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Wednesday, Oct 8, 2008
Thanks to the martyred comedian, American culture is free to be a wild kingdom. But with his new anti-porn crusade, Attorney General Ashcroft wants to turn back the clock.
Aug 26, 2003 | On Oct. 4, 1961, stand-up comic Lenny Bruce appeared at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop. Recalling the first gig he had played in the city four years earlier, at another North Beach joint called Ann's 440, he acted out an imaginary conversation between himself and his agent.
Bruce: What kind of a show is it, man?
Agent: Well, you know.
Bruce: Well, no, I don't know, man...
Agent: Well, it's not a show. They're a bunch of cocksuckers, that's all. A damned fag show.
Bruce: Oh. Well, that is a pretty bizarre show. I don't know what I can do in that kind of show.
Agent: Well, no. It's ... we want you to change all that.
Lenny: Well -- I don't -- that's a big gig. I can just tell them to stop doing it.
Bruce then did a routine that was to become one his most famous, in which he examined the phrase "to come":
"To" is a preposition, "come" is a verb, the verb intransitive.
To come. To come.
I've heard these two words my whole adult life and as a kid when they thought I was sleeping. Tooo commmme...
It's been like a big drum solo.
Did you come? Did you come? Good. Did you come good?
... Now, if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual -- the words "to come" really make you feel uncomfortable -- if you think I'm rank for saying it to you ... you probably can't come.
Bruce brought the house down. But among the guffawing hipsters, goateed existentialists and black-bedecked jazz fans (tenor great Ben Webster was also on the bill) was a man who was not laughing. He was a San Francisco policeman named James Ryan, who had been sent to the club by his sergeant, James Solden, with instructions to see if anything of a "lewd nature" was going on.
Ryan was horrified by what he heard. "Jeez, you know," he told Solden, "I can hardly believe this myself. The man is up there onstage and he's performing and he's taking the term 'cocksucker' and using it." After a brief conference, Ryan and Solden decided they had heard enough to arrest Bruce. As the crowd from the 10 p.m. show left, Ryan and Solden informed Bruce and the club owner they were arresting the performer for obscenity and escorted Bruce to the police call box in front of Enrico Banducci's Hungry i. Along the way they had a conversation about obscenity stranger and funnier and, as events would show, more tragic than anything even Lenny Bruce could have dreamed up.
"I took exception. I took offense," Solden told Bruce. "We've tried to elevate this street. I'm offended because you broke the law. I mean it sincerely. I mean it. I can't see any right, any way you can break this word down, our society is not geared to it."
Bruce said, "You break it down by talking about it ... How about a word like 'clap'?"
"Well, 'clap' is a better word than 'cocksucker,'" Solden replied.
"Not if you get the clap from a cocksucker," Bruce rejoined.
Bruce was taken in a paddy wagon down to the Hall of Justice, booked on misdemeanor charges, and locked up in a cell until the club owner bailed him out. He returned to the Jazz Workshop in time for his 1 a.m. show, announcing as he walked onstage, "You'll never guess where I've been. I've been busted." A little later, he said, "I'm sorry if I'm not very funny tonight, but I'm not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce."
It was the first of eight obscenity busts that were to consume, and ultimately help destroy, the life of one of America's greatest comedic satirists and verbal performers.
Lenny Bruce's legal ordeal is one of the most shameful chapters in the cultural history of postwar America -- a persecution that obsessed Bruce, drained his creative energies, bankrupted him, and allowed the demons that always haunted him to take over. Bruce died of a morphine overdose in 1966, but as Vincent Cuccia, one of the New York D.A.'s who prosecuted Bruce's last obscenity case, said, "We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him."
Bruce makes a very difficult martyr -- he was too irascible, too self-destructive, too perverse, too unclassifiable. But he is a martyr nonetheless -- a heartbreakingly vulnerable renegade who was broken by the final tail-lash of the dying dragon of American Puritanism.
