On April 1, 1964, Herbert Ruhe, an ex-CIA agent formerly stationed in Vietnam, submitted a surveillance report to the office of the Manhattan District Attorney about a person of interest to city officials. On the basis of the material Ruhe had gathered the previous night, four policemen were sent to tape the suspect that evening, and a garbled transcript of what they recorded was made available to a twenty-three member grand jury the next day. The grand jury, considering the evidence laid before them, recommended the suspect’s prosecution on charges that, collectively, carried a maximum sentence of nine years in jail.

On April 3rd, policemen arrested the suspect, the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, minutes before a scheduled performance. He was indicted on violations of an obscenity law, New York Penal Code 1140-A, which prohibited “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama, play, exhibition, and entertainment ... which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.”



As the historian Doug Linder writes in his account of Bruce’s legal woes, the jokes that threatened to land Bruce in prison included a line about Jackie Kennedy trying to escape JFK’s convertible after his assassination—she “hauled ass to save her ass,” he’d said—and a bit that mentioned men having sex with chickens. By 1964, Bruce had already been arrested multiple times on obscenity charges and barred from entering the United Kingdom. After an arrest in 1961, which was prompted in part by Bruce’s use of the word “cocksucker” during a San Francisco performance, he was represented by a First Amendment lawyer whose partner refused to take the case. “You can’t win a case,” the partner had said before quitting, “based on ‘cocksucker.’”

Bruce, in fact, went on to win that case and many of the cases brought against him. Despite his repeated arrests, the mounting costs of legal representation, and being blacklisted from most nightclubs and television, he continued to perform. Along the way, he developed a cult following among counter-cultural figures, intellectuals, and other comics. After making bail following his arrest in New York, Bruce immediately returned to the club at which he’d been apprehended and performed another show.

It was this spirit of defiance—the very soul of his material—that won him the respect and admiration of the celebrities and luminaries that would go on to sign a petition on his behalf, including Elizabeth Taylor, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. Over the course of a six-month trial, critics, academics, psychiatrists, and even a minister spoke in Bruce’s defense—none more beseechingly than Bruce himself.