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Aug 1, 2016 · Lenny Bruce died half-naked, alone and broke on a bathroom floor in Los Angeles, with a needle stuck in his arm. The official cause: a morphine overdose. He was 40 years old.
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. He was renowned for his open, free-wheeling, and critical style of comedy that combined satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity. [2]
Leonard John McLean (9 April 1949 – 28 July 1998) was an English unlicensed boxer, bouncer, bodyguard, businessman and actor. He was known as "The Guv'nor", "the King of the Cobbles " and "the hardest man in Britain". McLean's pugilist reputation began in the East End of London in the late 1960s and was sustained through to the late 1980s.
- A Life Full of Controversy and Legal Trouble
- Early Life
- Comedy Career Gets Off to A Slow Start
- Sick Humor
- Success and Persecution
- Death and Legacy of Lenny Bruce
In the conservative America of the late 1950s, Bruce emerged as a leading proponent of what was called "sick humor." The term referred to comics who stepped out beyond stock jokes to poke fun at the rigid conventions of American society. Within a few years, Bruce gained a following by skewering what he considered the underlying hypocrisy of America...
Lenny Bruce was born as Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York on October 13, 1925. His parents split up when he was five. His mother, born Sadie Kitchenburg, eventually became a performer, working as an emcee at strip clubs. His father, Myron "Mickey" Schneider, was a podiatrist. As a child, Lenny was fascinated by movies and the very popul...
In the late 1940s, he worked as a typical comedian of the era, doing stock jokes and performing at Catskills resorts and in nightclubs in the northeast. He tried out various stage names and eventually settled on Lenny Bruce. In 1949 he won a contest for aspiring performers on "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," a very popular radio program (which was...
The term "sick humor" was coined in the late 1950s and was used loosely to describe comedians who broke out of the mold of patter and banal jokes about one's mother-in-law. Mort Sahl, who gained fame as a stand-up comedian doing political satire, was the best-known of the new comedians. Sahl broke the old conventions by delivering thoughtful jokes ...
In the late 1950s, comedy albums became popular with the public, and Lenny Bruce found countless new fans by releasing recordings of his nightclub routines. On March 9, 1959, Billboard, the leading trade magazine of the recording industry, published a brief reviewof a new Lenny Bruce album, "The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce," that, amid strained show-...
On August 3, 1966, Lenny Bruce was discovered dead in his house in Hollywood, California. An obituary in the New York Timesmentioned that as his legal problems began to mount in 1964 he had only earned $6,000 performing. Four years earlier he had earned more than $100,000 per year. The probable cause of death was noted to be "an overdose of narcoti...
Apr 2, 2014 · Lenny Bruce was an American stand-up comic and satirist who became a target for prosecutors and a poster boy for freedom of speech.
Read all about Lenny Beckerman with TV Guide's exclusive biography including their list of awards, celeb facts and more at TV Guide.
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Death and posthumous pardon. On August 3, 1966, a bearded Lenny Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home at 8825 W. Hollywood Blvd. According to legend, a policeman at the scene said, “There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster”, which itself was possibly one of Bruce’s lines.
