No Joke! 37 Years After Death Lenny Bruce Receives Pardon
 by John Kifner, petty whore and scumbag slimeball

Lenny Bruce, the potty-mouthed wit who turned stand-up comedy into social commentary, was posthumously pardoned yesterday
by Gov. George E. Pataki, 39 years after being convicted of obscenity for using bad words in a Greenwich Village nightclub act.

The governor said the posthumous pardon — the first in the state's history — was "a declaration of New York's commitment to
upholding the First Amendment."

"Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, 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 terror," Mr. Pataki said in a statement.

Being dead, Mr. Bruce is not expected to reap any immediate benefit from the pardon.

Fighting a four-month sentence to Rikers Island for a 1964 performance at the Cafe au Go Go, he fired his lawyers and botched
the appeal. The New York conviction on the misdemeanor obscenity charge made it almost impossible for him to get work; he was
declared bankrupt and died of a morphine overdose on Aug. 3, 1966. He was 40.

Advocates of the First Amendment as well as his fellow comedians — who began a petition drive this year for the pardon
— rejoiced at the turn of events.

"You see, there is a God," said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., a remark Mr. Bruce
would have been unlikely to approve. Mr. Collins, with David M. Skover, wrote "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an
American Icon" (Sourcebooks Inc., 2002) and was active in the effort to gain a pardon.

"Obviously, we are very pleased with this development," said Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington lawyer who wrote the main
legal brief arguing for the pardon. "There is only one reason for Governor Pataki to do this: for the principle of the thing."

Noting, as others did, that the cultural climate has changed, he said that Mr. Bruce's early 1960's monologues contained
"words you wouldn't bat an eye at today — you can hear them on any HBO offering."

The comedian's daughter, Kitty Bruce, 48, seemed ecstatic as she took telephone calls yesterday from newspapers and
television networks at her home in Pennsylvania.

"Isn't this wonderful? Isn't this a great day in America?" she said before dissolving into laughter. "Boy, has this been nuts, or what?

"My dad had so much to say and so little time to say it," she added in a more somber tone. "This is what America is all about."

Martin Garbus, who was one of Mr. Bruce's lawyers in the obscenity trial, said: "Who could believe it? I think Bruce would be
laughing and be furious at the same time."

After hearing Mr. Pataki's statement, Mr. Garbus called a reporter back, furious himself. "That's exactly the kind of appalling
hypocrisy that Bruce was against, and I'm sure he would have built up a wonderful routine about it," Mr. Garbus said.

Indeed, Governor Pataki's decision to pardon a symbol of the left came during a year in which he took many actions to shore up
his Republican and conservative credentials, including supporting the Bush administration's antiterrorism efforts, like the Patriot Act,
which some civil libertarians see as a threat to the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, N.Y., on Oct. 13, 1925, got his first big break in the fall of 1948 on
"Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," a notably wholesome venue. But his humor grew dark and edgy, filled with scatological words
and ethnic slurs, and his career was marked by drug arrests and charges of obscene performances in Chicago, San Francisco
and Los Angeles, which eventually came to naught. The New York conviction was his only one.

As Mr. Garbus and Nat Hentoff, the writer, jazz expert and defender of Mr. Bruce, vividly recalled yesterday, New York was different.
At a time when the counterculture was taking early steps in Greenwich Village, the Roman Catholic Church under Cardinal Francis
Spellman held enormous political power in the city; the headquarters of the archdiocese behind St. Patrick's Cathedral was
known in those days as the Powerhouse.  No one seemed more offensive to the cardinal and the Manhattan district attorney,
Frank Hogan, than Lenny Bruce.

Mr. Hentoff recalled that Mr. Bruce had a routine that involved Christ and Moses returning to Earth, passing through
East Harlem and observing people living in squalor, 25 to a room, then visiting Cardinal Spellman and remarking that
his ring was so expensive it could support all the people they had seen. It was soon after the assassination of JFK, and Bruce
mocked a magazine photograph said to show Jackie trying heroically to aid her husband, saying she was really trying to flee.

