Lenny Bruce

"You can't put tits and ass on the marquee!...Why not?...Because it's dirty and vulgar, that's why not!... Titties are dirty and vulgar?...Okay, we'll compromise. How about Latin? Gluteus maximus, pectoralis majors nightly...That's alright, that's clean, class with ass, I'll buy it...Clean to you, schmuck, but dirty to the Latins!"

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

"I'll die young, but it's like kissing God."

"I want to perform an unnatural act."

"A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord... there should be a statute of limitations for that crime."

"I was arrested for using a ten-letter word that began with ‘c,’ and I would marry no woman who was not one."

"If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer."

"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school."

"The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds."

"I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."

"Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago."

"If I get busted in New York, the freest city in the world, that will be the end of my career."

"Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government.""

"Life is a four-letter word."

"In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls."

", in one of his forensic flights, once described Lenny's hotel as "the on elegant .” The Marlton was, indeed, just a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, but it belonged exclusively to the honky-tonk world of , which it fronted with a façade so narrow-shouldered and a lobby so inconspicuous that you could walk up and down the street for years and never notice this tiny fleabag."

"Lenny Bruce's legacy is freedom of speech and telling it as it is, getting your life and putting it out on the table, telling everyone about it."

"That's what happened to Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn't funny any more."

"Bruce was a great stage artist, a soloist of unbelievable virtuosity. The thousands of people who filled two houses of an old movie theater in Greenwich Village in December 1963 are a witness of that. So were the audiences that came back night after night during his month in London. The people who followed him were charmed by the free conversational directness of the man. He liked his audiences and took great pains to feel his way towards the individual temperament of each one. And if he felt comfortable with a group there was no end to the effort he would make to entertain and delight them. It’s not really true that he thrived on hostility, though he sometimes managed to put on a show of hard, glittering verve when the animals were in—people who talked loudly throughout his act, sounding "like tape played backwards." But generally an unfriendly audience made him stiff and defiant, and then he would sometimes become brutally dirty, just for the hell of it."

"One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That's obscene."

"Lenny Bruce (The Establishment) [is] the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language this inhibited island has ever engaged to amuse its citizens. Mr. Bruce is dark-hatred, dark-suited and American; and the virulent, free-associating manner in which he excoriates the hypocrisies of his compatriots has earned him the epithet "sick." He is in fact pan nihilist, part moralist. He slouches around the stage clutching a microphone, smiling as he improvises, caring as he smiles, seldom repeating in the second show what he said in the first, and always conducting what amounts to a rush job of psychoanalysis on the audience he is addressing. He talks about the nuances of race relations (viz. the white liberals who worship Negroes but somehow never meet them) ... about the techniques of masturbation and the psychological duplicity ("a horny hoax") involved in sleeping with a prostitute; about pain, and laughter, and dying. At times Mr. Bruce drawls and mumbles too privately, lapsing in to a welter of Yiddish phrases borrowed from the show-business world that reared him. ... But at the end he had broken through frontiers of language and feeling that one had hitherto thought inviolable ..."

"And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, That all my wealth won't buy me health So I smoke a pint of tea a day."

"Oh, the language is a bit loose; It's decidedly not Mother Goose. Outside on the marquee This quotation you'll see: "I was shocked!" and it's signed Lenny Bruce."

"They said that he was sick 'cause he didn't play by the rules He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools"

"Just don't forget your history, dirty Lenny died so we could all be free"

"That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane - Lenny Bruce is not afraid."

"Mother Goose is on the loose, stealing lines from Lenny Bruce."

"I want to be Lenny Bruce."

"Lenny Bruce, declares a truce and plays his other hand. Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand."

"For Halloween, I want to be Lenny Bruce, I want them to hate me, so you can love me on the sly."

"Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, to the stage"

"Lenny Bruce was trying to tell you many things before he died..."