Bruce was at the end of his rope. The cops and the courts seemed to be on a vendetta against him. No nightclub would book him. He would soon be convicted of obscenity by the New York justices, a conviction that would stand until last December, when Bruce was pardoned by New York Gov. George Pataki. By then, of course, Bruce was long dead, driven by prosecutors, paranoia and his own heroin addiction to an overdose in August 1966.

We remember Bruce today for his struggles with the courts of California, Illinois and New York, and for his ugly death. His First Amendment battles paved the way for comedians like Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and George Carlin to address the most taboo of subjects in their own routines. But with the release of “Let the Buyer Beware,” a deluxe six-CD box set produced by Hal Willner, Bruce’s own louche comedy routines are back in the spotlight.

Much of Bruce’s act was deliberately not funny, especially late in his career, when his courthouse misadventures took over his nightclub shows. (“The Lenny Bruce Performance Film,” the only widely available video of his work, is a painful chronicle of one of his final performances, spent on a point-by-point rant against Murtagh’s opinion.) But his early routines, as captured on “Let the Buyer Beware,” reveal a rapid-fire performer who combined outrageous ad-libbing with carefully honed bits and shtick. Bruce was tireless in pointing out hypocrisy — in religion, in sex, in race relations. He cursed a blue streak, eager to exploit four-letter (and 12-letter) words for their shock value while simultaneously trying to “liberate” those words from their gutter status.

And listening to him today raises the inevitable question: Who is fighting the battles — for good and ill — that Lenny Bruce fought 40 years ago? Bruce’s trials helped assure that anyone can say “cocksucker” on a nightclub stage, but who among contemporary artists is pushing the boundaries of correctness, making people angry, and exposing hypocrisy? Here’s a list of the 10 best that are out there now, and a guide to where you can catch their incendiary humor.

10. The Upright Citizens Brigade (Matt Besser/Amy Poehler/Ian Roberts/Matt Walsh)
In their Comedy Central sketch show, the Chicago-trained quartet combined a healthy distrust of authority with a taste for unlikely juxtapositions, calling to mind Bruce’s riffs on cops, judges and polite society. But it’s with the opening of their own comedy theater in New York (where, full disclosure, I occasionally perform) that the UCB has demonstrated their debt to Bruce most clearly, by making the theater a summer haven for protesters and protest comedy. The theater offered water and shelter to RNC protesters last month, and recent shows like “The Real Real World: The White House” and Adam McKay’s satire “George Bush Is a Motherfucker” obscenely skewered public figures with a vigor Bruce would’ve appreciated. (For a show schedule, go here.)

9. Louis CK
A former writer for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Chris Rock Show,” CK’s stand-up comedy focuses on the darker sides of sex, family and society. In this way he’s reminiscent of Bruce, whose comedy sought out the darker side in almost any issue — and often went way over the line separating dark from pitch black. Plus, one would never suspect from CK’s fringe of unruly red hair and goatee that he’s the crackpot behind “Pootie Tang.” For a taste of the shifty ferocity of CK’s humor, listen as he talks about how easy it is for people to make fun of “white trash” — “Everybody laughs at them. Do you know why everybody laughs at them? Because they’re poor, that’s why. What’s funny about them is that they’re starving to death” — and hear the audience howling with laughter. Are they laughing at the sheer meanness of his humor? Or is he slyly turning the audience into the very people he’s really making fun of? (For a show schedule and humor tracks, click here.)

8. Chris Rock
Bruce didn’t shy away from race relations; several of his most plangent bits, including “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” assailed white liberal racial guilt. Years later, Chris Rock would call to mind Bruce’s race talk with this riff: “There ain’t a white man in this room that would change places with me! And I’m rich! That’s how good it is to be white. There’s a one-legged busboy in here right now saying, ‘I don’t want to change. I’m gonna ride this white thing out, see where it takes me.’” (Rock’s fourth HBO special, is out now on DVD.)

