Leonard Alfred Schneider (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), better known by his stage name Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist.

[4][5][6] In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Bruce third (behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin) on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.

After spending time working on a farm, Bruce joined the United States Navy at the age of 16 in 1942, with active service during World War II aboard the USS Brooklyn (CL-40) in Northern Africa, Palermo in 1943, and Anzio, Italy, in 1944.

[14][15][16] In 1959, while videotaping the first episode of Hugh Hefner's Playboy's Penthouse, Bruce talked about his Navy experience and showed a tattoo he received in Malta in 1942.

Lenny did a piece inspired by Sid Caesar, "The Bavarian Mimic", featuring impressions of American movie stars (e.g., Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G.

In 1956, Frank Ray Perilli, a fellow nightclub comedian who later wrote two dozen successful films and plays, became Bruce's mentor and part-time manager.

The two appeared on the Patrice Munsel Show (1957–1958), calling their comedy duo the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players",[25] 20 years before the cast of Saturday Night Live used the same name.

Starting in the late 1960s, other unissued Bruce material was released by Alan Douglas, Frank Zappa and Phil Spector, as well as Fantasy.

Bruce developed the complexity and tone of his material in Enrico Banducci's North Beach nightclub, the hungry i, where Mort Sahl had earlier made a name for himself.

Branded a "sick comic", Bruce was essentially blacklisted from television, and when he did appear, thanks to sympathetic fans like Hefner and Steve Allen, it was with great concessions to Broadcast Standards and Practices.

[29] Jokes that might offend, like a routine on airplane-glue-sniffing teenagers that was done live for The Steve Allen Show in 1959, had to be typed out and pre-approved by network officials.

[31][full citation needed] In his posthumous biography of Bruce, Albert Goldman described that night:[32] It's all a trip—and the best of it is you haven't the faintest idea where you're going!

On this night, he rose to every chance stimulus, every interruption and noise and distraction, with a mad volleying of mental images that suggested the fantastic riches of Charlie Parker's horn.

The first flash was simply the spectacle of people piled up in America's most famous concert hall.In August 1965, a year before his death, Bruce gave his penultimate performance at San Francisco's Basin Street West, mainly talking about his legal troubles.

According to his primary biographer, Albert Goldman, it was "precisely at the moment when he sank to the bottom of the barrel and started working the places that were the lowest of the low" that he suddenly broke free of "all the restraints and inhibitions and disabilities that formerly had kept him just mediocre and began to blow with a spontaneous freedom and resourcefulness that resembled the style and inspiration of his new friends and admirers, the jazz musicians of the modernist school.

[42] Bruce had a severe drug addiction in the final decade of his life, using heroin, methamphetamine and Dilaudid daily, and suffering numerous health problems and personal strife as a result.

[44] Bruce's desire to help his wife stop working as a stripper led him to pursue schemes designed to make as much money as possible.

He was acquitted because of the legality of the New York state-chartered foundation, the actual existence of the Guiana leper colony, and the local clergy's inability to expose him as an impostor.

Later, in his semifictional autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, Bruce said that he had made about $8,000 in three weeks, sending $2,500 to the leper colony and keeping the rest.

[citation needed] On October 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity[46] at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, where he had used the word "cocksucker", and said that "to is a preposition, come is a verb"; that the sexual context of 'come' was so common that it bore no weight; and that if someone hearing it became upset, he "probably can't come".

He was booked for a two-week engagement at Aaron's Exchange Hotel, a small pub in central Sydney, by American-born, Australia-based promoter Lee Gordon, who was by then deeply in debt, nearing the end of his formerly successful career, and desperate to save his business.

[55] Bruce remained largely confined to his hotel, but eight days later gave his third and last Australian concert at the Wintergarden Theatre in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

[5] The official photo taken at the scene showed him lying naked on the floor, a syringe and burned bottle cap nearby, along with various other narcotics paraphernalia.

It was attended by prominent members of the arts community, many of whom also performed, and included Allen Ginsberg, Joe Lee Wilson, Jean Shepherd, Charlie Haden, and The Fugs; Paul Krassner officiated.

[66] On December 23, 2003, 37 years after Bruce's death, New York Governor George Pataki granted him a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction.

[67][68] Perhaps the most profound and cataclysmic change in our popular culture the last few years—matching the "new sound" in music—has been the kind of humor exemplified by the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, Woody Allen, and that whole breed, whose secret source of strength was the late dark angel, Lenny Bruce.

Bruce was the subject of the 1974 biographical drama Lenny, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Dustin Hoffman, who was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for the role.

The main character's editing of a fictionalized film version of Lenny was also a major part of Fosse's own autobiopic, the 1979 Academy Award-nominated All That Jazz, where Gorman again played Bruce.

Episode 12 of Season 1 of Liberty on Trial in America: Cases That Defined Freedom, aired on January 3, 2020, explored the ways in which Bruce and the First Amendment affected each other.

In 2004, Comedy Central placed Bruce at number three on its list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time, above Woody Allen (4th) and below Richard Pryor (1st) and George Carlin (2nd).