If you know who Lenny Bruce is, you’re old. You’re either a boomer or a member of the cohort that is now blamed for blowing it in the ’60s, despite the warning from Peter Fonda’s character in Easy Rider. Or you’re one of their children, a Gen Xer who resents the parental grip on family assets and public office while sharing your parents’ reverence for the ’60s. Boomers remember Bruce as a foul-mouthed stand-up comedian, the Abbie Hoffman of the comics, ruined by McCarthyite prurience and politicized prosecutions. Gen Xers, curators of a museum culture, know Bruce as the inventor of modern comedy and a free-speech martyr through the 1974 movie Lenny, in which Dustin Hoffman reenacted Bruce’s stage routines and legal disasters.
Boomer liberals are given a hard time, but they are right that race was the founding problem of American society and that Jim Crow laws were obscene. Bruce’s answer was not just legislative, but also linguistic. Disempowering the bigots in law only created legal equality. To live as equals, the language of discrimination needed to be disempowered. For his routine on this theme, Bruce turned the house lights on the audience and named them by insult like a racist auctioneer: “Three more sheenies, eight more guineas, seven wops, six greaseballs. I pass six dykes, four k*kes, and eight n*ggers.”
