![\"Criminal](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1757857631_306_\")
<\/a> <\/p>\nIn this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.<\/p>\n
The Bruce death photos were widely seen. It was as if police did not want anyone to miss the squalor of his last days, and by extension, the degeneracy of his act.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessary to get into their mens rea, or mindset,\u201d Ronald K.L. Collins, a 1st Amendment scholar, told The Times in a recent interview. \u201cThe net effect was to leave this image of Bruce as this dirty, vulgar drug user. From their point of view, he was a bad guy,\u201d a notion \u201cthat would have been shared with a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
But many of his friends and supporters were quick to link his disintegration to law-enforcement harassment. Phil Spector, who produced his records, took out an ad in Billboard that declared: \u201cHe died from an overdose of police.\u201d <\/p>\n
There was a play, a 1974 feature film starring Dustin Hoffman, documentaries, books, and an affectionate but sanitized portrayal of Bruce on the Amazon series \u201cThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel\u201d that introduced him to a new generation.<\/p>\n
Bruce has come to occupy a place of singular reverence among comedians and 1st Amendment advocates. \u201cHe leaves this earth, and he resurrects as this saint of comedy, albeit a dangerous saint. He resurfaces as a cultural hero,\u201d said Collins, co-author (with David M. Skover) of \u201cThe Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martyrdom became central to his myth. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe died for freedom of speech,\u201d said comedian Eddie Izzard.<\/p>\n
\u201cLenny died for our sins,\u201d said Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786889479_866_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Lenny Bruce, center, being treated after a 1957 brawl at a Sunset Strip cafe. Bruce was breaking away from mainstream constraints in favor of uncompromising, countercultural stand-up comedy. <\/p>\n
(Don Cormier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island, quit school at 16 and got his start telling jokes at a Brooklyn nightclub for $12 a week. He joined the Navy and took acting classes in Hollywood on the GI Bill. He developed his act in smoky strip clubs and jazz joints around Southern California in the mid-1950s. He riffed in a Beatnik argot, and his act took on the flavor of improvisational jazz.<\/p>\n
He made organized religion, bigotry and hypocrisy his regular targets. \u201cEvery day people are straying away from the church and going back to God,\u201d he would say. His act \u201cReligions, Inc.\u201d lampooned the Madison Avenue-like peddling of faith as a salable commodity. He imagined what Jesus would make of the opulence of the Catholic Church\u2019s headquarters.<\/p>\n
There were words that offended him, he said. Among them were \u201csegregation,\u201d in an era when it was legal, and \u201cGovernor Faubus,\u201d referring to the Arkansas governor who fought to prevent the integration of a Little Rock high school.<\/p>\n
More than one observer noted that he approached stand-up comedy like an evangelist with a pulpit. \u201cHe preaches that sex is not dirty, that drug addicts are not criminals, and that homosexuals should not be prosecuted,\u201d wrote critic Kevin Thomas.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The Beverly Hills trial lasted two days. One of the prosecution\u2019s star witnesses was a young vice squad sergeant named Sherman Block, later to become the four-term sheriff of Los Angeles County. He had arrested Bruce at The Troubadour in October 1962. Like the iconoclastic comedian, Block was Jewish, with a knowledge of Yiddish, which had been deemed advantageous for the assignment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you went to this place on the 24th, was it not your express position to be sort of a Yiddish undercover agent?\u201d defense attorney Burton Marks asked Block. \u201cThat is, to understand the Yiddish words that Mr. Bruce used?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAlong with the English, yes, sir,\u201d Block said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some words like \u2018schmuck\u2019 used?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHave you ever used that word?<\/p>\n
\u201cI have.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn public?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his routine, Bruce had also invoked a Yiddish term for buttocks, and his attorney asked Block if he\u2019d employed it publicly himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cTuchas?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was the theme of Mr. Bruce\u2019s commentary?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t see any overall theme.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the other vice cops, the future sheriff admitted that he\u2019d found some of Bruce\u2019s act funny. But the prosecutor maintained that it had aroused the \u201cprurient interest\u201d of the audience, which prompted the defense attorney to ask: \u201cAnybody at that show, after hearing Mr. Bruce, did they masturbate?\u201d<\/p>\n
Block was not allowed to answer. The judge called it an \u201centirely improper\u201d question.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you think that Mr. Bruce\u2019s show was perverted?\u201d<\/p>\n
Block said he regarded homosexuality as a perversion, and so Bruce\u2019s references to homosexual acts were perverted.<\/p>\n
When Bruce took the stand, he compared himself to the satirist Jonathan Swift.<\/p>\n
\u201cI usually report the contemporary scene,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t profess to be solely a comedian.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you think that the material which you use appeals to anyone\u2019s prurient interest?\u201d his attorney asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly the most perverse. Or illiterate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of his act was meant to be \u201cjust completely ludicrous,\u201d he explained. Not all of it had \u201cheavy-weight meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody is like Lenny Bruce,\u201d his attorney told jurors. \u201cHe tries to impress upon people the incongruity of our social situation.\u201d The act was not meant to arouse the audience sexually. \u201cYou just cannot be having lascivious thoughts while your risibilities and your laughter is aroused.\u201d<\/p>\n
The jury deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquittal, and prosecutors dropped the case. But local vice cops were not done with him. He found it easy to spot them in the clubs, and sometimes worked their presence into his act.<\/p>\n
![\"Comic](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786889480_999_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Lenny Bruce at Los Angeles County General Hospital in June 1963, days before a court ordered him confined to a drug rehab center. <\/p>\n
(Bill Murphy\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
They arrested him again, this time for his act at the Trolley Ho nightclub, at the corner of La Cienega and San Vicente. His prosecutor was a young Johnnie Cochran, later to be a superstar defense lawyer, then a deputy city attorney.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy first celebrity trial,\u201d Cochran called it. In his memoir \u201cJourney to Justice,\u201d Cochran described the comedian as \u201ca rumpled, sad-eyed man with an alcoholic\u2019s pallor under a five o\u2019clock shadow,\u201d a man who appeared \u201cdefiant and doomed.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Cochran\u2019s account, the 1964 prosecution relied on Sherman Block\u2019s surreptitious recording of Bruce\u2019s act, much of it rendered inaudible by the crackling of the deputy\u2019s well-starched shirt.<\/p>\n
Among the complaints, this time, was Bruce\u2019s take on Jackie Kennedy\u2019s behavior in the moments after her husband\u2019s assassination. Time magazine had portrayed her impulse to climb out the back of the presidential limo as heroic. Bruce maintained that she, understandably, had merely been \u201chauling ass to save ass.\u201d<\/p>\n
The judge, by Cochran\u2019s depiction, found it deeply offensive \u2014 but nevertheless tossed the case on 1st Amendment grounds.<\/p>\n
New York authorities later prosecuted him successfully on obscenity charges, however, for his performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. It led to his blacklisting, and deepened his obsession with his legal woes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you talk to any comedian they\u2019ll tell you it was Lenny who kicked down the doors, at terrible personal cost,\u201d said Robert Corn-Revere, an attorney who led the successful effort to win Bruce a posthumous pardon from the New York governor.<\/p>\n
During Bruce\u2019s life, obscenity law was evolving to afford greater protections to artists and writers. \u201cEven under the evolving law at the time, he should never have been convicted,\u201d Corn-Revere said. \u201cNow it would be unthinkable that a prosecution like that could be brought.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though he was a hero of liberals for decades, Bruce\u2019s language now makes them cringe. His act made use of racial and ethnic slurs, under the philosophy that taboo words lost their maiming edge with repetition. This is far from the left\u2019s current view.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has been a cultural shift. It\u2019s fair to say that Lenny even after death became a victim of cancel culture, as people became more sensitive about language,\u201d Corn-Revere said.<\/p>\n
He pointed to the 2017 cancellation of Michael Weller\u2019s play \u201cBuyer Beware,\u201d which was scheduled to be performed at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. It\u2019s about a student who discovers Bruce and decides to mount a show inspired by his work, only to encounter the wrath of humorless student activists.<\/p>\n
When Weller\u2019s script got around, wrathful student activists declared the play would be \u201charmful to the student population if staged.\u201d It was canceled.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve watched my audience change right before my eyes,\u201d said Ronnie Marmo, a Los Angeles actor who plays Bruce in a one-man show called \u201cI\u2019m Not A Comedian \u2026 I\u2019m Lenny Bruce.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore the pandemic, people on the left, they\u2019d come out and they\u2019d love Lenny. He fought for the brown and black people, the voiceless people. Then when George Floyd [was killed] suddenly the people on the right were screaming \u2018Don\u2019t take away my words.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Collins, the 1st Amendment scholar, said that after Bruce\u2019s death, no American court convicted a comedian for obscenity again. But much of his act would be unwelcome on college campuses today.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe may have been the darling of liberals in the \u201860s, but today with the whole PC mindset there\u2019s no way that some of his comedy would be tolerated,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel no need to sugarcoat Lenny Bruce. He offended me at times.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The comedian was on the witness stand, trying to explain himself. Night after night, under constant threat of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1004545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[402199,4746,12854,40226,22760,1582,276,402196,120333,402195,402194,402198,2961,224,5337,402197,3546,6617,402193,27020],"class_list":["post-1004544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-1st-amendment-scholar","tag-act","tag-attorney","tag-audience","tag-bruce","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-cochran","tag-comedian","tag-dead-time","tag-incendiary-comic-lenny-bruce","tag-l-a-vice-cop","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-mr-bruce","tag-people","tag-prosecutor","tag-sherman-block","tag-word"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117105598272624332","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1004545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Lenny](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786889476_629_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n