The Lenny Bruce Story

The Resurrection

Videocover: Lenny

The resurrection of Lenny Bruce began almost the moment he died, and it has continued ever since. There have been films about his life, among them the Bob Fosse movie "Lenny," starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role. Long after his death, Bruce became a yardstick of hip for many American intellectuals. Ironically, many of those same intellectuals who have over the years so fervently praised Lenny Bruce would probably be the first to slap him down if he ever tried to appear on their campus, for the simple reason that Lenny Bruce made his career out of offending everybody -- conservatives and liberals alike.

In one of his most famous bits, he virtually chanted a racial epithet that even now academics still refer to as "The N-word." Bruce's stated goal was to repeat the word so it lost its sting, but even today, it is likely that audiences would hear only the word and not the context.

"I would suspect there would be few communities in the country that Lenny Bruce wouldn't offend today. Today," Collins said. "You couldn't do that on a campus today, you just couldn't do it."

But with his accidental overdose in the bathroom of his Los Angeles home, Lenny Bruce stumbled on the ultimate loophole in America's moral code. America loves heroes, and Americans are willing, under the right circumstances, to make a hero out of just about anybody. The only problem is that "Americans prefer their heroes to be dead," Collins said.

In fact, to some degree, America has rediscovered Lenny Bruce. Perhaps, says his daughter, Kitty Bruce, part of the reason for that is that Lenny Bruce's edginess resonates particularly well today when, some fret, the issue of government censorship is again rearing its head. After all, it was only a little more than three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, that Ari Fleischer, President Bush's then-press secretary, issued a chilling warning from the White House podium. People should "watch what they say," he suggested, after comedian Bill Maher made what some believed to be comments that were not sufficiently patriotic.

Since then, in some circles, Lenny Bruce has been reborn as a small-time industry. His daughter, now living in a small coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania, has been working on a book, as have others, and she has been actively promoting a six-CD set of Bruce's recordings. Later this year, she will head out to Los Angeles to represent her late father at the Grammy Awards.

But even more crucially, Lenny Bruce is even finding new allies among some unlikely people. Take New York's moderately conservative governor George Pataki, for example.