Lenny Bruce Pardoned, Thirty-Nine Years Later
Lenny Bruce, a popular and controversial stand-up comic in the late 1950s and 1960s, was on this day posthumously pardoned by New York Governor George Pataki on this day for his obscenity conviction on November 4, 1964, in New York City.
Bruce’s iconoclastic style of humor involved searing attacks on American hypocrisy about sex, race relations, and religion. He became the role model for many later stand-up comics whose humor had a political orientation.
See also his earlier arrest in San Francisco on October 4, 1961.
Read about Bruce’s career: Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (2002)
Listen to Lenny Bruce’s “What I Was Arrested For” routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew2OJNFEisA
Learn more about his trial: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bruce/bruce.html
Visit the official Lenny Bruce website: http://www.lennybruceofficial.com/
Listen to a radio documentary, The Life and Crimes of Lenny Bruce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8R4fZU3UG8