce a posthumous pardon. In 2004, the cable-TV network Comedy Central aired a special on the 100 greatest standup comedians of all time. Bruce was ranked 3rd. Coming in 2nd was George Carlin, who had once been arrested along with Bruce. Carlin called him "a brilliant comedian, who influenced me as much as a man in my moral thinking and attitudes as he did as a comedian." Coming in 1st was Richard Pryor, who had once said that hearing Bruce for the first time "changed my life."
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