February 2003

The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon

 Reviewed by Robert C. Cumbow

Although The Trials of Lenny Bruce contains a good deal of detail about the life and times of Lenny Bruce, it is emphatically not a biography. More than anything else, this hugely readable book offers a journey through free-speech jurisprudence in the '50s and '60s — years that proved crucial in forming the way we look at freedom of expression a half century later.

In their previous book, The Death of Discourse, authors Collins and Skover, both professors of law but working on opposite coasts, asked provocatively whether our unprecedented permissiveness toward expressive conduct furthers or trivializes the public discourse that is crucial to the democratic ideal of government by the people.

It's no accident, then, that the authors should have happened upon Lenny Bruce's travails as the topic of their next book. The cops, prosecutors and judges who sought to penalize Lenny Bruce for "indecency" were not Neanderthals (by and large); they respected the First Amendment and the limitations it placed on the regulation of speech. But they were asking, in their time, the same question that continues to haunt Collins and Skover: How free should free speech be?

Lenny Bruce's fast, free-association patter, which later inspired George Carlin and Robin Williams, was at the time truly innovative, and separated Lenny from his contemporaries. His presentation style was the exact opposite of the studiously prepared and delivered routines of the most popular comedians of the era, Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart. But what made headlines (and case captions) was his satirical approach to religious, political, sexual and moral hypocrisy, which diverged sharply from the ambling, dry, safe political commentary of his most similar contemporary, Mort Sahl.

Arranged roughly chronologically, though with some overlap, the book details Bruce's run-ins with obscenity laws in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, from his first obscenity arrest in 1961, through his death in 1966. Focusing on the social impact of Bruce and his four trials, the authors bid fair to bring an awareness of Lenny Bruce's cultural and jurisprudential importance to a wider audience and to a new generation to whom Lenny's name is no longer a household word.

Like the authors' previous book, The Trials of Lenny Bruce is not just for students and practitioners of the law, but for any reader who cares about freedom and discourse. However, it certainly holds special interest for those who walk the path of law. The influence (and lack of influence) that key First Amendment cases of the era had on Bruce's trials, the procedural ups and downs, and the views (then and now) of Lenny's prosecutors and defenders make endlessly entertaining and eye-opening reading.

The more Lenny ran afoul of the law, the more the law became "his routine," as the authors put it; and this explains the obsession with the workings of American justice that informed Bruce's later, angrier work — the work that gave meaning to his comment, "I'm too conscious of the law," and turned him into an institution ("I'm not a comedian; I'm Lenny Bruce"). His growing criticism of the system and of American hypocrisy became more bitter, less witty, and, in the words of the authors, "sounded more like law talk than comedy talk."

Litigators who read the book will surely see Lenny Bruce as the "client from hell." He took such an interest in his own cases that he insisted not only on managing his defenses but often on conducting them himself, presenting arguments at trial, and engaging in ex parte communications with judges he disagreed with. Eventually even the most passionately crusading First Amendment lawyers refused to represent him.

The authors carefully analyze the tactics of Lenny's various prosecutors, most notably Richard Kuh, the New York City attorney who, years later, would lose a campaign to become Manhattan's district attorney, in part because of his relentless pursuit of Bruce. One of these tactics — separating Lenny's "dirty words" from the context of his performance — was heavy with irony in light of the fact that Lenny himself deliberately sought to liberate such words from their meanings, and thus ultimately to destroy the power of words to shock or hurt. Although Lenny won some and lost some, he died before serving a day of the jail sentence he earned in that New York courtroom, and the date of his death, the authors decide, is "as good a marker as any of the moment when words alone … ceased to be targets of prosecution."

The book, like Lenny's life and trials, is filled with ironies, which the authors never cease to appreciate. The greatest irony is perhaps the way Lenny the man became Lenny the myth, and "Lennyolatry" eventually became politically correct — hence the "and Rise" of the book's subtitle. The authors give dispassionate and nonjudgmental space to the phenomenon of "we killed Lenny" revisionism, citing multifarious quotables to the effect that Lenny "was murdered … by the Establishment," and "died of an overdose of police." Lenny was using narcotics, and getting arrested for it, long before the obscenity prosecutions ever started; though there is no doubt a grain of truth in the theory that his arrests, trials, and resultant bankruptcy contributed to a depression that exacerbated the drug habit that eventually killed him.

But whether the law killed him or not, there's no question that the authorities genuinely hounded Lenny to the extent that he could no longer make a living at his chosen profession. You won't find Socrates in the index to Collins and Skover's book, but the Lenny they portray is like no one so much as the great Attic philosopher, who so relentlessly challenged his contemporaries to look at themselves that they tried and executed him for it. And nowhere this side of Apology and Crito will you find a portrait of a man who so passionately believed in the very law that destroyed him: "I respect the law, and it will eventually vindicate me," he said; and later John Cohen wrote of Lenny that he had "apologized for the agents of his persecution."

One of the most exciting aspects of the book is its inclusion of a CD containing 48 excerpts from Lenny Bruce's own routines, from his trials, and from comments of others about him. The carefully chosen excerpts not only support the text but also stand on their own as a short tour through Lenny Bruce's most important and provocative work. The CD's first publication of excerpts from Lenny's own secret tapes (a recorder was concealed in his briefcase, no mean feat in the open-reel days) of Richard Kuh's near-hysterical cross-examinations is a historic event in itself, even though the poor recording conditions make the recordings almost unintelligible.

The authors and their editors have delivered a handsome, supremely reader-friendly book, whose large, wide-set type makes the authors' direct, witty prose even more readable. The longish chapters are broken into subsections by frequent headings that amplify each episode and its significance. Photos, captions and epigraphs further break up and illuminate the text. Occasional lapses — such as the use of "loathe" for "loath" and "mettle" for "meddle" — suggest that both authors and editors relied on spell-check software rather than eyes-on proofreading. But such errors are infrequent enough that they don't get in the way of what is bound to be, for lawyers and nonlawyers alike, one of the most compelling and stimulating books of the past year.