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CELEBRATING LENNY BRUCE’S 100TH BIRTHDAY: “THE WORLD IS SICK AND
I’M THE DOCTOR”  
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Bruce E. Levine
October 10, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ Today, it is an understatement to say that mainstream U.S. society
is sick with what Lenny called “false values.” Tip-of-the-iceberg
evidence of how a sick U.S. society has gotten sicker? In 2024, an
in-your-face scumbag bully was elected president. _

, Lenny Bruce’s booking, following his arrest in 1961. Photo:
Examiner Press. Public Domain.

 

“Lenny Bruce is not afraid”

—“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
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R.E.M.

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Schneider on October 13, 1925, died on
August 3, 1966. Officially, Bruce died from a drug overdose.
Unofficially, he was murdered by the New York County District
Attorney’s office.

The Trump Reich is not the first era in U.S. history in which local,
state, or federal government has attempted to abolish free speech and
destroy opposition; for example, Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs in
prison for speaking out against capitalism and World War I. What makes
the current era different is that a U.S. president is not only acting
like a dictator, he is doing everything possible to ensure the world
views him as one, getting these headlines: “Trump Pulls From
Dictator Playbook and Hangs Giant Banner of His Face
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Today, one risks imprisonment or having a career derailed not simply
for challenging obscenity laws, as did Bruce, or speaking out against
a capitalist war, as did Debs, but for hurting a president’s
feelings. So, it’s an especially good time to celebrate Lenny Bruce.

At the time of his death, Bruce was blacklisted by almost every venue
in the United States, as owners feared that they too would be arrested
for obscenity. One of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted
Bruce’s last 1964 obscenity case, Assistant District Attorney
Vincent Cuccia, later admitted
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“We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I
watched him gradually fall apart. . . . We all knew what we were
doing. We used the law to kill him.”

 “As a child,” Bruce recounted, “I loved confusion: a freezing
blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get
stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical
failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and
find a new direction.” At age 16, Lenny ran away from home and
boarded with the Dengler family, working on their Long Island farm in
the 1940s. The Denglers had a roadside stand, and city and suburban
folks loved the idea of fresh farm eggs, but the Denglers didn’t
have enough chickens to meet the demand, so they would buy eggs
wholesale, and a teenage Lenny repackaged them in Dengler cartons; and
he would later recount, “With my philanthropic sense of humor, I
would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an
authentic pastoral touch.”

Bruce’s rebellions against authority, on stage and off, remain
legendary among comics. Fed up with the navy in 1945, Bruce told
medical officers he was overwhelmed with homosexual urges, and this
tactic worked to get him discharged. He then fell in love with Honey,
a stripper at the time, and they married in 1951. To raise money so
that Honey could leave her profession, Lenny created the “Brother
Mathias Foundation,” in which he impersonated a priest and solicited
donations. Bruce was arrested for that scam but was lucky and found
not guilty.

On stage, Bruce was fearless. He worked as an MC at strip clubs, and
following one performer, he himself came on stage completely naked and
said, “Let’s give the little girl a big hand.” In Bruce’s
time, it was still common for some Christians to accuse Jews of
killing Jesus, and this would put most Jews on the defensive—but not
Lenny. In his act, Lenny would “fess up” that not only did the
Jews kill Jesus but that it was his Uncle Morty who did it. In one
variation of this bit, he said that what in fact Jews really had
covered up was that his Uncle Morty had killed Jesus with an electric
chair, but that Jews thought that Christian women wouldn’t be as
attractive wearing necklaces with Jesus in an electric chair dangling
over their chests, so Jews made up the crucifixion story.

However, as Bruce became more famous for his risk-taking humor that
fearlessly mocked authorities, his luck eventually ran out. He was
arrested multiple times for obscenity during his stand-up act as well
as for drug possession. Bruce believed that authorities went after him
mostly because he made fun of organized religion, and his friend
George Carlin agreed, “Lenny wasn’t being arrested for obscenity.
He was being arrested for being funny about religion and in particular
Catholicism. A lot of big city cops . . . tend to be Irish
Catholic,” noted the Irish Catholic Carlin.

