The Lenny Bruce Story

I Beg Your Pardon

That's precisely where things stood for nearly four decades. During that time, the legend of Lenny Bruce, the free speech hero, the icon, grew. But the courts, at least in New York, never acknowledged that there had been any error or that any injustice had been done.

But Bruce's most ardent supporters - among them his ex-wife Honey Bruce, his daughter Kitty, and prominent entertainers like Robin Williams, Penn and Teller and the Smother Brothers -- petitioned New York's moderately conservative Governor George Pataki to pardon Lenny Bruce posthumously.

Collins was among those who championed the cause.

To Collins and Skover, his co-author on "The Trials of Lenny Bruce," the petition was more than simply a bid to right a wrong that had been done long ago, though that was certainly part of it, Collins said.

The petition was one way to "set the record straight," Collins said. But "the other big thing was to serve as a contemporary reminder of what can go terribly wrong when the First Amendment is set aside. Particularly with regard to entertainers and particularly with regard to writers and poets and artists...forty years later...it's easy to say, 'Sure, we exonerate him,' but our point in this was to kind of reinvigorate an interest in the First Amendment."

To the surprise of almost everyone, Pataki agreed. On December 23, 2003, Pataki pardoned Lenny Bruce.

"We never expected that Pataki would grant it," Collins told Crime Library. "What we had thought was likely to happen was...he'd ignore it...he didn't have to do a thing. He didn't have to respond. He could have let 20 years go by and done nothing. That's what we thought would happen. Or he could have denied it, in which case we were ready to blast him. But one thing we hadn't prepared for was him granting the pardon. It just wasn't on our radar screens."

As Kitty Bruce said in a recent interview with Crime Library, the pardon was certainly welcome. "I think it was very gracious of Governor Pataki and I'm very grateful to him... and I applaud his administration for doing so."

But to Kitty Bruce, the pardon alone cannot wipe away the injustice that she believes was done to her father.

" I do believe...the act...of giving a pardon was as close to an apology...that they could muster," for the "length that New York State went...to make my father's life literally a living hell. "

"The pardon...it doesn't come too late. I'm glad that it came...because it doesn't affect whether my father lived or died."

In the end, Lenny Bruce has finally been exonerated. And he has certainly almost been elevated to the level of secular sainthood. He has become a bona-fide hero, at least to a select group of ardent supporters. It is fair, therefore, to ask them what exactly Lenny Bruce achieved.

To be sure, comics are no longer prosecuted for the four-letter words they choose to use. But are those who gleefully toy with dangerous ideas really any safer from persecution than Bruce was? Put another way, what would happen if Lenny Bruce were to walk onto a stage today?

Lenny Bruce, victory with 2 fingers

Collins has considered that question, and he finds a bit of an answer in one of Bruce's more provocative routines. The comic, lampooning the anti-Semites' accusation that "the Jews killed Christ," made a mock confession, saying, "It's true, and if He comes back, we'll do it again." And while police and prosecutors didn't kill Lenny Bruce -- his own excesses did that -- "they did have a big hand in it." The way Collins sees it, "if he came back, they'd kill him again."