The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of An American Icon (Sourcebooks, Naperville, Ill., 2002, $29.95) by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover is a multi-media audio/visual experience. The book, which details the relentless legal battles of controversial and groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, comes with a CD that features live clips of some of Bruce's performances, interviews and commentary. I spoke with David Skover, one of the book's authors, as he was preparing to leave Seattle for his book tour.
Gregg Shapiro: How did you meet Ron Collins with whom you collaborated on The Trials of Lenny Bruce and, previously, The Death of Discourse?
David Skover: Ron Collins had developed a national reputation in the area of state constitutional law. When I was a very young scholar, shortly after I came to Seattle University Law School, I decided to write in the area of state constitutional law, specifically the issues of the distinction between the public and private sector. I wrote an article for a symposium issued by the Seattle University Law Review. The editor-in-chief of the Law Review asked me who we should get as the keynote speaker and moderator for that symposium. I suggested Ron Collins. Ron came out to Seattle in 1985, to serve in that capacity. We met for the very first time when he moderated the panel on which I spoke. We hit it off immediately. There was a meeting of the minds. We both found each other's energies and personalities exciting, and we found great overlap in our academic interests. This led, eventually, to our decision to write together. Our first piece, which was published in the Michigan Law Review, was called The Future of Liberal Legal Scholarship. (Laughs), it started with the sentence, "Earl Warren is dead." Until the publication of The Death of Discourse, it seemed as though that phrase was cited more often than others in our works (laughs).
GS: Speaking of common interest, what is the source of your interest in Bruce?
DS: The central focus of Ron's and my prior scholarship, before this book, was the intersection between law&emdash;particularly free speech law&emdash;and the popular entertainment culture. A series of articles, published in the Texas Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, picked up aspects of that intersection. We examined how the commercial television and modern advertising cultures and the modern pornography industry effected concepts of free speech. The articles were, in a sense, more descriptive than normative. We weren't taking a single ideological stance, but playing off positions in an almost post-modern way. This dynamism between the popular entertainment culture and First Amendment theory and doctrine had become a major playground for us. All of this led up to The Death of Discourse, which is coming out in a second edition next year, which was the culmination of our work in this area. The Death of Discourse was theory behind our ideas and Lenny Bruce became the practice. To be entirely frank, we must give credit to Nadine Strossen, national president of the ACLU, who saw that Lenny Bruce would be a perfect candidate for our examination. He represents in life&emdash;he embodies as a human being, the First Amendment. Given his amazing practical effect on the First Amendment environment, it's really almost shocking that no one ever picked up his story before and told this remarkable tale of a man who was hounded to death because he spoke his truth (laughs) by the light of his own voice. There is no individual in America who has ever been prosecuted for word crimes alone, time and time again.
GS: Do you think that the way you approached the subjects of the First Amendment and civil rights issues, as a gay man, have any effect on the way that you told the story?
DS: Lenny was willing to speak the unspeakable in his own time. He was the first comedian who raised a lance against the power structures on issues that no other comedians were touching. Lenny would talk about homosexuality and race relations. He would talk about sexual relations in direct and authentic ways, not the hackneyed mother-in-law joke or the one-liner about the wife, which was the common feature of comedians in those days.
GS: Bruce often used the lesbian and gay community as a source for his material, such as in the "Dykes and Faggots" routine. Do you think that he had respect for the subject?
DS: Lenny was very supportive of the gay community and, at that time, of the African American community. We have to put him in context. The African Americans were still not recognized as anything other than second-class citizens at that time. The gay and lesbian had hardly become a blip on the screen. He clearly was familiar with gay and lesbian people and liked them. He has an obviously gay man playing a role in his photograph album Stamp Out Help, which is no longer in print. He certainly had gays and lesbians in his entourage.
GS: Being in show business, wouldn't he have been exposed to that milieu anyway?
DS: Absolutely. Gays and lesbians were among his strongest supporters. If you want to know who his people were, the kind of people who were going to some of the less mainstream clubs that he played, essentially were society's outcasts at the time, and certainly they gay community was.
GS: He was the voice of the outcast.
DS: That's exactly right. Gays, lesbians, the young hipster. The African American jazzmen loved Lenny. He used to be criticized for playing to the band, because he was playing to that group. The drug addicts, the pimps, the prostitutes, they were the ones who were in attendance.
GS: On the subject of audiences, who would you consider to be the target audience for this book?
DS: This book is written for a very large range of people. It talks about the trials of Lenny Bruce, but it is not a heavily legalistic book. Anyone who is interested in free speech, a cultural icon that changed the face of comedy, and a First Amendment hero who broke down the barriers for honest and authentic speech in America. Anyone who his interested in important courtroom dramas would be interested in this book. It can appeal to people from various sides and orientations.
GS: I'm glad that you mentioned the way Lenny changed the face of comedy. I interviewed Margaret Cho in August and we talked about how she sees herself in the lineage of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. What do you think contemporary comedy would be like without the precedent set by Bruce and Pryor?
DS: I think that if Bruce didn't live and accept the role that he did, then America would have had to create him. The 1960s generation demanded a change from the repressive social and political atmosphere of the 1950s. Lenny very much comes in the spirit of Bob Dylan, who did the same thing with music.
GS: It's interesting because George Carlin, who was a friend of Lenny's, figures into the early 1960s part of the book. He is someone who carried the torch after Lenny died.
DS: Yes. And George Carlin is someone who has become a comedian, famous in his own right. He's not just a chip off of Lenny's old block. You are correct to say that George carried a torch that Lenny lit and ran with for quite a long time. Carlin himself admits that in his interview (in the book) with us and in his endorsement on the back cover of the book. He said that Lenny crashed down the doors for all the guys like him.
It's interesting that you mentioned Margaret Cho. The reason that we were so thrilled to both interview and feature Margaret in our book is that it is our perception that she is very much the new Lenny Bruce. There are, of course, differences in focus and in her style. She is her own person and not merely an imitator. Margaret speaks to serious political issues and does so in a vulgar and raunchy and hilarious way. She brilliantly interweaves her political and social satire with her raunchy humor, and she is still an insider.
GS: Because she's a woman. Because she's Asian American.
DS: She's a Korean American woman and she's speaking about issues on which her position is still that of an outsider. The politics of fat, which occupies so much of her attention. That's a feminist issue that is still a loser as one sees in every women's magazine today. Our desire to demonstrate how Lenny Bruce is still extremely relevant today and to show that his legacy carries on to the present day was, in some sense, gratified when we were able to interview George Carlin, Margaret Cho, and Hugh Hefner, who spoke so eloquently on Lenny's legacy and his importance to First Amendment rights.
