American stand-up comedian and brilliant satirist, who created much controversy in his time due to his use of so-called 'dirty words' in his nightclub comedy act. The black humor of Bruce's largely improvised shows often overstepped the bounds of what was considered in the 1950s and 1960s respectable. Bruce's performances, his fresh and daring way of breaking rules, influenced such comedians as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams.

"Children ought to watch pornographic movies : it's healthier than learning about sex from Hollywood." (from How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 1965)

Leonard Alfred Schneider (Lenny Bruce) was born in New York. "To me, if you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish, he once said. " It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish if you're Jewish." When Bruce was five his parents divorced and he was brought up by relatives. During World War II he served in the Navy on the U. S. S. Brooklyn, a light cruiser, and was discharged in 1946. After spending some time in odd jobs, he moved to Hollywood to study acting. In 1947 he changed his name to Bruce, because "Leonard Alfred Schneider sounded too Hollywood."

The fifties was the breakthrough decade for Bruce and such comedians as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Mort Sahl, who were all Jewish, with their own vision of ethnicity. Their humor evoked a response among young Bohemians and college-educated people. Bruce worked as a night-club performer in Brooklyn and Baltimore, where he met a striptease dancer, who worked under the name Hot Honey Harlowe. She was born Harriett Jolliff in 1927. Harlowe had ran away from home in her teens and spent also some time in jail. "Honey and I just stared at each other and got hot," Bruce later said. They married in 1951.

Bruce appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Show and drew national attention with his daring style of satire, in which he probed taboo subjects such as racial fears, sexual fantasies, Jewish-Christian tensions, and presidents. "I really dig what they do with a homosexual in this country. They put him into a prison with a lot of other men. That's a really good punishment." (Dustin Hoffman in Lenny)

Bruce imagined Hitler in show business and stewardesses jettisoning infants from overloaded airliners, betraying at the same time a schooling in the Catskills resorts. The black sheep among salon tyros and young comics, such as Joe E. Lewis, Buddy Hackett, Alan King, Bruce played to intellectuals, wearing jeans, not tuxedo. His wit and inimitable frankness won him an admiring audience and made his act celebrated in liberal literary circles.

Harlowe appeared in two films, Dance Hall Racket (1953) and Princess of the Nile (1954). Bruce was married to her until their divorce in 1957. Harlowe, who later published a book of memoir, Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady (1976), died in 2005 in Honolulu.

Bruce worked in Hollywood at night-clubs and on a local television show. Steve Allen had Bruce on his show in April 1959.

In 1961 Bruce was imprisoned on obscenity charges and in 1963 he was refused permission to enter Britain. "The comic, Lenny Bruce, was booed offstage in England," claimed the controversial radio journalist Walter Winchell. Eventually Bruce's show was banned both in England and Australia.

After a number of nightclub owners started to Bruce's show, assuming that it would only lead to police arrest, he was unable to perform his material. In 1962 the United States District Court in San Francisco, in support of a bankruptcy action, declared him a pauper. The idea for Bruce's autobiography, HOW TO TALK DIRTY AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, was suggested by Hugh Hefner in 1963. It appeared in Playboy over the next two years and in book form in 1965.

In spite of pressures, Bruce refused to clean up his language. "All my humour is based on destruction and despair," he said. "If the whole world were tranquil, I'd be standing in the breadline, right back of J. Edgar Hoover." (from The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. by J. Cohen, 1970) In 1964 Bruce was convicted of giving obscene performances at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village.

When he was arrested by the police in April 1964, Norman Mailer, James Jones and other prominent writers and intellectuals defended him as a social satirist "in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais and Twain." In his later years Bruce became addicted to heroin. In 1963 he was found guilty of illegal possession of drugs. Bruce died of an overdose on August 3, 1966, in his home on Hollywood Boulevard. He was 40 years old.

Bruce's life inspired Julian Barry's 1971 play Lenny and Bob Fosse's film Lenny (1974), which portrayed him as a martyr of freedom of speech. Marvin Worth, Bruce's longtime friend, had tried to produce a screen biography of him since 1968. Fosse considered Dustin Hoffman the best candidate for the title role - the actor even looked like Lenny. Actress Valerie Perrine, who played his wife, Honey, had been a Las Vegas stripper. In the nightclub scenes Hoffman performed many of Bruce's most remembered monologues, with a live audience looking on. "I'm totally corrupted. I mean, really. My whole act, my whole economic success, whatever that is, is based solely on the existence of segregation, violence, despair, disease and injustice. And if by some miracle, the whole world would suddenly tranquilize, be pured, I would be standing in an unemployment line somewhere. So you see, I'm not a moralist." (Dustin Hoffman in Lenny)

Hoffman had prepared himself well for the role - he listened to records, watched films, and read books on the comedian. He also had his own view of the Lenny myth: "I don't believe Lenny used drugs just to get wasted. Instead, I thought he used them to keep himself going for four days, since he was under enormous pressure from performing in clubs, writing new material, recording new record albums, and planning concerts." (from Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's Antihero by Jeff Lenburg, 1983)

Lenny Bruce expanded dramatically the style and subject matter of stand-up-comedy. His style has left impact on many performers. Years later Eddie Murphy was using language and material that would have made Bruce seem inhibited. Woody Allen, who had became a respected comedy writer in the late 1950s, appealed to a similar audience, but when Bruce satirized middle-class values, Allen satirized his own idiosyncrasies.

"Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn't commit any crime
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time.
I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half,
Seemed like it took a couple of months.
Lenny Bruce moved on and like the ones that killed him, gone."
(Bob Dylan in 'Lenny Bruce', from Shot of Love, 1983)

For further reading: The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of An American Icon by Ronald K. L. Collins, David M. Skover (2002); Society, Language and the University: From Lenny Bruce to Noam Chomsky by Sol Saporta (1994); Lenny Bruce: The Making of a Prophet by William Karl Thomas (1989); Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady by Honey Bruce (1976); Lenny Bruce: The Comedian As Social Critic and Secular Moralist by Frank Kofsky (1974); Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller (1974); The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. by J. Cohen (1970)

Selected works:

• HOW TO TALK DIRTY AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1965 (with Paul Krassner)
• OTHER WORKS: The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce; From the Private Collections of Kitty Bruce; Lenny Bruce: The Berkeley Concert (audio cassette and cd)