7. Eddie Izzard
In 1999, Izzard — best known as the manic stand-up behind the shows “Dress to Kill” and “Glorious” — played Bruce in a revival of Julian Barry’s 1970 play “Lenny” in London. Reviewers praised Izzard in the role — particularly for undercutting his own lighter spirits and injecting the role with the darkness and desperation Bruce himself brought to the stage. While Izzard’s own jokes are far more innocuous than Bruce’s (for a sample, go here to listen to his riff on “chickens”), their coming out of the mouth of a burly transvestite gives them a bit more zing. (For upcoming tours and appearances, go here.)

6. Sacha Baron Cohen
On HBO’s “Da Ali G Show,” British comedian Cohen combines Lenny Bruce’s willingness to deliver discomfort with Andy Kaufman’s devilish persona-swapping. As Ali G, a clueless British rapper, or as Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakh journalist, Cohen interviews unwitting subjects like Buzz Aldrin, Jim Baker and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, forcing them into rhetorical corners by force of cluelessness. In doing so Cohen’s not afraid to make himself look bad and his targets look worse: Witness the wince-inducing recent episode in which Borat got the patrons of a Tucson, Ariz., bar to enthusiastically sing along with him: “Throw the Jew down the well/ So my country can be free/ You must grab him by the horns/ And then we have a big party,” which sparked an investigation by the British FCC and raised the ire of the ADL against Cohen (who happens to be Jewish). Lenny Bruce — who noted that not only did Jews kill Christ but “we’ll kill Him again when He comes back” — would surely have approved. (HBO is airing reruns of the recent season of “Da Ali G Show” at various times; check schedules, or HBO’s Ali G home page.)

5. David Cross
One-half of the team behind HBO’s “Mr. Show” and a cast member on FOX’s “Arrested Development,” Cross brings to his stand-up a jittery energy and an impatience with hypocrisy that easily call Bruce to mind. A 1999 bit in which he railed against airlines’ Miles for Kids program — in which customers donate their frequent-flier miles so that sick children can take one last trip — is Brucean in its fury. Cross imagines a holding pen of terminally ill children inside the airport and plays a smiling idiot of a gate agent who refuses to board most of them: “Oh, there are empty seats on the plane, but you’d have to pay for those tickets, because nobody donated his miles. I’m sorry. Airline policy.” (“Arrested Development” airs Sundays at 9:30 p.m. on Fox. For Cross’ schedule and information on his comedy recordings, including the recent “It’s Not Funny,” click here.)

4. Sarah Silverman
“Relations between black and white would be greatly improved if we were more accepting of our fears and our feelings and more vocal about it,” Silverman said in interview in the Forward last year. “When my comic friends who are black [and I] joke about race and say racist shit to each other, it makes it silly, and easy to laugh at.” To that end, Silverman — one of the creators and stars of Trio’s new “Pilot Season” — wryly spouts material that, in the hands of a less sure comic, would seem truly offensive. No, screw that — even in Silverman’s hands, her jokes are truly offensive, and that’s what would make Lenny Bruce proud. Among her many Brucean moments was the one that earned her the ire of Asian-American media watchdog groups in 2001. Called to jury duty, Silverman asks a friend how to get out of it. “My friend said, ‘Why don’t you write something inappropriate on the form, like ‘I hate chinks’? But I don’t want people to think I was racist, so I just filled out the form and I wrote ‘I love chinks.’” (“Pilot Season” will rerun in its entirety Sept. 25 and 26 on Trio.)

3. Aaron McGruder
McGruder’s comic strip, “The Boondocks,” appears in about 300 newspapers every day, and as Bruce did with stand-up comedy, McGruder is reinventing a staid pop-culture medium as a forum for rabble rousing. And just as Bruce’s anger eventually took over his act, so has McGruder’s taken over the strip; in recent months, “The Boondocks” has been so vitriolic toward the current administration as to barely qualify as entertainment. When McGruder is funny, he’s hilarious, but even when he isn’t, he’s mad as hell. Particularly reminiscent of Bruce in its mixture of the personal and the political was last October’s series in which Caesar and Huey developed a plan to save the world: Get Condoleezza Rice a boyfriend. “Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn’t be so hell-bent to destroy it.” (Read “The Boondocks” here.)

