It's a lurid photograph, and even after almost 40 years, it still seems sanctimonious. In it, the nearly naked, bloated body of a middle-aged man is sprawled spread-eagled across a bathroom floor. His pants are gathered around his ankles. It's clear that he has collapsed and died in the midst of some unspeakably corrupt act. Shooting drugs, obviously: A set of works is visible at the edge of the frame. The photograph is taken from such an angle that the viewer can make out the dead man's features, the heavy lids over dark eyes, the perfect nose, the crest of rich, coal-black hair, the beard that seems to only accentuate a sneer of contempt for all the comfortable values of the time.

Even in 1966, it was the type of photograph the tabloids salivate over: graphic, unflinching, maybe a little bit stagy, and yet somehow morbidly moralizing, an unambiguous obscenity masquerading as news.

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Lenny Bruce would have appreciated the hypocritical irony of it.

The comic who had made his living piercing the smug conventions of the time with his rapid-fire, often crude, and always-incisive machine-gun patter was a connoisseur of fine hypocrisy. He savored it in some of his most biting bits -- Religion Inc., for example -- in which he portrayed a host of leading religious figures, from Oral Roberts to the fatherly Pope John XXIII, as hucksters and con men hiding behind the sacred cloth. He used it in routines like The Lone Ranger, in which he unmasked America's archetypal hero as an emotionally stunted coward, terrified that he might become too dependent on the simple townsfolk he purported to serve. Bruce also represented the Masked Man as a deeply repressed closeted gay man with eyes for his sidekick Tonto. While the Kennedy assassination was still fresh in America's mind, Bruce caustically questioned the nation's reverence for his grieving first lady, and he gleefully roiled liberals and conservatives alike by lampooning the grim state of race relations in the country. In short, he said aloud what many Americans were privately thinking, but would never dare say.

He had an unfailing instinct for the sordid truth that festered in the American psyche. But the supreme irony of his life was that in the end, he was done in not by any kind of open outrage about the truths he spoke, but by feigned outrage over the words he used to do it.