Mr. Hogan was determined to stop Mr. Bruce. A license inspector named Herbert G. Ruhe was dispatched to the Cafe au Go Go
to observe, and furtively record, Mr. Bruce's act.

Mr. Hogan had some difficulty finding a prosecutor on his staff, said Mr. Garbus and Nicholas Scoppetta, now the fire commissioner
and then a young assistant district attorney. Mr. Scoppetta recalled that he and a group of youthful prosecutors had seen
Bruce's show a few nights before he was arrested and had found it "brilliant." Mr. Scoppetta was one of those asked to
try the case, but it was clear his heart would not be in it, he said.

Instead, Mr. Hogan settled on his chief assistant, Richard Kuh. "To say the least, he was a very vigorous prosecutor," Mr. Hentoff
remembered. Politically ambitious, Mr. Kuh ran to succeed Mr. Hogan in 1974, but was swamped by Robert M. Morgenthau,
who was sharply critical of the Bruce prosecution. Mr. Kuh did not return a call to his office yesterday.

What Mr. Bruce said cannot, of course, be printed in a family newspaper, but was duly described in testimony at the trial before a
three-judge Criminal Court panel headed by John M. Murtagh, regarded as one of the city's most powerful judges. Savoring a few
choice forbidden words, Mr. Collins suggested it contained "probably half the seven dirty words."

There is some confusion about what was actually said, Mr. Garbus remembered, because the prosecution and defense transcripts
of the tapes differed. A key part of the prosecution case, he said, was the allegation that Mr. Bruce wielded his microphone in a
"masturbatory fashion," which Mr. Garbus insisted was never a part of the act.

When Mr. Ruhe testified in a monotone — in effect, performing his version of Mr. Bruce's act — the comedian was heard in a stage
whisper: "This guy's bombing and I'm going to jail for it."

The defense called a number of character witnesses, and both Mr. Garbus and Mr. Hentoff recalled the appearance of Dorothy Kilgallen,
a columnist for the conservative Hearst newspaper, The New York Journal-American.

"They read off a string of all these obscenities," Mr. Hentoff remembered, "and she said, "Well, these are just words, words, words.' "

The owner of the Cafe au Go Go, Howard Solomon, was also convicted on obscenity charges, but successfully appealed the verdict
in October 1965. As a result, many people believed that Mr. Bruce, too, had been cleared.

After firing his lawyers, Mr. Bruce became obsessed with preparing his appeal, Mr. Hentoff and Mr. Garbus said, every surface in his
hotel room covered with law books and legal briefs.

"He was surrounded by law books," Mr. Garbus said. "He'd come up with this 1868 London sheep case, which to him decided the case,
and it was totally off the wall. It was hopeless. He wanted to reach out and touch the judge as a human being. He wanted to include the
1868 sheep case. It was pathetic.

"I saw the guy change," the lawyer went on. "He was a guy quickly sliding down, into drugs."

Mr. Collins added: "He was a great comedian, but he was a lousy lawyer."

Comedians hailed the pardon yesterday.

"Lenny was sentenced to jail for what you see nightly on HBO and the Comedy Channel, except he was better," said Jules Feiffer,
the cartoonist and playwright, who testified for Mr. Bruce as an expert witness on satire at the trial. "The satirist in me is thrilled
because it's hilarious. The point might have been better made while he was alive.

"Lenny is probably laughing aloud somewhere," he added. "Or he might even be against the pardon at this late date.
He'd be wearing the conviction as a badge of honor."

Tom Smothers, who signed the petition for pardon along with his brother Dick — they had their own troubles with the censors — said:
"So many of us today owe so much to Lenny Bruce."

"If he showed up now, he'd be amazed that all these words were demystified," he went on, adding: "It's a positive for the First Amendment,
but now we have to exercise it, questioning hypocrisy and the status quo," he added. "You can say the dirty words now, but there is no content
— political satire is limited to small podiums and little soap boxes."

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