2. Rick Shapiro
Of all the comics on this list, Shapiro is the one whose style most overtly apes Bruce’s; the wiry, black-clad New York comedian/performance artist unleashes stream-of-consciousness rants reminiscent of Bruce’s most wired gigs. A former junkie and prostitute — he sells bumper stickers at his shows that read “I Sucked Dick for Heroin” — Shapiro is as famous for his breakdowns on the doorstep of fame as he is for his years of success at some of the best comedy clubs in L.A. and New York. In his latest brush with fame, a plan to reenact Lenny Bruce’s 1961 Carnegie Hall show off-Broadway fell apart due to lack of financing; his manager quit the business the same week. Like Lenny Bruce, Rick Shapiro knows what it feels like when it all falls to shit. (For performance schedules click here.)

1. Howard Stern
Sure, Stern hardly makes the pop-culture meter move these days. Sure, his show has become a parody of itself, with a constant parade of saline-enhanced dim bulbs lining up for a cheap Web site plug in exchange for a few slaps on the ass from the King of All Media. Sure, Stern’s barely even funny. But remember what Lenny Bruce said: “I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.” Similarly, Howard Stern is no longer a shock jock. He’s Howard Stern. Howard Stern, the man who cost Clear Channel $1.75 million this spring; Howard Stern, the man who openly rips both George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey on the air; Howard Stern, just about the only celebrity actively fighting the FCC’s new indecency rules, the contemporary equivalent of those New York vice cops furiously scribbling in their notebooks at Lenny Bruce’s Cafe Au Go-Go shows more than 40 years ago. Like him or hate him — and I myself can’t stand to listen to more than three minutes of his show — you have to admit that, more than any other public figure out there, Stern is following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce. Like Bruce, he’s furious about the hypocrisy of those attacking him; like Bruce, he’s obsessed with finding justice; and like Bruce, his career is coming to a flaming end before our eyes. (You can hear him here.)

It was the penultimate performance of the sold-out Sarah Silverman show “Jesus Is Magic.” Silverman, an attractive, young, mildly cynical, hip, deadpan ironic comedienne has appeared on, to offer a brief sampling, “Saturday Night Live,” “Politically Incorrect” and a show on the Fox network with puppets. “Penultimate” means that the next night was the last show. (It was also Shabbos the next night. Good Shabbos.)

Before the show I bumped into Sarah Silverman, who looks more zaftig on the poster, on the street. She asked if she could sign my breast. The pen I handed her didn’t do too well on skin, so all she managed to scratch into my flesh before giving up was a single S. At that point we realized that we have the same initials. Even more fantastic is that her middle name is Bennett as well.

The show was sold out, but Justin Kerber and I had gotten our name on the standby list that afternoon. So we stood around a bit. I had just had a chat about the golden days of MTV with Colin Quinn, and was standing against the wall, hoping that I would get into the show. Colin had tickets. Maybe an “SNL” connection. Sarah Silverman had told me earlier that she couldn’t even get tickets for her own friends. So much for the bonds of the flesh, I mused as I rubbed my sore breast.

Suddenly Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick walked in front of me, entered the theater and got in line at the box office. She wore a white flowered maternity dress, soft and pretty, and a shawl. Her hair was pulled back. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a thin moustache. I didn’t see her shoes. Mine were Israeli. New York women followed her with their eyes and flushed and blushed and quietly gushed devotional phrases such as, “I love you.” I looked at her belly. Huge with child. The Broderick-Parker child.