Has that dragon really died? It's true that no comedian or author or singer will probably ever again be led away in handcuffs for using what some beat cop decides are offensive words -- certainly not for saying that Eleanor Roosevelt "had the nicest tits of any lady in office" or doing a shtick about a wife who returns home to find her husband screwing a chicken. But the outdated obscenity laws and murky Supreme Court rulings used to arrest and convict Bruce remain, a testament to our nation's complete inability to deal with the issue of obscenity. (Indeed, as Ronald Collins and David Skover point out in their excellent book, "The Trials of Lenny Bruce," his final New York conviction has never been formally overturned: In the eyes of the law, disgracefully, Lenny Bruce remains a criminal.)
Most tellingly, the highest powers in the land are still eminently capable of using those laws to crack down on material they deem immoral -- even if millions of Americans spend billions of dollars a year consuming that material. The issue today is not dirty words or offensive comedic routines, but pornography -- America's favorite not-so-secret vice and the bête noire of cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists. (At least the official bête noire: According to many in a position to know, the most Bible-thumping types tend to be the most avid watchers of porn.) Pornography may not be as inspiring a subject to defend as a Lenny Bruce spritz, but free speech is free speech. It's also hard to avoid the feeling that Attorney General John Ashcroft and his ilk, who are constantly calling for a return to the good old days of clear moral guidelines and harsh sanctions, would have been among Bruce's most zealous persecutors.
On Aug. 7, Ashcroft's Justice Department announced a 10-count indictment against a porno production company called Extreme Associates. The owners of the company, Robert Zicari and Janet Romano (aka "Lizzie Borden") were charged with distributing obscene films and video clips through the U.S. mail and the Internet. The move was expected. The conservative groups that regard society's tolerance for pornography as a sign of hideous moral decay, and that make up the Bush administration's political base, have been critical of Bush for not launching an anti-porn war sooner. Attorney General Ashcroft is a fervent born-again Christian who met with anti-porn crusaders before Sept. 11; his planned crusade was derailed by the terrorist attacks. (Under Clinton, not surprisingly, prosecuting porn was a low priority -- and during those years, the industry took off in meteoric fashion.)
What is peculiar about Ashcroft's war on porn is its obvious futility. Only someone with the burning, itching faith of a Jimmy Swaggart would believe that an industry that now generates an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion annually and involves mainstream, blue-chip companies could realistically be closed down, or even significantly curtailed: Like it or not, the porn toothpaste is out of the American tube, and it won't go back in.
Legally, Ashcroft is on strong ground: pornography is obviously obscene, and obscene speech can be restricted. But law and the real world have diverged here to the point of absurdity, and a common-sense analysis reveals his singling out the Extreme films to be ludicrous. With the possible exception of "Forced Entry," in which an actress was apparently actually beaten (albeit with her consent), the Extreme Associates movies deemed obscene by the feds -- "Extreme Teen #24," "Cocktails #2: Director's Cut," "Ass Clowns #3: Director's Cut," and "1001 Ways to Eat My Jizz" -- don't appear (to judge by the images on the Extreme Web site) to be fundamentally different from the standard run of porn films. Raunchier, maybe; a little more outrageous, perhaps. But not in an altogether different league. Once you're in the realm of hardcore, drawing distinctions about what is and isn't obscene becomes an exercise in Aristotelean hairsplitting, using Clarence Thomas' fabled pubic hair. As Susannah Breslin noted in a Salon piece two years ago about the L.A. police department's crackdown on so-called extreme porn, "It remains unclear why 100 men masturbating on a woman is less protected by the First Amendment than, say, three men doing the same thing."
A scene in which Bush and Ashcroft are sitting around discussing this important matter of First Amendment law could only be done justice to by Lenny Bruce. "John, I love ya but I gotta tell ya, you're back in the friggin' Middle Ages with this no-more-than-four-dicks-at-one-time thing. Times have changed. Even when I was a frat boy, a couple dozen weenies was no big deal ... Tell you what I'll do, I'll do ya a favor and cut it off at 50. More than 50 shmucks, we shut 'em down." "Fifty! Mr. President, with respect, that's outrageous. How about 35?"
The real target of Ashcroft's zeal is obviously not the supposedly "unacceptable" porn made by Extreme Associates, but pornography itself. As already noted, however, it is a singularly empty crusade, apparently intended mainly to score political points: Although Ashcroft has the full weight of obscenity law on his side, that law -- always hopelessly ambiguous and vague -- has become completely meaningless. It has been trumped by money and reality.
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