Bruce, Lenny (13 Oct. 1925-3 Aug. 1966), comedian, was born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York, the son of Myron Schneider and Sadie Kitchenburg. Because his father sought a professional occupation, throughout more than twenty years of shoe-clerking he also pursued various other tracks, including law and pharmacy. After World War II Myron Schneider used the GI Bill to complete his education and qualified in California as a physiotherapist, which he combined with his vocation of fitting orthopedic shoes.

Lenny's father often doted on him and imparted a love of reading and knowledge. His mother was a dreamer. She was entranced with the world of show business and sought to become a dancer, eventually changing her name to Sally Marr. Over time she honed her talents on stage as a comedian and performed as Boots Malloy, doing stand-up routines and serving as a master of ceremonies. Her energies and aspirations influenced Lenny's comedic sensibilities, and they were devoted to each other. "I really love her," he acknowledged, "and the reason I dig her is I realize . . . I got a lot of humor from her. She exposed me to many areas that I never would have been hip to." Lenny's parents divorced when he was still a child, and he bounced between them over the years, frequently being shunted off to sets of relatives. "My childhood," he wrote in his autobiography, "seemed like an endless exodus from aunts and uncles and grandmothers. Their dialog still rings in my ears. . . . The plan was I would stay with relatives till my parents 'could get straightened out.' "

A high school dropout at age sixteen, Bruce joined the U.S. Navy early in World War II, but in 1946 he was given a dishonorable discharge when he falsely claimed to possess homosexual obsessions. He then worked at a string of various jobs until he arrived in Hollywood to study acting under the GI Bill. His first stint as a comedian came in a Brooklyn, New York, nightclub, and he performed in burlesque clubs along the eastern seaboard introducing strippers, silencing inebriated customers, and demanding attention from inattentive audiences. In 1949 he achieved recognition winning on Arthur Godfrey's "Talent Scouts," a top-rated television show, by impersonating such Hollywood stars as James Cagney, Edgar G. Robinson, and Peter Lorre. Bruce's nightclub routines, however, were evolving an outlaw style that reflected and vastly extended the new forms of humor that were being created by a younger set of stand-up and stage comedians in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.

In Baltimore in 1951 Bruce met and married Honey Harlowe, a stripper who had been twice-divorced, and subordinated his work to manage her new singing career. To raise money, Bruce fraudulently impersonated a priest, "Father Mathias," claiming himself to be the director of a charitable foundation supporting an African leper colony. He was arrested and charged but received no sentence. Returning to Los Angeles, for several years he performed at various nightclubs, notably the Crescendo, a favorite Sunset Strip nightspot where he developed a following as an ultrahip comic. Harlowe and Bruce had one child, a daughter, Brandie Kathleen. Shortly after their 1957 divorce, however, Bruce moved to eliminate the child's first name because he thought it connoted a stripper's image.

In January 1958 Bruce trekked to Ann's 440, a lesbian club, in North Beach, San Francisco, and later at other popular places such as Fack's No. 2 and the hungry i, where his reputation as an extraordinary comic was solidified. When he appeared the next year at a new Chicago club, the Cloister, he was singled out as the most controversial comedian in the country. He appeared at the Den in the Duane in New York City to similar strife over the nature of his comedic technique. Long-playing records and word-of-mouth spread his particular approach across the country. By the early 1960s Bruce had attained a special place in American comedy, labeled either as a "hipster comic," the most radical of the social satirists, or as the "sickest of the sick" of the new comics. Bruce disputed the label "sick" to describe his or anyone's comedy, arguing that the media-devised term obscured the complexities of contemporary comedy.

Bruce's career coincided with the social rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beat Generation, and the Counterculture, and he was as controversial as the movements he reflected. In spontaneously crafted routines, he assaulted the barriers of conventional public comedy, expanding its language to include the scatalogical and widening its subject matter. By doing so he incurred the wrath of both religious and civil constituencies. Consequently, Bruce was constantly hounded by law-enforcement officials who frequented his shows and arrested him on charges of obscenity and possession of narcotics. Judges in various cities admonished him for his "lewd" language and religious spoofs. By 1964 many clubs throughout the country refused to book him. In the aftermath of his arrest and subsequent conviction for obscenity in a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1964, however, nearly 100 figures prominent in the arts and intellectual life--mobilized by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg--came to his defense. They signed a statement describing Bruce as "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."

