Happy Birthday Lenny Bruce

The man who invented “yadda, yadda, yadda”, the inspiration for the cross-dressing Klinger in M*A*S*H, and the only guy to be granted a posthumous parden in New York history (in 2003 by George Pataki). And he also was a American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist. San Francisco columnist Herb Caen had this summary of Lenny Bruce in 1959:

They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic, and sick he is. Sick of all the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful. He is a rebel, but not without a cause, for there are shirts that need un-stuffing, egos that need deflating. Sometimes you feel guilty laughing at some of Lenny’s mordant jabs, but that disappears a second later when your inner voice tells you with pleased surprise ‘but that’s true’.

Some Lenny Bruce quotations:

The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

A lot of people say to me, ‘Why did you kill Christ?’ I dunno, it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.

And of course, like every other subversive in America, Lenny Bruce had an FBI file, helpfully now public here. An account of his infamous trial is here.