More Truth About Bruce

I appreciated Paul Brownfield’s lucid article about my recent HBO documentary “Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth” (“Telling the ‘Truth’ About Bruce,” Aug. 7). However, he quotes Bruce as saying in a routine that “children ought to watch pornographic movies. It’s healthier than learning about sex from Hollywood,” a rather noxious quote that simply didn’t ring true to Lenny’s verbal-comic rhymes or, more important, his philosophy.

A little research led me to the source. In Lenny’s autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” the foreword was supplied by Kenneth Tynan (the erudite British arts critic), who was a major advocate for the controversial comedian. In his foreword, Tynan recalls seeing Lenny perform at a London nightclub in 1962. Tynan made notes from the ideas Lenny worked on that night and reproduces them in the foreword. Among these notes is the “pornography” reference exactly as Brownfield includes it. The problem is that it’s a quote from Tynan’s notes, not Lenny’s performance.

Tynan was roughly distilling Lenny’s concepts. The actual routine (which I am now paraphrasing) suggests that kids would see a more realistic portrayal of sex by watching a low-budget stag film than a sanitized Hollywood depiction. It may not be Lenny’s most profound or comedic concept, but it’s a far cry from suggesting that “children ought to watch pornographic movies.”

ROBERT B. WEIDE

Studio City

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I met Lenny Bruce in the early ‘50s. I was a busboy at Warwick Lodge in Warwick, N.Y., and he was a young comedian, recently discharged from the Navy. His social consciousness hadn’t yet found its way into his routines, but he was very popular with the guests and was invited back four or five times that summer.

What seems to go unsaid about Lenny in all that I read about him is his innocence. He was fascinated by the world around him in a way that can only be described as childlike. Although he may have succeeded in hiding behind the hipster’s mask (his language and style were those of jazz musicians of that epoch), he was a tender, gentle man who finally was crushed like the world crushes all its innocents.

Lenny was the victim of a cruel hoax. He actually believed that if he was wise enough, clever enough, funny enough, he could make a difference.

RONALD RUBIN

Topanga