Breaking History - Vulgarians at the Gate: How Censors Lost the Culture War

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

*Explicit Content Warning* Since Donald Trump won the presidential election, American institutions are shedding what remains of wokeness nearly everywhere. From Columbia University to Facebook, the old guardrails have crumbled. Something similar happened nearly 60 years ago. After police and prosecutors drove the revolutionary comic Lenny Bruce into bankruptcy and overdose, America began its slide into vulgarity. Despite the best efforts of the word police of that era, the old taboos about sex and profanity melted away. So just how did America's censors end up losing the culture war? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Warning, the following episode is about Lenny Bruce and his legacy on American culture, so there will be a lot of bad words. There is a lot of profanity, including some racial epithets. If that is something that you are uncomfortable with, then please keep that in mind. Since Trump won the election, American institutions are shedding what remains of wokeness nearly everywhere. From Columbia University to Facebook, the old guardrails have crumbled. Something similar happened nearly 60 years ago. After police and prosecutors drove the revolutionary comic

Lenny Bruce into bankruptcy and overdose, America began its slide into vulgarity. Despite the best efforts of the word police of that era, the old taboos about sex and profanity melted away nonetheless. After the break, how American censors may win their battles but lose the culture war. The pod you've got is next year's model. Lehigh, the odds, Irving, Berlin. What happened once happens again.

When news of fear's a mystery, the cause's a down-gap. Turn into breaking history. History. Hi, I'm Eli Lake. I want to tell you about a great podcast that I think you'll appreciate, Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Noam Weissman. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long and complicated

story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. Much like breaking history, unpacking Israeli history uncovers the history behind the headlines, diving into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present. Gnome examines each subject from a variety of perspectives, leaning into the complexities and layers around topics like how the state of Israel was founded and debates around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So if you're looking for a nuanced,

thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, you'll love this show. Find Unpacking Israeli History wherever you listen to your podcasts or watch it on YouTube. It's official. The vibe has shifted. We are now post-woke. Right now, what I think happened last election is younger men, they would rather vote for somebody who feels, who even if they don't completely agree with, they don't feel judged by, than somebody who they do agree with, that they feel like they have to

walk on eggshells around constantly because they're going to be judged or ostracized or excommunicated. What's interesting about this moment is it feels like the two parties in some senses have flipped where, you know, Republicans used to be the judgmental assholes in many ways. And since many Democrats, despite us, I would say for most of us, coming from the right place of wanting to do the right thing, we've created a culture where we say, well, if you say the wrong thing, you're excommunicated. And that's just not how human beings work. Nobody is perfect. But ultimately what we have to do here is figure out how to bring people back in and work towards the bigger goal of advancing the future of this country and helping young people, especially, get by

so that they're able to focus on their lives and, you know know getting with a young woman or something like that instead of how are they going to pay their rent. In 2025 this is a fairly banal insight. The left have become the hall monitors and nobody really likes it. The remarkable thing though about that clip is who is now making the point. David Hogg, the Parkland school shooting survivor, the proto-Greta Thurnberg, one of the people who helped create the culture where if you said the wrong thing, you would be excommunicated. Well, now David Hogg is a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who on May 9th told Bill Maher that the left should stop making everyone feel like they're walking on eggshells. We've come a long way since the summer of 2020. Indeed the

new vibe shift is everywhere. Facebook canceled its DEI programs. Columbia is now expelling students who cosplayed Jihad in the library on finals week. Let me be clear. What happened today, what I witnessed, was utterly unacceptable. I arrived to see one of our public safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged. As I left hours later, I walked through the reading room, one of the many jewels of Butler Library, and I saw it defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Perhaps the most dramatic shift is in our language.

Once forbidden words are now tolerated. Consider retard. In 2021, then New York Times correspondent, Taylor Lorenz, publicly accused Silicon Valley investor, Marc Andreessen, of using R-word in a discussion on the Clubhouse app. The accusation was enough for Andreessen to furiously deny he had said it. Now I think Joe Rogan summed it up best.

The word retarded is back and it's one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on probably by podcasts. Pronouns are no longer mandatory. Gay is no longer just an identity. It's back to being a middle school insult. It's not just dirty words. There has been a decancelation. Officials who once had their social media accounts throttled or frozen are now running important government agencies. Marjorie Taylor GreGreen, once censored by her colleagues for denying the 2020 election, is now a subcommittee chairman. Only a few years ago, the Babylon Bee had its account locked because it misgendered

the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Now Twitter lets Kanye West stream his new single, Heil Hitler. It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment the new norms all fell to pieces. By the end of the Biden presidency, many of us had grown weary of excessive limits on our speech, the mandatory sensitivity trainings, the content moderation, the online outrage mobs. But for my money, the moment the great awakening unraveled came only a few days before the 2024 election. It was at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally and a roast comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe said this.

Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it's called Puerto Rico. You can't say that if you're not Puerto Rican. And at a presidential rally? Mika, in any other political world, in any other political reality, after something like that was said,

Democratic politicians, Republican politicians before Donald Trump on this level, they would have all condemned the hate speech. They would have all condemned the attacks against Puerto Ricans who are American citizens. They would have all done that. But what happened here? One speaker after another speaker after another speaker got up there and talked, nobody condemned him. Donald Trump got up, didn't say a word about it. Even Megyn Kelly, who endorsed Trump in the election, was miffed.

Maybe when you present in front of hundreds, thousands at least, at Madison Square Garden, you clean up the bro talk just a little so you don't alienate women in the middle of America who are already on the fence about Republicans. Tony's career should have been over. He should have lost endorsement deals, gigs. He should have been picketed by the rules of woke engagement. He should have been placed firmly on the margins of our culture. But Tony Hinchcliffe wasn't canceled. He ended up getting a Netflix deal.

And his joke didn't bury Trump's election campaign either. In fact, it seemed to have no effect at all. Trump won 54% of Latino males. This moment signaled a real vibe shift. During the woke era of 2014 to 2024, comedy itself became a battleground. Comedians found their careers strangely politicized. Jerry Seinfeld announced that he was no longer doing college shows because the rooms were just too tough. Podcasters had their shows demonetized on YouTube.

Shane Gillis was sacked by SNL. But for all that, the comedy clubs were the one institution that didn't just wilt in the face of online opprobrium and the new progressive dogma. Shortly after he got cancelled, what am I going to do when Louis CK comes back? This is Noam Dorman, owner of the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, discussing his decision to book Louis C.K. after he was canceled from masturbating in front of two female comics several years earlier. In the moment, it was a nightmare because we had protests. Every newspaper was writing stories negatively about me.

I even had some threats of violence. Some people were threat... Obliquely threatened my kids. They say, like, I saw your kids on the internet. It'd be terrible if something were to happen to them, like, happened to those kids that Louie made fun of in Parkland or something like that, you know. Take it as what you want.

Take it as what you want. And the emails that I got just buried in angry and negative emails from people. Our Google reviews, our Yelp reviews didn't happen is business did not decrease. This is a valuable insight. Even when the online outrage mobs appeared to be at their most powerful, people still voted with their feet, at least when it came to comedy. And this is because for the last 60 years or so, the one place in American life where cultural taboos are put in the dock and interrogated

is in that one man courtroom of the standup comic. In this respect, these joketellers play the role of dissident, saying out loud what we are too afraid to say online. You see, what I didn't realize at the time and what Kevin had to learn the hard way is we were breaking an unwritten and unspoken rule of show business. And if I say it, you'll know that I'm telling you the truth. The rule is that no matter what you do in your artistic expression, you are never, ever allowed to upset the alphabet people.

You know who I mean. Those people that took 20% of the alphabet for themselves. I'd say the letters, but I don't want to conjure their anger. It's too late now. I'm talking about them L's and them B's and them G's and the T's. That was Dave Chappelle from his aptly titled 2019 Netflix special, Sticks and Stones. And he was taking on a very contemporary set of taboos, the taboo against questioning the absolute moral authority

of the new trans orthodoxy. And while Netflix still released Chappelle's specials, there was real friction. He became a target for LGBT activists. In 2022, his gig at the Minneapolis club that once hosted Prince and the Revolution canceled his performance because of a revolt from the staff. Netflix writers and employees held a brief strike to get Netflix to stop putting out Dave Chappelle specials. Sigmund Freud argued in 1905 that a good joke releases a kind of pent-up mental energy that we expend

to maintain taboo. Anthropologists have concluded that every human society has the sacred and profane, what Claude Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked. Jokes are a way of exploring that forbidden space. Now we should say, even at the high point of the awakening, the state did not formally enforce the new cultural norms. There were no laws against Shane Gillis mocking Chinese people on a podcast, a bit that cost him that job at Saturday Night Live.

The government did not force anyone to say Black Lives Matter or trans rights or human rights. The enforcement of the new rules was more subtle, even though it was nonetheless coercive. It was understood in boardrooms and newsrooms, Hollywood studios and universities that traversing new taboos was just not worth the risk of the backlash. The threat of jail time was not necessary to punish forbidden speech. Well, that wasn't always the case. To find the last major prosecution for word crimes, you have to go back more than 60 years. And yes, it was a comedian.

And yes, he went to jail for his jokes. His name was Leonard Alfred Schneider. But he is known to history as Lenny Bruce. The importance of Lenny Bruce, though, is from a cultural perspective. He marked the end of an era of censorship in that at the time he was prosecuted for obscenity, for doing stand-up routines. This is First Amendment lawyer and author of The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, Robert Corn Revere. It was the last time, because of the development of First Amendment law, that you had people

being prosecuted for word crimes. And that is a cultural milestone that we really need to recognize and to celebrate that that is something in our past and that there should be no more martyrs to the First Amendment in the way that Lenny Bruce was. In the early 1960s, district attorneys in four major cities prosecuted Lenny Bruce for insulting the Catholic Church, referencing lewd sex acts and making fun of the First Lady. Routines like this.

The bust. What I got arrested for in San Francisco. San Francisco, I got arrested for, uh, we can hear that daddy. I'm not going to repeat the word because I want to finish the gig here tonight. It's, uh, they said it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice. A ten-letter word. It's really chic. There's two four-letter words in a preposition. I can't, I wish I could tell you a word.. Starts at a C, but you know the word is."

The prosecutions ruined Lenny, but they also cemented his revolutionary, radical, and fearless honesty as a new art form. Comedy could now speak truth to power, and this new kind of norm-defiance became the model for the kings and queens of comedy today. I'm Eli Lake and you're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, I tell the story of Lenny Bruce, arguably the most important comedian of all time. After the break, the first stand-up social critic and how he lost his legal battle but

won his culture war. The cops found Lenny slumped over on the floor, the dope in his arm from the night before. The morphine killed him, the television said. If it wasn't for the junk, Lenny wouldn't be dead But the man on the news isn't paid to understand It's the cops that got Lenny Bruce's blood on their hands Made his living, told the dirtiest joke For downtown hookers and the regular folks

She said, I knew your buddy put up a fight Cast to the lawyers defending his rights Now the judge and the court isn't paid to understand That the charges in the case ain't nothin' but sham Lenny died for our right to addict ourselves to porn Lenny knew he was right, he rejected every norm Lenny died for our right to say whatever we wish Lenny knew he was right, Eleanor Roosevelt's tits

Lenny died for our bread to make our culture obscene. Lenny knew he was right to tell it like he had seen And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart

shopper and delivered to your door? A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool? Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Before we get into Lenny Bruce's story, let's pour one out for the American censor.

He is the modern Sisyphus, if ever there was one. Every time he succeeded in banning a book or slapping a warning label on a video game or rock album, the culture continues to slide back into the muck. The prototypical American crusader was a guy called Anthony Comstock. He became a censor of national significance when, in 1873, he persuaded Congress to pass a law that carried his name,

allowing him to prevent lewd and obscene literature from being sent through the mail. But society flows downhill, and Comstock was the target of ridicule. Not for the last time in American history, the censor became an important marketing tool for the goods he wished to suppress, as publishers sought out his stamp of disapproval so they could say their books were, quote, banned in Boston. A label as seductive to consumers as parental advisory stickers would be to rap fans over

100 years later. Well, that's what I meant by the censor's dilemma. Yeah. In that you have people who, based on their position, can exert great authority and can chill a great deal of speech. And yet they are also ridiculed behind their backs, sometimes to their fronts. And they ultimately become thought of as buffoonish characters that undermine their own goals.

Again, this is Robert Corn revere. That was the problem with Comstock and the fact that he took himself so seriously and was so over the top in his censorship campaigns that he alienated not just those who were the targets of his campaigns, but also people who actually believed that he was doing a good thing.

Comstock's failure to stop people from reading purient books is a good prism through which to understand the life of Lenny Bruce. Born into a showbiz family, his mother was a vaudeville-era comic herself. In his life, he went from the pinnacle of hipness as an edgy comic in the late 1950s to a foul-mouthed pariah in a few short years. But in death, he became a secular saint. He died so George Carlin could tell dirty jokes,

so Larry Flynn could publish Hustler Magazine, so Howard Stern could broadcast the lesbian dating game, and so Cardi B could record Wet Ass Pussy. ["Wet Ass Pussy"] ["Wet Ass Pussy"] He is both a founding father of modern standup and the man who opened the faucet of filth that today's popular culture joyfully wades through. I do think that the obscenity trial of Bruce was important because if we think about it,

before that time, the linguistic culture of America to us looks almost bizarrely Victorian or post Victorian. This is Columbia University linguistics professor John McQuarter. So even with the say early talkie movies where it's fashionable to say that there are things that they would barely do in movies today that they were doing then, the truth is that linguistically every now and then a person could quietly say, damn or hell, if it was kind of quiet and usually was an uptight character who said it. But shit and fuck were absolutely impossible, even if these were, you know, gangsters, very poor people, very violent people. The language was really buttoned up,

whereas we're very familiar with the way things are today and become even more todayish by the week. And so yeah, that was a time when we got away from what you can think of as a rather primitive idea that there are certain magic words that you absolutely do not utter for any reason. And it's really not different from say an indigenous pre-literate tribe where for various reasons there are words that you absolutely don't utter, in-laws' names or the names of dead people. When Lenny Bruce emerged as a stand-up comic, culturally at least, there were two Americas. Mainstream America liked to imagine itself as a wholesome Norman Rockwell painting.

But if you looked hard enough, in the after-hours cafes and bohemian bookstores, you could find a vibrant counterculture. Smut was technically banned in most of the country, but it was tolerated so long as it was enjoyed, purchased, and created in out-of-the-way places. It was in this America that we first heard Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Howl for Carl Solomon. Today, we consider Howell a treasure of American literature. But when it was published, the San Francisco Police Department determined it was obscene. On June 3, 1957, an undercover officer purchased a copy of Howell and then turned around and

arrested the cashier who sold it to him. The owner of that bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was taken to court for stocking Ginsburg's masterpiece. The trial was a sensation. Major literary figures of the day offered their public support for Ferlinghetti. And when the case finally went to trial in August of that year, the judge ruled Ginsburg's poem was not obscene even though it contained obscenities. If a work had any socially redeeming value, then it would be protected by the First Amendment. But Howell is an example of the underground, the avant-garde, written

by and for those on the edge of culture. By comparison, the center of American culture was clean and square. Picture a little love nest, down where the roses cling. claim. Picture the same sweet loveness and think what a year can bring. He's washing dishes and baby clothes. He's so ambitious, he even sews. But don't forget folks, that's what you get folks, for making whoopee. Movies barely showed kisses, let alone sex. Songs relied on euphemisms to express intimate copulation, like Frank Sinatra's Making Whoopee, the track we are listening to now. In 1962, it was a legitimate scandal that Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor

of New York, divorced and then remarried. Books by D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller were banned in libraries. Television shows filmed Elvis Presley from the waist up because he gyrated his hips during his stage act. We were a long way from Cardi B and online pornography. Again, one could still find dirty words and dirty pictures if one tried. And one man who did was Lenny Bruce. Lenny came from an underworld of beatniks and jazz

clubs. He honed his trade as a stand-up comic for burlesque shows, the 1950 version of the strip club. In these shows, women wore pacies to hide their nipples and pranced around in feather boas, and between this mild strip tease, comics would come on stage and deliver a succession of one-liners. I just got back from Miami, ladies and gentlemen. They said, come down to Miami, this time of the year you get a nice room near Miami Beach for $20 a week. I was living in Savannah, Georgia. Lenny did that for a while, but as the 50s turned into the 60s, he reinvented himself.

He would famously say, I am NOT a comedian, I am Lenny Bruce. And what he meant by that is that he was offering more than a few belly laughs. He was performing stand-up social criticism. His act resembled a jazz performance. He would improvise and go off on free-form expositions. He explored how a word sounded with different pronunciations and how its meaning would change depending on the context. One-liners could not contain what Lenny had to say. I think Lenny Bruce is considered so revolutionary is not because, I mean, the profanity was obviously part of it. But I feel like it was the honesty, like before that, every comedian would, for example, a

mother-in-law joke, which is, which those jokes are very funny because there was an intrinsic like truth to people's mother-in-laws and them not getting along. Right. So it's not like they were bad comics, they're good comics. This is legendary comic Colin Quinn. But Lenny Bruce was like, no, I'm going to tell you about my specific deepest like strangest thoughts about my mother-in-law and our relationship, you know Not that he did that but I'm saying that's that would be his angle on his mother-in-law would be like, you know

Like yeah, man, like, you know, my mother-in-law were in this like weird relationship and it's kind of like, you know Strangely, you know, whatever it It was just, he went to a deeper place than stand-up did at that time. In going to those deeper places, Lenny Bruce hunted for the rawest nerve in our society and went to work. Here is one of the more notorious disquisitions on the definition of obscenity.

I would like an honest equation from any at least grammar school graduate. Is the word son of a bitch less obscene to you than motherfucker? Really? Is it the fact that a Catholic president called old businessman son of a bitches in a Jewish comic relates to motherfucker? If you're interested in the meaning of obscenity,

I'm less obscene than the president. If the word motherfucker stimulates you sexually, you're in a lot of trouble. Especially if it's my mother. If the word motherfucker stimulates you sexually, you're in a lot of trouble. Especially with my mother." Lenny Bruce performed that routine in 1962, and when he did, he was not exactly a cultural outcast. He was a hip, in-demand comic and made a lot of money for the era, half a million dollars

a year at his peak. Time Magazine in 1959 labeled him a sicknik, a new breed of comedian that explored vulgarity and politics. Lenny Bruce landed a monthly appearance offering his stand-up on Steve Allen's late night chat show. He was an early guest on Hugh Hefner's Playboy Cocktail Hour. Even though the dominant culture was tame, the great cities, New York first among them, offered this rich buffet of filth for all who desired.

This was a golden age for organized crime, who were able to turn pornography, gay bars, peep shows, and the like into profitable rackets, protected by the cops they bribed. And this jibed well with the New York of Arts and Letters, Commentary Magazine and The Village Voice, an emerging folk scene in Greenwich Village, and the post-bop Renaissance. Lenny Bruce was part of that bohemian tapestry. And in that underworld, the artists, writers, strippers, and freaks all rubbed elbows after ours. And they all clashed with the cops, who had been given the unenviable task of making New

York City shine its shoes and comb its hair. I actually have a paper-thin sliver of sympathy for the police in this case. After all, anti-obscenity laws were on the books. There was also a strong public decency faction inside of New York politics. Cardinal Francis Spellman launched a crusade, for example, to clean up Times Square. And under pressure from these moralists like Spellman, the NYPD raided more than 100 smut shops in the city in 1963 and 1964. Spellman thought he was enforcing a community standard for New York City. But whose community are we talking about? Certainly the community standards for Greenwich Village were different than those for the

outer boroughs. What's more, the Supreme Court's obscenity test at this point included the stipulation that obscenity was permitted if it had some socially redeeming value, like Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Modigliani's nudes, for example, may be obscene to some, but our culture would be impoverished if displaying these works invited sanction and censure by the police. This is the environment in which the real persecution of Lenny Bruce began. In New York, at least, you could say it started with a risky joke only a few months after

the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lenny accused Time Magazine of not being straight with its readers. Jackie had not rushed to save her dying husband after Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets rained down on Deeley Plaza. This is Dustin Hoffman's version of a famous Lenny Bruce routine. When the president got it, bam! And the governor got it, bam! She tried to get the hell out of there! But they want us to believe this bullshit! They want my daughter, our daughters, if the husbands An ambitious prosecutor in Hogan's office named Richard Q. thought that joke was so tasteless and over the top that he owed it to the nation to put the bracelets on Lenny. Now to reference Q when Lenny Bruce was arrested and convicted in New York

for his hauling ass to save her ass routine. He was penalized for degrading America's lofty image of Jacqueline Kennedy. And this only months after the president's assassination. This is David Scover, the co-author of the Trials of Lenny Bruce along with Ronald K.L. Collins. Again, he could not be constitutionally charged for seditious libel. That was not possible. But the concern was seditious libel nonetheless, the libel of the people who was extraordinarily offended by that particular routine. He wasn't thrilled by a lot of Letty Bruce's routines. There are others that were mentioned in the trial.

The tit-and-ass routine was mentioned. His use of four-letter, six-letter words were mentioned, but if one really wanted to get to the psyche, I think that Q's motivation and his fervor were fueled by his utter disgust with Lenny Bruce's willingness to go out and make fun of Jacqueline Kennedy in the routines calling her ass to save her ass. That is the epitome for Richard Kew of seditious libel. And I believe that Lenny was prosecuted for seditious libel, even though the charge had to be obscenity. On March 31, 1964, the NYPD sent plainclothes officers to Cafe Agogo, where Bruce was performing

to find out for themselves whether the hottest comic in New York violated the city's community standards. They recorded his act, and when he was arrested, along with the husband and wife who owned the venue, it was specifically for his use of dirty words. This is Lenny, in 1965, recounting one of the bits that got him into so much trouble. And they're lovely. I never saw such nice tits on you. You're really all lovely. I don't want to be rude, but I've never... I've always admired you and your tits. And I admired you for years, even before you had any tits when you were nine years old. So long, Ellie. That was it.

That was it. That was it. Thus began the obscenity trials for Lenny Bruce. They make for a fascinating kind of reading. When police officers were forced to recount Lenny's routines from the stand, Lenny would complain that their timing was off. Here is an exchange between the critic Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kueh over his famous Jackie Kennedy bit.

He's just described Jackie Kennedy's pictures in the automobile, and then he goes on. And he says, that's the way all of us feel. Shitty all the time. Because we're no good, because we run away, because nobody ever stays. It's all bullshit. None of you motherfuckers ever stayed one time in your life. Do you feel that that language was necessary for the effectiveness of that portion of that script? I think he felt it was necessary, and perhaps it was. He was expressing the fear that all human beings feel, and he was sympathizing with it.

And if he feels it's necessary, I do not object to it. Are you saying that in your eyes, Mr. Bruce can do no wrong? Even in 1964, Lenny Bruce had allies. This is an open letter signed by a who's who of 20th century cultural and literary legends, including Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nat Hentoff,

and the founding editor of commentary magazine, Norman Podoritz. It read, Lenny Bruce is a popular and controversial performer in the field of social satire in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais and Twain. Although Bruce makes use of the vernacular in his nightclub performances, he does so within the context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his listeners. It is up to the audience to determine what is offensive to them.

It is not a function of the police department of New York or any other city to decide what adult private citizens may or may not hear." All of this gets to the inherent problem of word crimes. Who decides? Lenny's audience? Cardinal Spellman? Richard Q.? Lenny Bruce was prosecuted for his act in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and

Chicago. He was banned from the United Kingdom. Twice. Over time, he became obsessed with his persecution. The legal fees bankrupted him. He did his own research on First Amendment law. He fired his lawyers, and he dug deeper and deeper into heroin and morphine. Unsurprisingly, his act, like his personal life, unraveled. He began spending his time on stage reading

angrily from court proceedings of his trial. He was becoming a stand-up polemicist. As a result of the bullseye on Lenny's back, and the increasingly bitter tone of his shows, he was no longer a hot ticket. Clubs wouldn't book him. He was in debt. Everything was going wrong. On August 3, 1966, Lenny died of an overdose of morphine in his bathroom. Sitting in his typewriter was a page bearing the words of the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unlawful search and seizure. When the police arrived, they allowed the media to photograph his lifeless body, the spike still in his arm. Phil Spector, the legendary producer who himself would later

be convicted of murder, remarked at the time that Lenny died of an overdose of police. Here is David Scover again. Ron and I could not substantiate whether Lenny committed suicide or overdosed accidentally. But we did establish that on the day that he died, on his toilet, on the day he died, he had received a foreclosure notice on his home in the Hollywood Hills. And he loved that place. It was his sanctum sanctorum. Eleven days later, the Judson Memorial Church held a funeral service in New York City. Alan

Ginsburg read his poetry, Tony Scott's quartet performed a free-form blues. And the Reverend Howard Moody gave a eulogy, which I will play now in part. He was an iconoclastic comic who demolished our cultural icons with relentless precision. There was no taboo so forbidding, no chivalrous so sacred,

that it could not be exposed and cut out by his probing surgical humor. Like a comic shaman, he exorcised and destroyed the demon that plagued the body of a sick society." So this view of Lenny Bruce, expressed so eloquently by Reverend Moody, casts him as Socrates, a man driven to his death by a society that resented his pursuit of truth. And there is something to that. If you listen to say Lenny's bit on obscenity, he's making more than just a joke. Lenny Bruce was exposing the hypocrisy and moral degradation of a culture that accepted

white supremacy but demonized gays and lesbians. At the same time though, Lenny Bruce could be quite vulgar. One of his most offensive jokes goes like this. A kid looks up at his father and he says, what's a degenerate? The father says, shut up kid and keep sucking. He told that joke during his downward spiral at a supper club, and he was thrown out of the gig. Now the question, does that joke shine a light on a hidden truth obscured by a

pointless taboo? Or is it just shocking and clever? Or maybe it's both. The answer to that question matters a great deal. And as we shall see, in the years after Lenny's death, American culture not only permitted more obscenity, it often celebrated the obscene as though it revealed a truth we wouldn't allow ourselves to see before. After the break, the legacy of a comedy martyr. Breaking news, a brand new game is now live at Bet365. Introducing PrizeMatcher, a daily game that's never ordinary. All you have to do is match as many tiles as you can and the more you match the better

We also have top table games like our incredible super spin roulette blackjack and a huge selection of slots So there you have it How can you match that check out Prize Matcher and see why it's never ordinary at Bet365 Must be 19 or older Ontario only please play responsibly if you or someone you know has concerns about gambling, visit connexontario.ca, T's and Z's apply. MUSIC Since Lenny Bruce died, it's been a tough road for those Americans who would like to return to a less vulgar America. We can look at his legacy as a kind of inflection point. He was really prosecuted for saying words like cocksucker and making jokes about Eleanor

Roosevelt's tits, which seems pretty tame in a world when hardcore pornography is only a click away on your laptop and when even presidential candidates employ profanity from time to time. There are two interesting points about all of this. The first is that the cultural taboos against profanity at least began to melt away only two years after Lenny's death. We are listening to early proto-punk pioneers, MC5. The song from 1969 is notable because it's the first time a song with a profanity, in this case, motherfucker, charted on Billboard.

The album reached number 30 and the song peaked at number 82. Now, we should say there had been profanity in pop music before. The Kingsman's cover of Louie Louie has a barely audible fuck in the background, and the Greenwich Village group known as the Fugs recorded a series of profane ditties for a small label that never went national. But it was MC5 that kicked the doors open when they kicked out the jams.

It wasn't just music. In cinema too, the old taboos were cast aside. Consider Midnight Cowboy. This 1969 film, starring a young Dustin Hoffman and John Voight, depicts the story of a male prostitute's friendship with a New York con man. There is a scene where a man fillets Voight in a theater. Initially, the Motion Picture Academy gave the film an R rating, but after consulting a psychologist, the movie was rated X.

Nonetheless, it went on to win an Oscar for Best Picture in 1970. The next year, Hollywood made Myra Breckenridge, a film based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Gore Vidal. This was the first major motion picture, and the first novel, about a trans main character. But of course, Lenny Bruce's biggest impact was on comedy. No bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words. You know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, huh?

That was just one of Lenny Bruce's protégés, George Carlin, performing his famous seven words you can't say on television routine. That bit got him arrested in Milwaukee on June 21, 1972. And you can hear Lenny Bruce's influence in the actual routine. That's not an accident. Lenny Bruce was an idol for Carlin. Indeed, Carlin was in the audience when Lenny was arrested in Chicago for one of his shows

in 1964. Here's Carlin talking about how he, too, was arrested that evening. So, when I got to the door, the police was like, ID, you want to see your ID? I said, I don't believe in ID. Just a smart-ass Irish guy, a little drunk, who didn't like authority anyway, and didn't really care much for regulations my whole life. So I always give him heart, give him some shit, you know. So I said, I don't believe in ID. So he was a little exasperated by this point, this policeman, I guess he was a plainclothes. And he sort of grabbed me by the collar of the suit and, and, you

know, the baggy pant of my ass and kind of bum rushed me down the stairs. Had Carlin done his seven words bit in 1962 as opposed to 1972, he would have likely found himself banned from most nightclubs like his mentor Lenny Bruce. But America had changed. In a few months after the Milwaukee performance, the charges against Carlin were dropped. He went on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk all about it. Now George you must promise me something. You won't get me in any trouble on the show tonight because I've been reading about your problems in Milwaukee and they they busted you there or tried to

bust you or there's a court case pending. Right. Because and I don't want to jeopardize the case so I have to be careful with the words I use, I guess. Right. You allegedly, let me put it that way, used some words in your act which brought about a bust, saying that you were, what was the technical language in the... Oh, it was disorderly conduct hyphen profanity. Later, Carlin would include the seven words bit on his 1972 album Class Clown, which he dedicated to Lenny Bruce for taking all the risks.

Far from making Carlin too risky to get work, Class Clown and the seven words routine made him a superstar. After Lenny Bruce died for our right to say words like cocksucker, obscenity stopped being a risk. It began to be rewarded. Telling dirty jokes, making risque films, and shouting profanity on your album was cool. Obscenity was profitable. Just consider Lenny's own autobiography, How to Tell Dirty Jokes and Influence People. When it was published in 1965, it barely sold. When it was republished in 1972, it was a

best seller. And the shifting culture also had major political implications. There is no better example of this than the 1974 race for a Manhattan district attorney. The election pitted Robert Morgenthau against Lenny's original prosecutor, Richard Kew. The story begins on April 3, 1974, a day after the death of Frank Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney. Kew was still a prosecutor in that office, and was soon named the interim district attorney. But this time he had enemies.

124 artists took out an advertisement in the Times that blasted Kew's prosecution from 10 years earlier under the banner in all caps, Lenny Bruce arrested. Morgenthau made Q's pursuit of Lenny a campaign issue. He said he would not have done it himself. In a televised debate, Morgenthau said, I think it was not only the trial of that Bruce case, but it was the harshness with which Mr. Q tried it. He tried to prevent Bruce from getting bail, and in trial he opposed a certificate of reasonable doubt after convictions. Now, one might think that Q would defend his decisions in a moment like this. But Q slunk away from the old prosecution. He accused Morgenthau of playing dirty for dredging up

the case. Q would go on to lose in a rout to Morgenthau by a 3-1 margin. He lost all 13 districts in Manhattan. Four of Q's own assistants at the DA office even volunteered for Morgenthau's campaign. That is crazy! Just look at how much America had changed in the aftermath of Lenny Bruce's death. By 1974, the district attorney who ruined his life couldn't even bring himself to defend his own case. But are we better off today? It's ridiculous that people were going to jail for saying obscene things. It's ridiculous

that people were pretending they weren't hearing such things, you know, in their own lives. This is Noam Dorman again. But the vulgarity which has now become an everyday part of our show business, I don't know. I don't know if we're better off for that. I don't like it that much. I know that they were wrong back when they were refusing to show Elvis from the waist down, but now my kids see simulated intercourse on a regular basis at 11 years old, right? That's where this led. So I'm always torn between this kind of hypocrisy that the, what is it, the tribute that vice

pays to virtue. And now there's, I don't know, there's no tribute being paid anymore. It's like we're just like, we've all collapsed. Everything's collapsed. We don't even pretend anymore. And so somehow this form of comedy, it led us along to that. We love it.

There's tremendous accomplishments of it. There's some of the funniest things we've ever heard or wouldn't have happened if not for the breaking down of these barriers. And yet at the same time, we're left with an extremely vulgar culture that extends not just to comedy but to the present United States and everywhere you look. You can't turn on the TV anymore with your entire family without being embarrassed. It's all part of the same movement. After the break, the one taboo that still remains today.

Read Carlin's Seven Dirty Words or check the changing norms on homosexuality, and it would be easy to conclude that the culture cops have just totally lost. But this doesn't really capture the full spectrum of American taboo. On sexuality and violence, the taboos have largely faded away. But one word in 2025 remains a line not even the edgiest podcasters in comics traverse. At least the white ones. And I think we all know which one I am talking about. It is so forbidden that we have created our own euphemism to avoid pronouncing the syllables.

The N-word. Take a deep breath. This is going to sound very abrasive. Are there any niggas here tonight? What did he say? Are there any niggas here tonight? Jesus Christ, he had to get that low for laughs. That was the opening of one of Lenny Bruce's most famous routines. I have no doubt that

he would not be allowed to perform that today. That is in part because he is not black, but it's also because the taboo on uttering that word in any context is stronger than ever. That change has been a slow boil. In the 1970s, George Jefferson, the black friend of Archie Bunker and later the star of his own show, could say the word on network television. Here is Dick Cavett, a white man in 1972, using the N-word on ABC to introduce a segment with John Lennon, who is not black, and Yoko Ono, who is also not black, where they discuss and perform one of their songs with the forbidden word in its title.

At this point in the show, which was taped a week ago, John and Yoko got into something which ABC feels may develop into, in their words, a highly controversial issue. It revolves around the song, Woman is an Agor of the World, and the obvious fact that some members of our black audience will or may be offended by the use of that word. In the next segment, John Lennon gives his reasons for writing the song and for using the word. I permitted this insertion into the show that I'm doing now

as the only alternative to a full deletion by ABC of the segment. What was really striking was starting in the 90s, but it was around then that we started treating the N-word as a magic word. This is John McQuarter again. But I'm just old enough, you know, about to be 60. I was doing media interviews when I was in my 30s and no one spelled it out, but within reason, you could say it and nobody would flinch. You're white, black, polka dotted. You didn't sit there saying it for the whole

interview, but you could refer to it. And that wasn't considered a problem. And we thought of ourselves as living at the end of time every bit as much as we do now. And so something has really happened and the word has become a magic word. That had not happened quite to that extent in say a Norman Lear sitcom in 1973. But here we are at the end point now of that process. Now it's worth returning to that Lenny Bruce bit because his point about that word is worth considering. Here is Dustin Hoffman's version of the routine as performed in the 1974 film Lenny, at a time when this kind of speech was evaluated based on the intention of the speaker and not the utterance of the syllables.

Well, I'm 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, big. If President Kennedy would just go on television and say, I'd like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet. And if he'd just say, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, every nigger he saw, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, till nigger didn't mean anything anymore,

then you'd never be able to make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger till nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you'd never be able to make some sick old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger in school." That gets us in some ways back to Freud's theory that a good joke releases a kind of pent-up mental energy that we expend to maintain taboo. Lenny is saying that by exposing the taboo to sunlight, it robs the epithet of its venom. The fact that the N-word is unsayable is what gives it its power. I think that that moment was important because, yes, one way of dealing with hurtful words is to get rid of their sting. And of course, the famous way of doing it is that often people call the word, take the

word on and start using it as a term of affection. Again, this is John McQuarter. So there is the other N-word. The same thing with, if we may, dyke with lesbians. But also, I think that his idea that if you just say it over and over, and especially if you're a white person, then it just gets blunted with wear. What strikes me the most about that moment is that it's now eons ago,

that's what six decades ago. Today, frankly, I don't think that that scene could be done in a modern movie. It would be considered too offensive to have, let's say it was Bradley Cooper, for him to stand there saying the word at all would be considered really profane in the same sense as fuck was to people 100 years ago. And so you couldn't do it then. In the 60s, he was trying for something. And I think in a way he was more out of the box than we're in count

with them were encouraged to be today. And by we I mean people of all American races, not just black people. Whatever the reason, it's clear that not every taboo has washed away. We never escape these limits on our language. The last time a major white comment uttered the N-word was Louis C.K. in 2005. The margins of acceptable discourse shift over time. And perhaps there is no better example of this than to consider that Lenny Bruce was not prosecuted for saying the N-word in the early 1960s.

The police did not care about that. They cared about him talking about cocks and tits. It is an interesting thing that in the case of the prosecution of Lenny Bruce, it was over the fact that he talked about sex, he talked about religion, he talked about politics, and those were the things and the words that he used to describe them that made him the target of prosecution. And even though he touched on these sensitive racial issues as well, that wasn't what got him into trouble. This is Robert Cornelivier again. The very fact that you have to use the expression n-word rather than to discuss the word, even

though you're using that as part of a question in an intellectual discussion and not using it as an epithet, not using it to hurt somebody, it does mean that there still are taboos. Indeed, a play about Lenny Bruce that was scheduled five years ago to be performed at Brandeis University was canceled because it included an excerpt from that routine that we just played. Perhaps the new norm is a reflection in part of racial progress. It may have always been unacceptable to some, certainly to the victims. Again, this is David Scover.

But the acceptability of the word among others changed as the power and the economic and social and political power of the group altered. So when you are now, when a white college student is sitting in the same Princeton classroom with a black student, that black student is in a far different position. Yes. Right? Absolutely. Than the black housekeeper of the 60s. And that is as important to understanding the acceptability or the taboo quality or the power of the N-word as anything else.

After the break, what does the post-woke cultural landscape have in store? Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items have in Canada. Essential resources responsibly produced. It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. So how far will all of this go? Well, consider Kanye West's latest single. All of Ye's boys are Nazis. Hail Hitler. Yikes. In one sense, the taboos still exist.

No major streaming service will carry Ye's ode to the Führer. But in another sense, the old guard rails don't matter for a superstar like Kanye. Millions have streamed this track on Twitter and other platforms. You can still find it. I understand that one must separate the art from the artist. I do it all the time. But in this case, the art is quite literally a song that earnestly praises the worst demon of the 20th century, a tyrant who killed six million Jews and plunged the world into war. But Kanye's not really an exception. An entire new media universe has cropped up in place of the carefully cultivated and stifling old one.

For the new platforms and personalities, gatekeeping does not really apply. I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the second world war. Now he didn't kill the most people, he didn't commit the most atrocities, but I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland. One consequence of the new vibe shift has been that the once-cancelled are exploring

all kinds of other taboos. We're seeing a new faction, at least of MAGA adjacent influencers, exploring their Hitler curiosity. And if this taboo is shattered, how long before a white comedian or podcaster drops an N-bomb? Noam Dorman at least thinks that's quite possible going forward. I talked with him about it last week. And we're going to have to decide whether to stand by him or not in the way that people had to decide whether to stand by Lenny Bruce or not, because attacking the Catholic Church in a Catholic neighborhood in 1962 or something is not any less offensive to the listener

than somebody using the N-word today. Right. And, um, but I think that people will not defend the guy using the N-word today. At least they wouldn't have a few years ago. I think we might be coming around to that happening. Look, here's the thing about that. If it's somebody who's really fucking funny, like really funny, and really charming, with a sparkle in his eye, and you know, he might get away with it.

That's how it will happen. So I can't say for sure. But if you're going to swing for the fences like that, you gotta hit it out of the park. You know, it's… The price buys pays the talent. Yes. That's a high degree of difficulty thing. But sooner or later, I think somebody is going to do it.

Because the comedians can't resist taboos. Noam is right. Comedians can't resist taboos. It's part of their job. It's a codependent relationship, you could say. Taboos in society will always exist in comedians in America like Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece will poke and prod at them to explore why they make us tick.

And just as every society will always have some taboos, it's also true that moralists will always be tempted to use coercion and power to enforce new norms. And that brings us back to the vibe shift. Because there's an irony to this post-Woke era. The man who rode the anti-Woke revolt all the way to the White House has himself started to regulate speech that he does not favor. The current FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is using heavy job jawboning tactics, that is making government threats to try and penalize networks like CBS because they didn't like the way 60 Minutes

edited its interview with Kamala Harris right before the election. Again, this is Robert Corn revere. They are also bringing action against NBC, claiming that it violated equal time rules by having Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live even though NBC well complied with that law by offering time to Trump as a candidate. They are opening or have opened an FCC proceeding against ABC because the moderated or the presidential debate had the temerity to fact check Trump on some of his answers. And we're seeing a range of those kinds of activities.

I mentioned the Biden administration leaning on social media platforms. One of the first executive orders that Trump issued once he became president was to say that we're going to support free speech, and so we're going to look at all those things that Biden did, but not at those pressures that we are bringing to social media platforms. Again, from the FCC, the chairman sent a letter to the presidents of the major tech companies making threats about whether or not they should continue to have immunity under Section 230. The pressure is being applied in a number of different ways. And I haven't even gotten to what this administration is doing with

universities and deportations and bringing pressure on law firms. Now we should say this is not a repeat of the word crime prosecutions of Lenny Bruce or the Comstock laws of the late 19th century. But it is nonetheless a use of government power to suppress and punish speech the elected leader of the government doesn't like. There are a number of Trump supporters today who see no problem. The left is willing to shun and marginalize voices that they find distasteful.

Why shouldn't the right give them a taste of their own medicine? Well, I doubt it will work. Most Americans don't like being told what they can and can't say. The word police may win battles, but they inevitably lose the war. Richard Kew and the other district attorneys tried their best to enforce community standards by targeting Lenny Bruce. They destroyed him. But within a few years of his death, America began its long slouch into obscenity. The way to win a culture war is to persuade the other side of the new taboo, not coerce the rest of us into obedience, whether through the courts, the state, or the threat of cancellation.

Just survey the wreckage of the Great Awakening. For a few years the wrong speak was punished with severity. But in November the dam broke. Now the Bulgarians have crashed the gates and become the new gatekeepers. Mostly peaceful riots, pregnant men. Canceled JK Rowling, think again. Thanks for listening to Breaking History.

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