I followed them into the building and got on line. Rabbi-to-be Justin Kerber followed. Standing behind Matthew, but not too close, I was not exactly overhwelmed or intoxicated by this brush with celebrity — chatting with Colin Quinn and Sarah Silverman had warmed me up to the simple truth that, even though Dee Snider is the only famous person in Coral Springs, Fla., and even though I am certain that Brad Pitt is far cooler than people assume, famous people are the same size as us, buy pretzels from the same Venezuelan vendor as us, don’t smell any better and don’t even necessarily shave well. Rather, I was just strangely determined to have Matthew Broderick know that I’m a funny guy. And clever. As clever as the brand of humor we were both willing to pay 30 bucks to see that night.

So I said it.

“You were great in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’”

Wait! Don’t crinkle your brow, don’t think such retorts. Let Matthew speak your mind for you:

“I wasn’t in that movie.”

Well, beloved friends, that was the end of me. I made a brief attempt to explain the joke to him: “I know, I just figured you get tired of hearing about ‘Ferris Bueller.’” And then Matthew Broderick nodded at me the way a fellow might nod if you had just told him that you like to pee in your own socks, and then he turned away.

Sarah Jessica (the real star of this scene, no doubt — yes, she’s very pretty) didn’t hear a word of it. She looked stressed. In the city.

My joke? Just a bit of wink-wink irony, as if to say, “You’ve probably been thanked for ‘Ferris Bueller’ a thousand times, so I’ll just thank you for a movie you weren’t even in, as a sort of acknowledged irony between two clever chaps.” But actually, it was more like, “Hi Matthew, I’m stupid — no, just kidding, but I am tremendously ludicrous and abstruse. And did you know that I like to pee in my own socks?”

Maybe I should have said, “Man, ‘War Games’ was awesome. That HAL was one tough computer!”

Rabbi-to-be Justin Kerber, who is now my lawyer on a $30 retainer, was more straight with the star:

“Matthew Broderick? I love your stuff.” Glorious simplicity. Perfection. I’ve been reading the wrong lifestyle magazines.

So now I’m stuck with this moment, this shame. I just wanted to use a bit of irony. You know, a reversal of what is expected, like Sarah Silverman signing my own name on my breast. I told my new doctor, Dr. Craig Blinderman, that my joke was akin to telling Clint Eastwood that “Death Wish 3″ was his best. Or even better, thanking Harrison Ford for being the saving grace of “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.” Dr. Blinderman thought that the Star Wars joke was funny, but didn’t like the Broderick one.

Neither did Broderick.

Prior to this devastating encounter, I had met my new shrink, Dr. F, who has served in the past as a lay rabbi, outside the theater. He was outside the theater looking for a convenience store, and I was outside the theater looking for a new perspective. I told him that I wanted to bring a fiery Pentecostal spirit to Reform Judaism. He gave me his card.

After the Matthew Broderick incident, I crossed the lobby to seek out Dr. F. I was beginning to admit the foolishness of my ways to the doctor when the box office fellow arrived and began to admit standby people into the theater. I made it into the show, but I don’t think that Dr. F, whose companion was the ex-daughter-in-law of Mia Farrow, got his name called, so he didn’t get to hear Sarah Silverman say, “We really have no good reason to make fun of midgets. But we do, because we’re not scared of them.”

I want to use this moment to apologize sincerely to Matthew Broderick and his stellar wife for the stupid thing I said. It was presumptuous of me to attempt to overturn the entire celebrity-fan dynamic by accosting him with an unprovoked bad joke, and it was cocky of me to assume that he (you, Matthew) would actually be receptive to my tragic efforts at clever intercourse. I hope you can find it in your hearts to let this one go so we can start fresh. If you like, you can both join me and some friends for the next two episodes of Kieslowski’s “Decalogue” this Wednesday at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. Tickets and Raisinets are on me.

Speaking of intercourse, Sarah Silverman ends her show with a rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” sung in three-part harmony by herself, her vagina and her ass. Honestly. She uses three microphones. The anal voice was quite deep, and it made me think of some of my own issues. I’ll probably discuss them with Dr. F when next we meet. He says that he’ll give me a therapy session if I buy him lunch at Katz’s Delicatessen.

