American comedian Lenny Bruce (1925-1966) made fun of everything held sacred during the 1950s and early 1960s, from the Lone Ranger television character to the Pope and Jesus Christ. His irreverent "anything goes" style eventually caused him to be...

From the late 1940s until his death in the 1960s, Lenny Bruce's unique comedy included social commentary, "lewd" material, and pointed personal monologues. He addressed issues of sex, race, and religion, and often did so using...

Lenny Bruce (October 13 1925 – August 3 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was a controversial American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was also...

Mark, Jonathan The Jewish Week 09-24-2004 Kitty Bruce remembers her father's legacy. Shlomo Carlebach used to say that Yizkor is so brief a prayer because it is said when the borders between this world and the Other World are so open there...

Lenny Bruce, the potty-mouthed wit who turned stand-up comedy into social commentary, was posthumously pardoned yesterday by Gov. George E. Pataki, 39 years after being convicted of obscenity for using bad words in a Greenwich Village nightclub act. The governor said the posthumous...

Gov. Charlie Crist is being asked to pardon the late Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, 38 years after he was convicted of exposing himself during a Miami concert.Dave Diamond, a cable TV producer from Dayton, Ohio, wrote to Crist last month asking for...

Today is Wednesday, Sept. 5, the 248th day of 2007. There are 117 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:Fifty years ago, on Sept. 5, 1957, the novel "On the Road," by Jack Kerouac, was first published by Viking Press.On this date:In 1774, the...

Nature had designed Lenny Bruce to be the kamikaze of the angry comics. He had an inexhaustible fountain of rage frothing up inside him. He also had the sort of spirit that exults in shaming people, and turning them bottomside up. (p. 184) Lenny Bruce was a hipster. Lenny stood at the exact focal point of that great myth of the fifties: the Underground Man. In that age of universal conformity, it was believed, there lurked beneath the familiar surface of life an anachronistic underworld of ruthlessly appeti...

[What] explains Bruce's unique effect? Certainly, his impact cannot be attributed to his material alone. By now, so completely have the so-called "sick" comics caught on—and so quickly has the authentic radical satire of a few years ago been rendered innocuous by sheer acceptance and then imitation—that it no longer requires daring, originality, or courage to attack sacred cows like integration, Mother's Day, the Flag. Such things are done, albeit in diluted form, v...

[Bruce] arrived at an innovation that was, for its time, genuinely revolutionary: he would synthesize the vocation of nightclub comedian with the point of view of a radical social critic. In this way, Lenny was able to reach far greater numbers—and, no less crucial, reach them at a visceral level where his words demanded to be taken seriously—than the intellectual radicals were ever able to do. This, alas, was probably the key to his undoing. Had he been content to write his satirical scenario...