From the Writer’s Almanac:
(To which Michelle turned me on)
Dan turned me on to Lenny Bruce


It's the birthday of comedian Lenny Bruce, (books by this author) born Leonard Schneider in the town of Mineola on New York's Long Island (1925). He got his start in comedy working as an emcee for a strip club, where he told jokes as he introduced the performers, and eventually he got his own show.

Bruce was controversial because he used profanity in his act, but also because he spoke openly about sex, race, and religion. He once said, "Because I'm Jewish, a lot of people say to me, 'Why did [the Jews] kill Christ?' We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that's why we killed him." People called him a "sick comic" but he said, "I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor."
In 1961, a policeman came to Bruce's show and charged him with obscenity. He got out on bail, but the judge told him that if he said one dirty word at his next performance, he'd go to jail. So at his next performance, with the local district attorney in the audience, he pulled out a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) and read all the dirty parts to the audience. He figured they couldn't arrest him if he was just reading literature.

He tried to fight the charges of obscenity, in court and on stage. He said, "If God made the body, and the body is dirty, the fault lies with the manufacturer." But he sank into depression and became obsessed and paranoid. He spent entire performances reading court transcripts out loud, insulting the judge and the prosecuting attorney. After spending four months in jail, he stopped performing and died of a drug overdose on August 3, 1966.

In December of 2003, Governor George Pataki granted a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for his 1964 obscenity conviction. A new box set of recordings of his performances came out this year called Let the Buyer Beware.
Lenny Bruce said, "Every day, people are straying away from the Church and going back to God."

He also said, "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."