He was a man with an unsettling sense of humor. Uncompromising, uncanny, unforgettable, and unapologetic-every outrageous step of the way. He entertained America with disturbing frankness. His words crossed the law and those in it. He became intolerable to people too powerful to ignore. When it was over, not even the First Amendment saved him. He died convicted-a comedian condemned for his words. He was Lenny Bruce.

Censorship, arrests, trials, convictions, and appeals. Police, lawyers, judges, and jurors. The state versus the individual; the old guard versus the avant garde. It’s all there, nonstop for five years, in the drama stamped People v. Bruce. Here is the story of comedy on trial, a story without rival in the annals of American history. It is the story of Lenny Bruce’s struggle for free speech.

Words were his catalyst to fame; to failure, as well. Words were his power, his incomparable gift, his way into the unexplored realms of life and law from which there is seldom safe return. He tore into the planks of conventional morality like a furious buzz-saw: "My concept? You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person-you can only do one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty." Daring to make public jokes about private matters, he satirically ridiculed hypocritical religious and legal authorities: "Respectability means under the covers," he explained, "I [am] pulling the covers off." His words cost him, in dollars, freedom, and sanity. His words-comical, critical, distasteful-put America’s First Amendment principle to the test: Can offensive speech really be free?

The trials of Lenny Bruce are like no other in the history of our law. His free speech story is no dry recitation of lawyerly argument and mundane judicial precedent. From microfilm pages and dust-covered court records emerges a remarkable account of a man who was the magnet for enough prosecutors (twelve or more) to staff an entire state attorney’s office, enough defense lawyers (twenty-three) to fill a small law firm, and more trial and appellate judges (some thirty) than have presided over any single body of First Amendment litigation. And all of this for misdemeanor offenses.

Lenny Bruce-born Leonard Alfred Schneider, a Jewish kid from Mineola, New York-was a comic criminal. He was prosecuted by the likes of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., and defended by the likes of Harry Kalven Jr., one of the great free-speech scholars of the twentieth century. Thurgood Marshall, before becoming a justice on the Supreme Court, once sat in judgment over Bruce. Nat Hentoff, the liberal columnist, testified on his behalf, just as Ernst van den Haag, the noted conservative commentator, testified against him. Steve Allen, the celebrated TV talk show host, also spoke out for Bruce-from the beginning, throughout his trials, to the end. Judy Peabody, a noted New York socialite, and Phil Spector, the infamous rock-and-roll record producer, stood by Lenny as well-they subsidized him and his work at a time when virtually everyone else had abandoned him.

In his own lifetime, this comic outsider’s speech was castigated by well-meaning conservatives and demeaned by well-meaning liberals. Major newspapers were relatively silent, and never ran editorial protests. Years after his death, feminist Susan Brownmiller lashed out against Lenny Bruce in a campaign to support his New York prosecutor for district attorney of Manhattan.

He had his defenders, too-among them Max Lerner, Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, James Baldwin, John Updike, and Susan Sontag, to name but a few. They once signed a petition in his defense: "Whether we regard Bruce as a moral spokesman or simply as an entertainer, we believe he should be allowed to perform free from censorship or harassment."

And then there is the remarkable story of Justice William Brennan Jr. The obscenity opinions he wrote over four decades ago figured prominently into Lenny Bruce’s struggles for free speech. The evolution of Brennan’s view of the First Amendment was central to the handling of People v. Bruce. It explains how Bruce was prosecuted, defended, once exonerated (on appeal), and how he may have been legally vindicated if only he had lived longer.

Incredibly, the Bruce story is virtually absent from the recorded history of the First Amendment. There is no celebrated Lenny Bruce precedent, because his cases have been virtually forgotten. True, Lenny Bruce has become a cultural icon. But in the world of the law, his life and legal struggles are nothing; it is as if he had never existed. Such legal inattention is folly, however. For in the comic and tragic turns of this life, there is a great legal story to be told. It is a story of the poignant and perverse sides of free speech and the way that speech plays to people and power. It is a true story, but one clouded by myths and complicated by paradoxes.

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Excerpted from The Trials of Lenny Bruce by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover Copyright © 2002 by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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