Rights and Raunchy Talk

Rob and Laura Petrie still slept in separate twin beds with buttoned-to-the-neck pajamas when New York police busted Lenny Bruce on obscenity charges. That’s how much comedy and culture have changed since 1964.

Dick Van Dyke is still tripping over that living room ottoman on cable TV, but Bruce’s dour, raunchy routines -- often tied, in pioneering fashion, to the headlines and churning social issues of his day -- faded from view when he died of a drug overdose at 40 two years after a misdemeanor conviction. Now, New York Gov. George Pataki’s granting of a posthumous pardon to the comedian should finally resurrect the reputation of a commentator who was more influential than he understood.

When Bruce got his first big break, in 1948 on the “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” show, comedy was corny and squeaky clean. Even five years later, in 1953, TV censors forbade Lucille Ball to utter the word “pregnancy” on her television show; “expecting” was as clinical as they would allow. But by then, Bruce was beginning to ply night club audiences with bracing material. Nothing was too raunchy or too caustic: body parts, sex, the pope, Jewish husbands, race, politics -- all were fair game.

It’s no surprise that his humor made Bruce enemies. The FBI kept a file on him. Police arrested him repeatedly -- in California and New York -- for dropping profanities that Tony Soprano now spews as conjunctions.

The harassment and the drug habit that Bruce acquired eventually broke him, financially and spiritually. Now with sex, body parts and toilet jokes the staples of television and stand-up comedy -- for better or for worse -- it’s easy to think of Bruce’s legacy as merely having played a key role in launching popular culture’s skid toward vulgarity. But the years-long effort by a core of fans and high-profile 1st Amendment lawyers to secure a pardon for Bruce was about much more. “Freedom of speech,” Pataki said Tuesday in granting the pardon, “is one of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror.”

The heirs to Bruce’s political and sexual zingers, comics like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, D.L. Hughley and Chris Rock, make us laugh because they poke fun at the things we’re scared of. In Bruce’s day, it was sex and Soviet bombs. In these tense times, it’s still sex and bombs. But, in part because of Bruce’s tortured ‘60s experience, these and myriad other impolite topics like religion and death now can be discussed, freely, openly and even with the giggles or belly laughs they can merit.