A little beef and sympathy.

It’s just a theory. But if I’m right, that little glass panel is now
shattered, the box emptied and the contents — a cover of Pamela
Anderson squeezing her bosoms together, the headline “Breasts!” and a salute
to “The Triumph of Cleavage Culture” — are available today for purchase on
your newsstand. It is at least the best explanation I can come up with for
this seeming self- href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/service/1999/01/11service.html">parody,
save perhaps to eradicate memory of the much-guffawed-over “Cocktail
Culture” cover of 1997 (proving that, pace the old journalistic
maxim, it no longer takes three examples to make a trend, just two Cs).
Welcome to Cleavage Culture; your D-cup is ready.

Esquire is either America’s worst great magazine or its best bad
magazine, swinging harder, whiffing more grandly and occasionally
connecting more dramatically than its peers. And the funny thing is, for
several months running, Esquire’s covers have been noteworthy and
risk-taking for precisely the opposite reason of the bodacious current one.
Bravely for a men’s magazine, they featured unsexy men. Stack ‘em
up: January — a bloodied Jerry Springer. December — an ashen Bill Murray.
November — a creepy Fred Rogers. October — a cracked bald head on the
“What Did You Do After the Crash, Daddy?” cover. Despite its aging-Lothario
rep, Esquire was looking far edgier than competitors like GQ, fronted by
deadly dull href="http://www.swoon.com/mag_rack/gq/9812_gq/toc_9901.html">objets
of perfection month after month, or Details with its
Tiger Beat for grown-ups pinups. It’s as if Pam’s mighty rack erupted
unconsciously in furious reaction, an angry blast of magma and silicone
heaved up by the hornier angels of Esquire’s nature.

There is an editorial conceit justifying Esquire’s package. Breasts, you
see, are uniquely visible in our culture today (“Everywhere you look:
tits”). In movies, on television, in magazines — sometimes two to a
customer! As you can imagine, this would be a difficult proposition to
prove at any href="http://www.costumegallery.com/pompadour/material/1600/1665_2.jpg">juncture in href="http://www.dnaco.net/~aleed/corsets/corsetpage/corset-pics/">history,
but Mim Udovitch — an excellent writer who deserves the fat check just for
biting her lip for this exercise — provides the
whatever the female equivalent of a beard is for the issue with an essay
tracing the American breast from the falsies of the ’50s (“an all-around
culture of concealment that necessitated a breast that repressed and
returned simultaneously”) to the Wonderbras of today (“a falsie culture”).
Comedian Sarah Silverman reveals that she has ‘em; Thomas Kelly counters
that men like ‘em.

Whatever its philosophical pretensions, the Cleavage Culture issue just
happens to come along at the heart of winter, when men’s magazines compete
to href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/01/21media.html">heat up
their readership with V-for-Valentine’s Day dicolletage. And it’s a rare
month indeed when Maxim finds itself out-cleft: With Esquire boasting
Anderson, with GQ sporting CAD-designed href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/03/18media.html">Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue cover girl Heidi Klum and with Gear’s Model
Issue hosting Adriana Sklenarikova, eyes wide and blank, lips parted and
hair in a bedroom muss like a just-deployed sex toy, Maxim inexplicably has
Bridget Fonda — a lovely lady who notoriously needed padding to fill out
her bikini top in “Jackie Brown” — to tout its
“Lingerie Runway” feature
(and even there it’s aced by Details, which dedicates its entire issue to
lingerie).

