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Anyone who has read about Lenny Bruce, the comedian, who spent his young life fighting censorship, knows that he was driven to his death by censors who thought his use of the F-word [fuck] was too horrible for public expression. So they harassed him with police goons at all his performances, arresting him on every slightest pretence. They jailed him, beat him and dragged him before magistrate after magistrate, but Lenny never gave up till the day he died.
"You are all free, he was saying. All you have to do is want your
freedom."
Enter Bill Hicks, who took up Lenny's mantle. His comedic genius was bound to get him censored too. Had he just toned it down like no talent hacks Letterman, Leno, etc, but Bill had, like Lenny, a mission to bring the truth to the masses. Like Lenny, he largely failed; the dull-minded masses hardly know his name, if at all.
Yesterday, Randi Rhodes, another comedic wit and talk show host was suspended for calling mafia wife, Geraldine Ferraro, and Hillary Clinton a big F*cking whore[fucking].
Again the censors want to protect you...
The 1st amendment is our guarantee of free speech. Nowhere does it say you have free speak except when you offend someone.
To understand what Lenny did for us--as a nation-state, as a culture, as a species--I need to quote the words of another great mind. "The comedian," Henry Miller wrote, "slays the censor within us." Which makes him Public Enemy #1 only to those who have a vested interest in keeping that censor, that infernal, internal pig, alive and well-fed. A self-censoring people can be easily controlled. As former Village Voice reporter Sally Kempton once observed, "It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
"The comedian," Bill Hicks said to John Lahr in an interview for a piece in The New Yorker magazine, "is the one who says 'Wait a minute' as the consensus forms." If we are serious about this multi-partite holiday--if we are serious about peace, love and
understanding--then perhaps we could take a minute to reflect, to think, to remember brave souls who dared us to think and dream.
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