In the years before his death, Bruce became increasingly preoccupied
by how to prevent his arrest for drug use. In his autobiography, Bruce
wrote, “For self-protection, I now carry with me at all times a
small bound booklet consisting of photostats of statements made by
physicians, and prescriptions and bottle labels.”

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In 1964, Bruce was arrested in New York on obscenity charges, and
despite petitions and protests from many renowned people, he was
convicted and sentenced in December 1964 to four months in a
workhouse. 

In July 1966, free on bail during the lengthy appeals process, Bruce
got a visit from Carlin and his wife. Carlin recalled, “He was
completely immersed in his legal battles. . . . He didn’t appear in
clubs anymore—the Irish cops and judges had indeed shut him the fuck
up. He was just about bankrupt, having spent all his income and
intellect trying to vindicate himself. We visited for a while and he
was as affectionate and lovable as ever. That was the last time we saw
him alive.” Twelve days after their visit, Lenny Bruce died of a
drug overdose.

Lenny Bruce may not have been the funniest comedian in U.S. history,
but his anti-authoritarian defiance is unsurpassed among comedians,
many of whom to this day honor him for his trailblazing free speech
advocacy. In _Resisting Illegitimate Authority_ (2018), to illustrate
the diversity among anti-authoritarians, I profile twenty U.S.
anti-authoritarians, including Lenny, with an emphasis on what can be
gleaned from their lives, including lessons about survival, triumph,
and tragedy.

Sometimes it is luck that makes the difference between
anti-authoritarians having a triumphant or tragic life, and Lenny did
not have the luck of coming to prominence in a more anti-authoritarian
era, as was the case with his friend George Carlin, whom I also
profile. In a more anti-authoritarian era, Carlin’s 1972 Milwaukee
disorderly conduct-profanity arrest for his “Seven Words You Can’t
Say on Television” bit was dismissed by a laughing judge
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and it actually helped Carlin’s career, even getting an invitation
from Johnny Carson to discuss it
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album on national television.

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Another luckier U.S. anti-authoritarian is Noam Chomsky who, in the
early 1960s, challenged and resisted the U.S. government’s war in
Vietnam at a time when very few Americans were doing so. He refused to
pay a portion of his taxes, supported draft resisters, got arrested
several times, and was on Richard Nixon’s official enemies list.
Chomsky anticipated going to prison, and he later recounted how only
luck and a changing era saved him from prison, “That is just what
would have happened except for two unexpected events: (1) the utter
(and rather typical) incompetence of the intelligence services. . . .
(2) the Tet Offensive, which convinced American business that the game
wasn’t worth the candle and led to the dropping of
prosecutions.” 

Lenny Bruce was often referred to as a “sick comedian,” but he
famously said, “I’m not a comedian. And I’m not sick. The world
is sick and I’m the doctor. I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false
values. I don’t have an act. I just talk. I’m just Lenny Bruce.”

Today, it is an understatement to say that mainstream U.S. society is
sick with what Lenny called “false values.” Tip-of-the-iceberg
evidence of how a sick U.S. society has gotten even sicker? In 2024,
an in-your-face scumbag bully was elected president—this time with
the popular vote, a majority of American voters who were either blind
to what he is all about, or saw what he is all about and were
unbothered by him being a scumbag bully because he is _their _scumbag
bully. 

_Bruce E. Levine [[link removed]], a practicing
clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture,
politics, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A
Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary
Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and
Radical Enlightenment
[[link removed]] (2022).
His Web site is brucelevine.net [[link removed]]_

* Lenny Bruce
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* George Carlin
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* anti-authoriatarianism
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* humor
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* anti-obscenity laws
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