Winter is a conservative season. You hanker for the same Christmas
turkey or Sunday pot roast; you spend the same 18 hours on the couch
Super Sunday; and you curl up with the same familiar ta-tas on the cover of
your waistcoats ‘n’ whiskey guide. The men’s magazines, in other words, are
basically serving visual comfort food. And these are old-fashioned meatloaves indeed, looking all the more dated when the rest of the industry has
long since moved beyond the two-squeezed-together-glands template that has
more or less been the default since the rise of mammals. We now have, for
instance, Boobs-on-a-Plate, which came strongly into vogue last year (model
leans forward, breasts lie supported by a plane or the front of her dress
like fresh mozzarellas); the Boob Runway (breasts taped to the inside of
the model’s top, exposing what is not really cleavage but really more like
a flesh landing strip); the Five-Finger Brassiere (breasts cupped by either
the model’s or a third party’s hands); even PoMo-Nostalgia Boobs (Anderson,
again, copping a Fawcett pose on the cover of Details last fall).

Indeed, more interesting than the subtle-as-a-mousetrap baits of men’s
magazines are the myriad uses of cover cleavage in other magazine genres.
The great mystery of the newsstand, to the male reader, is that women’s
magazines make men look like pikers, using caverns and canyons of flesh to
communicate class and demographic differences with a vocabulary nuanced
enough to stump the 17th century French court. For Cosmopolitan, cleavage
has long symbolized its trademark full-bore sexuality, and the target="new"
href="http://www.cosmomag.com/">January cover is a textbook example:
This is cleavage with shadows inside it, cleavage with an X, Y and Z
axis, cleavage so deep you can practically read the tag on the back of the
model’s dress. Whereas Mirabella (January), which aspires to be the women’s
mags’ intellectual leader (sic), is so good-girl that it puts Angelina Jolie
in a turtleneck. Meanwhile, issue after issue of fashion glossy W
melds the two approaches — relatively small-breasted models exposed in
Boob-Runway mode down to the navel — to connote classy edginess. target="new" href="http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage5.htm">Shoshanna
Lonstein’s noble efforts aside, we still haven’t shed our Audrey
Hepburn vs. Marilyn Monroe complex: Full sweater equals naughty girl.

The motif has been picked up, with a twist, by women’s sports and
fitness publications; Self, Shape and the like (with the notable
exception, so far, of the outstanding recent startup Women Outside) so
aggressively push Lycra-bolstered pontoonage you wonder if they cover any
exercise below the ribcage. On the Jan./Feb. Condé Nast Women’s Sports &
Fitness, Krista Cassidy heavingly “(takes) time out from snowboarding to
soak up some southern exposure” in the balmy waters of Mexico. So why not
just show her, oh, I don’t know, snowboarding? Because nothing says,
“I may be athletic but I’m still a heterosexual woman” like cleavage! You
can shoot skeet, these covers tell us, and fry it up in a pan; you can ride
a mountain bike and still land yourself a man. Just mind you don’t knock
yourself unconscious with those things, hon.

And what’s breast meat for the goose has quickly been ganderized by the
decade’s hottest magazine genre. That’s right: Male cleavage is where
it’s at in men’s fitness, further complicating the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/01/05media.html">sexual
confusion of the booming pecs-and-sex journals, whose black-and-white
models have developed such gigantic and cleft torsos, flexed and thrust out
on each month’s cover, as to rival the lad mags’ hood ornaments — and have
reaped a sizable cut of the traditional men’s audience for it.

In the shadow of these buff cover stars, Pam Anderson’s robotically
squeezed bounty is a tumbleweed-strewn valley of death. With their mammary
stock-in-trade replicated across the newsstand, men’s magazines have no way
to make breasts breastier, and less of a clue than ever how to grab the
attention of a male readership that just wants to move up a cup size. That may
be the reason, in fact, that below-the-waist peekaboos are starting to
steal the breast’s thunder: recall Gear’s oh-so-classy layout of Peta
Wilson on the can last year; notice GQ’s Klum shimmying the straps of her
slight bikini bottom well below her waistline. Cleavage may never go out of
fashion, but as these masculinity bibles remind us, it helps to
accessorize. For men’s magazine editors, standing desperate atop their
too-often-summitted peaks, there may be nowhere to go but down.