Presidential pardons were all the scandal after George W. Bush's election, and for those who follow such things, it was clear that some were justified and some weren't.
But now comes a pardon plea, albeit posthumous, that just about everyone in New York state, which has never been a bastion of conservatism, can get behind: Lenny Bruce.
Seems that on three occasions while performing at Greenwich Village's famous Cafi au Go Go during March 1964, performing routines that included the word "cocksucker" and references to the Pope molesting children, the cops decided that Bruce had gone too far in the exercise of his free speech rights. Bruce was arrested and, after a six-month trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, convicted on misdemeanor obscenity charges and sentenced to serve four months on Riker's Island - a sentence that was stayed pending appeal.
But Bruce, who by then had grown to distrust lawyers and decided to represent himself in pressing the appeal, never got his day in the higher court: He died of a drug overdose in 1966, while the appeal was still in process.
Bruce's co-defendant, however, Howard Solomon, who was also convicted of obscenity, successfully appealed his own verdict in October, 1965, and since Solomon was part of the Bruce case, when his conviction was overturned, many people believed that Bruce had simultaneously been cleared.
Uh-uh.
So now, 37 years after his death, some Bruce devotees are mobilizing to help accomplish Bruce's final, unfinished task: appealing the verdict.
A petition is circulating among performance artists and First Amendment scholars to ask Gov. George E. Pataki to issue the one thing that would clear Lenny Bruce's name today: a posthumous pardon.
"There's no question about it, the case killed him," said Martin Garbus, a lawyer who represented Bruce at trial. "This was a man who was destroyed by the law. He couldn't get a job. No one would touch him. It was a sad, angry time for Lenny."
Actually, Bruce did obtain some gigs after his conviction, but he was a marked man in the eyes of the law - but that only provided even more material for his act, which had become more and more oriented towards his legal problems. He was even invited to be a guest on, for example, the Steve Allen Show , but his segments were either severely censored or never aired. Recordings of those appearances have surfaced recently on video and in cable TV documentaries. It was also during this period that Bruce worked on his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People , which was eventually published by Playboy Press.
Labeled a "sick comic," Bruce replied, "I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor."
The simple fact, however, is that Bruce paved the way for almost every comic currently working in the U.S., and had it not been for the publicity which Bruce (and others) generated about himself and his arrests, the breadth of American sexual comedy might have stopped with Henny Youngman's "My wife is so fat..." jokes. Much of Bruce's material is still available today on CD, and even more on vinyl, plus aficionados can haunt used book sites for copies of collected monologues under the title The Essential Lenny Bruce .
The movement to pardon Lenny Bruce is "better late than never, from my point of view," said Joan Bertin, the executive director of the Manhattan-based National Coalition Against Censorship. "Lenny Bruce was really ahead of his time, and a very substantial unfairness was done to him. For ultimately random reasons, this injustice was never righted."
A spokesman for Gov. Pataki said that if a petition was received in Albany, Mr. Pataki would review it.
It is almost a certainly that the petition will be opposed by pro-censorship groups such as the New York-based Morality In Media.
Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, the authors of The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Sourcebooks Inc., 2002), have scheduled a news conference on Tuesday to announce the pardon petition in conjunction with a New York County Lawyers Association event, "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: Free Speech or Crude Comedy?"
"What happened to [Lenny] in 1964 was contrary to everything the First Amendment represents," said Collins.
