In the last years of his life, particularly between 1962 and 1964, Lenny Bruce, the grand vizier of so-called sick comics, was hounded from one court to another, from San Francisco to Chicago to New York. It was always a source of amusement to him that in each jurisdiction, police and prosecutors solemnly repeated the words he had used on stage -often ignoring the sense of what he was trying to say -- as prim and businesslike court stenographers copied them down. As Ronald K.L. Collins, who co-authored "The Trials of Lenny Bruce" with David Skover, said in a recent interview with Crime Library, the words were just a ploy. They were used to rein in Lenny Bruce and jail him if need be. They were the means by which the powerful tried to stop Lenny Bruce from saying things that made the liberal and conservative elite uncomfortable.

"Let me put it this way...in 1964, a guy is in a Greenwich Village club after hours, using colorful words and the state prosecutes him for six months, before three judges, spending thousands and thousands of hours...it's hard to imagine why," Collins said. "In '64, when they had bathhouses and people...doing all sorts of things in parks and using colorful language everywhere, why (did) they single out Lenny Bruce?

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"It wasn't the words that he used," Collins continued. "The words were, if you will, the excuse. The real reason was he was offending people in power. He was offending liberals. He was offending conservatives. He was doing jokes about JFK and Jacqueline (Kennedy) at a time not long after... our president was assassinated...He was saying things - tasteless things -- about the church... and in that regard he was busting taboos and I think that is the great unstated reason."

Feigned outrage at the words he chose was just a convenient way to cover rank hypocrisy. At least that's the way Bruce saw it.

"They're crucifying me," Bruce used to say.

The cops and the prosecutors didn't kill Lenny Bruce -- not exactly. He did that himself with his own lifestyle. By all accounts, Lenny Bruce was gluttonous in his taste for self-destruction. His was not a world of ultra-dry martinis and groping the waitresses at Shriner's Club conventions, though. Lenny Bruce's tastes were a bit darker. He had an unquenchable thirst, it is said, for sex and drugs, and for all the other accoutrements of the late jazz lifestyle. Ultimately, his addiction did him in.

But the authorities who muscled his body into the proper location on August 3, 1966, after he had collapsed on the toilet from a fatal drug overdose, made sure that the photograph was taken. And though they may not even have recognized it themselves, part of the power of the photograph is that, even today, it still touches something base and even perverse in the viewer, while at the same time allowing the hypocritical voyeur to mutter "tsk, tsk, tsk."

Bruce would have laughed himself into a coma at that.

But in a classic comedy twist, the kind of final-reel denouement that only a genius like a Keaton or a Chaplin or Bruce could even conceive of, the real punchline would come later, when Bruce, the dead man on the bathroom floor, was resurrected in the eyes of many as an embodiment of the First Amendment and the patron saint of free speech.

As Collins said, "The fact is...history...isn't simply what the players want it to be. Whether or not Lenny Bruce wanted to be a free-speech hero...he has become one. I mean...it is impossible to talk about freedom and comedy without talking about Lenny Bruce. It is just impossible. You cannot do it. Nobody has more of a liberating effect on comedy than Lenny Bruce...and it's because of his persecution and prosecution. So in a sense...history isn't what the dead want it to be. It's what the living make of it."

And that, no doubt, would make Bruce laugh even louder.

"What he would say is...'This is just an enormous amount of hypocrisy...they're lionizing me because I'm dead, but if I were alive, I'd be pissing them off and nobody would be lighting candles for Lenny Bruce.'"