Lenny Bruce
30 quotes
Biography
Leonard Alfred Schneider, better known by his stage name Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist. He was renowned for his open, free-wheeling, and critical style of comedy that combined satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity.
"You can't put tits and ass on the marquee!...Why not?...Because it's dirty and vulgar, that's why not!... Titties are dirty and vulgar?...Okay, we'll compromise. How about Latin? Gluteus maximus, pectoralis majors nightly...That's alright, that's clean, class with ass, I'll buy it...Clean to you, schmuck, but dirty to the Latins!"
"The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them."
"I'll die young, but it's like kissing God."
"I want to perform an unnatural act."
"A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord... there should be a statute of limitations for that crime."
"I was arrested for using a ten-letter word that began with ‘c,’ and I would marry no woman who was not one."
"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was 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. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school."
"The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds."
"I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."
"Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago."
"If I get busted in New York, the freest city in the world, that will be the end of my career."
"Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government.""
"Life is a four-letter word."
"In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls."
", in one of his forensic flights, once described Lenny's hotel as "the on elegant .” The Marlton was, indeed, just a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, but it belonged exclusively to the honky-tonk world of , which it fronted with a façade so narrow-shouldered and a lobby so inconspicuous that you could walk up and down the street for years and never notice this tiny fleabag."
"Lenny Bruce's legacy is freedom of speech and telling it as it is, getting your life and putting it out on the table, telling everyone about it."
"Bruce was a great stage artist, a soloist of unbelievable virtuosity. The thousands of people who filled two houses of an old movie theater in Greenwich Village in December 1963 are a witness of that. So were the audiences that came back night after night during his month in London. The people who followed him were charmed by the free conversational directness of the man. He liked his audiences and took great pains to feel his way towards the individual temperament of each one. And if he felt comfortable with a group there was no end to the effort he would make to entertain and delight them. It’s not really true that he thrived on hostility, though he sometimes managed to put on a show of hard, glittering verve when the animals were in—people who talked loudly throughout his act, sounding "like tape played backwards." But generally an unfriendly audience made him stiff and defiant, and then he would sometimes become brutally dirty, just for the hell of it."
"The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't."
"When you're eight years old nothing is your business."
"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."
"The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't."
"The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is."
"If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government."
"(On his addiction to opiods): I'll die young, but it's like kissing God."
"All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover."