One Hand Jerking

by Paul Krassner

  “Guess what, folks—that’s the news, and I am outa here.”

  And where did he go? For a ride in George W. Bush’s limousine, and in Air Force One, referring to himself as “a Rat Pack of one for the president in Hollywood.” Miller has morphed himself from “Bush can’t walk and fart at the same time” to “George W. is a genius.” He promises that on his new CNBC show, he won’t aim any barbs at Bush.

  “I like him,” he says. “I’m going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends.”

  Miller says that his political perspective changed when he kept hearing people comparing Bush with Adolf Hitler, and he didn’t think that was fair.

  “People say I’ve slid to the right,” he explains. “Well, can you blame me? One of the biggest malfeasances of the left right now is the mislabeling of Hitler. Quit saying Bush is Hitler. Hitler is Hitler. That’s the quintessential evil in the history of the universe, and we’re throwing it around on MoveOn.org to win a contest. That’s grotesque to me.”

  Out of 1,500 entries in the MoveOn political ad competition, there were only two that made the Hitler/Bush comparison (just an example of Miller sacrificing perspective for the sake of agenda), so if Tony Blair was George Bush’s poodle, then Dennis Miller is his mynah bird. And yet, paradoxically enough, I’m now convinced that Dennis Miller is correct. There’s a vast difference between Hitler and Bush. Hitler was elected.

  THE BALLAD OF LENNY THE LAWYER

  PROLOGUE

  Robin Williams, Penn and Teller, Margaret Cho, and Tom and Dick Smothers were among the signers of a petition addressed to New York Governor George Pataki. It stated: “A pardon now is too late to save Lenny Bruce. But a posthumous pardon would set the record straight and thereby demonstrate New York’s commitment to freedom—free speech, free press, free thinking.” In 1964, Bruce had been convicted of obscenity for his performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village.

  The petition—also endorsed by First Amendment scholars, lawyers and Bruce’s daughter, Kitty—was submitted at a press conference by the coauthors of The Trials of Lenny Bruce, Ronald Collins and David Skover, in May 2003. In July, Pataki was still giving this blatant no-brainer “serious consideration.” Finally, in December, he granted the posthumous pardon. But Lenny would have been simultaneously outraged by the hypocrisy and amused by the irony that the governor had pardoned him in the context of justifying the invasion of Iraq.

  “Freedom of speech is one of the great American liberties,” Pataki said, “and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.”

  Pataki’s pandering monument to opportunism was merely the tip of a satirical iceberg. In the words of former drug czar William Bennett, “Hypocrisy is better than having no values at all.”

  In 1959, I published an interview with Lenny Bruce in The Realist. It had been conducted totally by mail. Here’s a sampling:

  Q. Could you be bribed to do only “safe” material from now on?

  A. What’s the bribe? Eternal lfe? A cure for cancer? $45,000,000? What’s the difference what I take? I’d still be selling out.

  Q. Do you think there is any sadism in your comedy?

  A. What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I—well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a brass buckle.

  Q. What would you say is the role of a comedian?

  A. A comedian is one who performs words or actions of his own creation, usually before a group of people in a place of assembly, and these words or actions should cause the people assembled to laugh at a minimum of, on the average, one laugh every 15 seconds—or let’s be liberal to escape the hue and cry of the injured and say one laugh every 25 seconds—he should get a laugh every 25 seconds for a period of not less than 45 minutes, and accomplish this feat with consistency 18 out of 20 shows. . . . Now understand, I’m discussing comedy here as a craft—not as an aesthetic, altruistic art form. The comedian I’m discussing now is not Christ’s jester, Timothy; this comedian gets paid, so his first loyalty is to the club owner, and he must make money for the owner. If he can upgrade the moral standards of his community and still get laughs, he is a fine craftsman.

  When Lenny came to New York for a midnight show at Town Hall, he called me that afternoon, and we met for the first time at the Hotel America. He was staying there with Eric Miller, a black guitarist who worked with him in certain routines. In “How to Relax Colored People at a Party,” Lenny would play the part of a “first-plateau liberal” trying to make conversation with Miller, playing the part of an entertainer at an otherwise all-white party. Lenny’s character would spout one racial cliche after another. A critic had blasted him for “the insulting way in which he rididuled races and creeds.”

  Miller lamented, “They just don’t understand.”

  At this point in his career, Lenny was still using the euphemism frig on stage. Although his irreverence was already being translated into “sick comic” by the media, he had not yet been branded “filthy.” I handed him the new issue of The Realist featuring my interview with psychologist Albert Ellis, who described “the campaign which I have been waging, with remarkable lack of success, for many years, in favor of the proper usage of the word fuck. My premise is that sexual intercourse, copulation, fucking or whatever you wish to call it, is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damned good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner. Instead of denouncing someone by calling him “a fucking bastard,” we should say, of course, that he is an “unfucking villain” (since bastard, too, is not necessarily a negative state and should not only be used pejoratively).”

