On Obscenity and Literature
“But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.”
—Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Roth v. United States (1957)
Interviewer: Speaking of blue, you’ve been accused of vulgarity.
Mel Brooks: Bullshit!
—Playboy (February, 1975)
On a spring evening in 1964 at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, several undercover officers from the NYPD’s vice squad arrested Lenny Bruce for public obscenity. Both Bruce and the club’s owner Howard Solomon were shouldered out through the crowded club to waiting squad cars, their red and blue lights reflected off of the dirty puddles pooled on the pavement of Bleecker Street. For six months the two men would stand trial, with Bruce’s defense attorney calling on luminaries from James Baldwin to Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer to Bob Dylan, to attest to the stand-up’s right to say whatever he wanted in front of a paying audience. “He was a man with an unsettling sense of humor,” write Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover in The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon. “Uncompromising, uncanny, unforgettable, and unapologetic…His words crossed the law and those in it is. He became intolerable to people too powerful to ignore. When it was over, not even the First Amendment saved him.” The three-judge tribunal sentenced Bruce to four months punishment in a workhouse. Released on bail, he never served a day of his conviction, overdosing on morphine in his Hollywood Hills bungalow two years later. He wouldn’t receive a posthumous pardon until 2003.
“Perhaps at this point I ought to say a little something about my vocabulary,” Bruce wrote in his (still very funny) “My conversation, spoken and written, is usually flavored with the jargon of the hipster, the argot of the underworld, and Yiddish.” Alongside jazz, Jewish-American comedy is one of the few uniquely American contributions to world culture, and if that comparison can be drawn further, then Bruce was the equivalent of or — Moving comedy away from the realm of the Borscht Belt one-liner, Bruce exemplified the emerging paradigm of stand-up as spoken word riff of personal reflections and social commentary, while often being incredibly obscene. The Catskills comedian may have been inescapably Jewish, but Bruce was unabashedly so. And, as he makes clear, his diction proudly drew from the margins, hearing more truth in the dialect of the ethnic Other than in mainstream politeness, more honesty in the junky’s language than in the platitudes of the square, was his equal in bravery and genius, and despite the fact that some of his humor is dated today, books like still radiate an excitement that a mere burlesque performer could challenge the hypocrisy and puritanism of a state that would just as soon see ’s and ’s banned and their publisher’s hauled to jail as they would actually confront any of the social ills that infected the body politic.