Just short of his forty-first birthday, Bruce was found dead of a heroin overdose in his Hollywood Hills home. The obscenity conviction was overturned eighteen months after his death.

A lean, intense figure on stage, Bruce regarded the nightclub setting of his forays as "the last frontier" of uninhibited entertainment. He brilliantly prodded his audiences in a Socratic, stream-of-consciousness style that ranged widely over the social landscape, unearthing taboos and mining them for their absurdities and contradictions. He contended that "satire is tragedy plus time" and regarded humor as a means of confrontation. He rarely wrote out his routines in advance, relying instead on his own set of experiences and intuitions, particularly his sense of the pulse of American culture. "I never sit down and write anything out," Bruce said. "I've never sat down and typed out a satire. What I will do, is I will ad lib a line on the stage. It'll be funny. Then the next night I'll do another line, or I'll be thinking about it, like in a cab, and it'll get some form, and I will work into a bit. Everything I do on the stage I create myself."

The result was either free-form rambling or a highly crafted seriocomedic scenario, improvised like a theme in jazz, changing from one show to another but always fueled with a sense of purpose. Bruce aimed his barbs at organized religion, racial hypocrisy, cultural myths, and the law and during his discourses openly spotlighted stereotypical and taboo terms. In this connection he thought of himself as a neologist, one who either invents new words or discovers new meanings for old ones.

Although Bruce seemed antagonistic toward his audiences, his questioning of society's mores and values was not malicious. He possessed a defined sense of morality undergirded by introspection, and he was acutely aware that he was not innocent of abetting social irrationality. "Sometimes I look at life in the fun mirror at a carnival," Bruce said. "I see myself as a profound, incisive wit, concerned with man's humanity to man. Then I stroll to the next mirror and I see a pompous, subjective ass whose humor is hardly spiritual. I see traces of Mephistopheles. All my humor is based on destruction and despair." As is characteristic of American humor in general, his came from the culture's deeply ingrained irreverence toward authority. His autobiography, published a year before his death, was whimsically titled How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a satirical dig at Dale Carnegie's perennial bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People (1926), which preaches the virtues and power of ingratiating oneself in order to be a social success.

Perhaps paradoxically, Bruce was a quintessential American optimist. What he desired was a democratic order that would be open to a wide range of cultural outlooks. Along with his contemporary Mort Sahl, whose forte was political satire, Bruce transformed the character of publicly performed comedy by bringing into clubs and coffeehouses, as well as incorporating into his records and autobiography, language and subject matter generally considered offensive. His immense influence has been acknowledged by comedians who reached prominence in the later decades of the twentieth century, such as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and David Steinberg.

A comedic shaman, Lenny Bruce used humor to confront taboos. The laughter that he elicited had a cathartic effect and contributed to the widening range of socially acceptable beliefs and practices. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the shock of his humor--its transgressions of the permissible--no longer sounded dangerously out of bounds. For stand-up comics, his way of expressing himself and his slant on life had become commonplace.

Bruce's thoughts and observations are in his autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965). John Cohen, ed., The Essential Lenny Bruce (1968), is an excellent compilation of the comedian's diverse routines. A substantial biography is Albert Goldman with Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! (1974), but it lacks sources and an index. Frank Kofsky, Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist (1974), is highly thoughtful but limited. Essential interpretations of Bruce's place in American comedy are Tony Hendra, Going Too Far (1987), pp. 114-45, and Joseph Dorinson, "Lenny Bruce: A Jewish Humorist in Babylon," Jewish Currents (Feb. 1981), pp. 14-32. See also Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of the Stand-up Comics (1975). Bruce was the subject of a Broadway play, Lenny (1971), by Julian Barry, and a film, Lenny (1974), starring Dustin Hoffman. An obituary is in the New York Times, 4 Aug. 1966.