  “I can see this scrawled on subway posters,” I said. “Unfuck You!”

  I didn’t want to insult the readers’ intelligence by resorting to asterisks or dashes, as other magazines did, but my printer wouldn’t set in type that portion of the interview unless I brought a note from my lawyer. Lenny was amazed that I could get away with publishing it.

  “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”

  “Absolutely. The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest—”

  Lenny magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and he looked up the word prurient. “Itching,” he mused. “What does that mean, that they can bust a novelty-store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopie cushion?”

  “It’s just their way of saying that something gets you horny.”

  Lenny clenched his jaw, nodding his head in affirmation of a new discovery: “So it’s against the law to get you horny.”

  He asked me to give out copies of The Realist with the Ellis interview in front of Town Hall before his concert that night. He brought a copy on stage and proceeded to talk about it. As a result, he was barred from performing there again.

  “They’ll book me again,” Lenny said. “They made too much on that concert. I’d have more respect for them if they didn’t ever book me again. At least it’d show they were keeping their word.”

  But he was right. They did book him again.

  I was able to subsidize The Realist by doing interviews for Playboy’s new feature, the Playboy Panel, which wasn’t really a panel. I had to interview each person separately, then follow up with questions to give the illusion of interplay, and finally weave all the material into a discussion until I was convinced that we had all been sitting at a table together in the same room. For a panel on “The Hip Humorists” in 1960, I flew to Milwaukee to interview Lenny. He was staying at the YMCA. After checking in, I went to his room. We talked for a while. As we were leaving, he asked furtively, “Did you steal anything?” I took my watch out of my pocket (I didn’t like to wear it on my wrist) and placed it on the bureau. Lenny laughed—one loud staccato “Ha!”—and kissed me on the forehead.


  That evening, three plainclothes police walked into his dressing room at the club where he was working. They told him not to discuss politics or religion or sex, or they’d yank him right off the stage. The previous night, a group of Catholics had signed a complaint about his act. The cops told him that he shouldn’t say “son-of-a-bitch” in his impression of a white-collar drunk. Lenny was nervous, and did two slightly toned-down shows. We went back to his room and took turns naming all the books we had not read—even though we both used references from them—from James Joyce to Harold Robbins, from Franz Kafka to Kahlil Gibran.

  “People use The Prophet to get laid,” Lenny said.

  Critics had written about each of us that we were in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, but neither of us had read any of their books. Coincidentally, though, we were both reading books by Nathanael West. I was reading Miss Lonelyhearts and he was reading The Dream Life of Balso Snell, which had a line about an old actress with much-shaved armpits, prompting Lenny to improvise on what eventually developed into a routine about a popular singer who flashed her unshaved armpit to the audience. We stayed up till morning, discussing the subjectivity of humor.

  At breakfast in the YMCA cafeteria, a man sitting at our table told how he had slapped his daughter because she wanted to see Psycho. He had seen it and didn’t want her to witness a kissing scene between a partially disrobed couple. He didn’t mention the violence of repeatedly stabbing a woman in the shower, but the contradictions in that conversation would work their way into Lenny’s performance that night.

  I was fascinated by the way he played with ideas, and inspired by how he weaved taboo comedic targets—nuclear testing, teachers’ low salaries, drug laws, abortion rights, organized religion—into stream-of-consciousness vignettes. I was intrigued by the way he did show-and-tell with his audiences. When he heard “There Is a Rose in Spanish Harlem” on the radio, he bought the record, came on stage with a phonograph and played it. “Listen to these lyrics. This is like a Puerto Rican Porgy and Bess.” And when Gary Cooper died, he brought the New York Daily News on stage to share a headline: “The Last Roundup!”

  “I found this today,” he would say, introducing a bizarre concept as though it were as tangible as a record or a newspaper. Then, in each succeeding performance, he would sculpt and resculpt his findings into a theatrical context, playing all the parts, experimenting from show to show like a jazz musician, with a throwaway line evolving from night to night into a set routine. Audience laughter turned into applause for the creative process itself.

  “Please don’t applaud,” Lenny requested. “It breaks my rhythm.”

  But sometimes he’d become so serious that the laughs wouldn’t come every 15-25 seconds. I reminded him of this apparent inconsistency with his definition of a comedian’s role.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I’m changing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.”

  Lenny’s first arrest occurred in September 1961, ostensibly for drugs—for which he had prescriptions—but actually because he was making too much money and the local officials wanted a piece of the action. He was working at the Red Hill Inn in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Cops broke into his hotel room to make the bust. That night an attorney and bail bondsman came backstage and told him that $10,000 was all it would take for the judge to dismiss the charges. A beatnik-looking young lawyer friend witnessed this attempted extortion. In court, Lenny pleaded not guilty.

  “Incidentally,” he added, “I can only come up with $50.”

  The judge dismissed the case against him.

  In October, Lenny was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco for using the word cocksucker to describe a cocksucker. He got busted for aptness of vocabulary. The officers said they came because of an anonymous phone call the previous night, although the doorman insisted that there had been no complaints or walkouts.

  “We’re trying to elevate this street,” a sergeant told Lenny. “I took offense because you broke the law. I can’t see any way you can break that word down. Our society isn’t geared to it.”

  “You break it down,” Lenny replied, “by talking about it.”

  Two decades later, Meryl Streep would get an Academy Award for saying “cocksucker” in Sophie’s Choice, and if she didn’t, then fellow nominee Jessica Lange would’ve won the Oscar for saying “cocksucker” in Frances.

  Lenny was writing his autobiography—How to Talk Dirty and Influence People —which Playboy would serialize, then publish as a book, and they hired me as his editor. We hooked up in Atlantic City, where Lenny drove a rented car. We passed a sign warning, CRIMINALS MUST REGISTER, and Lenny decided to dedicate his book “to all the followers of Christ and his teachings; in particular to a true Christian—Jimmy Hoffa—because he hired ex-convicts as, I assume, Christ would have.”

  Lenny was taking Dilaudid for lethargy, and sent a telegram to a contact, with a phrase—DE LAWD IN DE SKY—as a code to send a doctor’s prescription. Now he got sick while waiting for it to be filled. Later, while we were relaxing on the beach, I hesitatingly brought up the subject.

  “Don’t you think it’s ironic that your whole style should be so free-form, and yet you can also be a slave to dope?”

  “What does that mean, a slave to dope?”

  “Well, if you need a fix, you’ve got to stop whatever you’re doing, go somewhere and wrap a lamp cord around your arm—”

  “Then other people are slaves to food. ‘Oh, I’m so famished, I must have lunch immediately or I’ll pass out.’”

  “You said yourself you’re probably gonna die before you reach 40.”

  “Yeah, but—I can’t explain—it’s like kissing God.”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna argue with that.”

  Later, he began to get paranoid about my role: “You’re gonna go to literary cocktail parties, and you’re gonna say, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I found Lenny slobbering in an alley, he would’ve been nothin’ without me.’”

  I denied any such intention, but he demanded that I take a lie-detector test, and I was paranoid enough to take him literally. I told him that I couldn’t work with him if he didn’t trust me. We got into an argument, and I left. I sent a letter of resignation to Playboy and a copy to Lenny. A few weeks later, I got a telegram from him that sounded as if we had been on the verge of a divorce—WHY CAN’T IT BE THE WAY IT USED TO BE?—and I agreed to try again.

  In December 1962, I flew to Chicago to resume working with Lenny. He was performing at the Gate of Horn, and now he was asking the whole audience to take a lie-detector test. He recognized my laugh.

  Lenny had been reading a study of anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he was obsessed by the implications of a news item with a statement by Adolf Eichmann that he would have been “not only a scoundrel but a despicable pig” if he hadn’t carried out Hitler’s orders. Lenny wrote a piece for The Realist, “Letter From a Soldier’s Wife”—namely, Mrs. Eichmann—pleading for compassion to spare her husband’s life. Now, on stage, he credited Thomas Merton’s poem about the Holocaust, requested that all the lights go off except one dim blue spot, and then began speaking with a German accent:My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People say I should have been hung. Nein. Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you—that you would have done the same if you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them? Hiroshima auf Wiedersehen. [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls, Jim. Are you kidding with that? Not what kid told kid told kid. They would just schlep out all those Japanese mutants. “Here they did; there they are.” A
nd Truman said they’d do it again. That’s what they should have the same day as Remember Pearl Harbor. Play them in unison.

  Lenny was arrested for obscenity that night. The cops broke open his candy bars, looking for drugs. One of the items in the police report complained: “Then talking about the war he stated, ‘If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.’”

  “I guess what happens,” Lenny mused, “if you get arrested in town A and then in Town B, with a lot of publicity, then when you get to Town C they have to arrest you or what kind of shithouse town are they running?”

  Chicago was Town C. Lenny had been released on bail and was working again, but the head of the vice squad warned the manager: “If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? You’ve had good people here. But he mocks the pope—and I’m speaking as a Catholic—I’m here to tell you your license is in danger. We’re going to have someone here watching every show.”

  And indeed, the Gate of Horn’s liquor license was suspended. There were no previous allegations against the club, and the current charge involved neither violence nor drunken behavior. The only charge pressed by the city prosecutor was Lenny’s allegedly obscene performance, and his trial had not yet been held.

  Chicago boasted the largest membership in the Roman Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny’s jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, all with a spot of ash on their foreheads, had the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy.