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How Lenny Bruce Was Actually Canceled in the 1960s
Matt Solomon
Okay, 2023 comedians, we hear you. Many of you are living in mortal fear of that alarming, amorphous blob known as “cancel culture.” In the past year, we’ve heard about the existential threat to comedy as we know it from the likes of Joe Rogan, Jennifer Aniston, Cedric the Entertainer, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Roseanne Barr, Kathy Griffin, Ricky Gervais, John Mulaney, Bill Maher, Howie Mandel, John Cleese, Marlon Wayans, Goldie Hawn, Jeff Dunham, Rowan Atkinson, Kevin Hart, Jerrod Carmichael, Rob Schneider… Well, you get the idea.
So far as we’ve seen, canceled comics like Chappelle suffer the consequences of cancelation by hosting Saturday Night Live and selling out the Hollywood Bowl. But back in the days of comedians like Lenny Bruce, cancelation meant something different. Canceling meant you might not work again. Canceling meant the club that employed you might close forever. In John Mulaney’s recent Baby J special, he lamented that comedians’ need to be liked is a jail. For Bruce, actual jail was part of his comedy reality.
Bruce was one of the leaders of a movement that Time, not kindly, called “sick comedy.” What made it “sick”? Time didn’t define the term, but used the slam to cover a new wave of comedians who were markedly different from those who had come before — and from each other. What comics like Bruce, Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters had in common was a hard turn away from the setup/punch-line cadence of comedians trained in the Catskills. Other than that, the comics couldn’t have been more different. Sahl, armed with a V-neck sweater and newspaper, poked improvisational fun at the day’s politics and culture. Winters, a proto-Robin Williams, morphed into crazy characters, interacting with talk-show hosts in multiple personas.
And then there was Bruce, for whom the description of “sick” at least made some sense. If a topic was taboo, Bruce wanted to flood it with light, to flip a joke that exposed its hypocrisy. That meant riffing on all the subjects that made good upstanding citizens queasy — homosexuality, drug use, politics, violence, organized religion, masturbation, guilt and shame. You know, the good stuff. His routines weren’t carefully written. “He was the first stream-of-consciousness comedian I ever saw,” comedian David Steinberg wrote in his book Inside Comedy. “He was a revelation because he wasn’t trying to ...
How Lenny Bruce Was Actually Canceled in the 1960s
Cancel culture had nothing on 1960s Chicago cops
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