By Julian Barry
Based on the life and words of Lenny Bruce

Peter Morris, Bud Samiljan, Georgie Paul, Arnie Shamblin, and Wayne Liebman

Lenny Bruce was . . . an important, seminal, absolutely pervasive influence in American social commentary. You cannot watch a late-night show these days that has a comedian on it without finding some of Lenny Bruce in his performance. His impact on those who practice his craft was as fundamental as that of Louis Armstrong in his generation or Charlie Parker in his.

 
— Ralph J. Gleason, Rolling Stone

 
There was community pressure . . . in the sense that the overwhelming percentage of the population wanted Lenny Bruce prosecuted and they wanted him punished because his words were offensive and his ideas hurt the Establishment. He said things that the Establishment didn’t want said. For that reason, I feel, there was a compulsion to prosecute and punish him. And we did. He didn’t harm anybody, he didn’t commit an assault, he didn’t steal, he didn’t engage in any conduct that directly harmed someone else. So, therefore, he was punished, first and foremost, because of the words that he used . . . At the time, I was given a job to do, I was wrapped up in the prosecution of it and was oblivious to some of the things we were doing . . . I wouldn’t have anything to do with his prosecution now.

— Vincent Cuccia, Assistant District Attorney, New York City

 
There are few comedians to whom I would apply the word genius, but Lenny Bruce is one such... It requires reading Lenny’s routines to oneself — now, in the 1980's — to realize that not only was he ahead of his time, he is still ahead of our time. Richard Pryor gets into some painful areas now and then. George Carlin calls a spade a spade in some particulars. But none of them ever comes close to Bruce, who did almost nothing else. Everything he said was deep, biting, cutting, and usually brilliant.

— Steve Allan, Funny People

 
I first saw Lenny Bruce in San Francisco, and was puzzled. I then saw him in Chicago, and was intrigued. I then saw him in New York City and was slightly scared by the nakedness with which this performer revealed himself. And then I began to laugh — to laugh at the wildness of on of the most bizarre imaginations that’s ever been let loose on a night club audience. I’ve been laughing ever since. Of course, I’m in a minority there, but I think Lenny’s admirers always will be. He goes out to do a rush jib of psychoanalysis on the audience, to root out their deepest inhibitions, their deepest repressions, all the things that scare them and are never talked about, and holds them up to the most relentless scrutiny, analyses them, tries to force the audience to come to terms with reality — actual, unspeakable reality. This is a hard thing to do anywhere, and it’s even harder to keep it as comic as he does . . . At his best he rises above mere evangelism and moral fervor into flights of fantasy, unscalable skyscrapers of sheer wit and baroque invention that, as far as I know, have never had any rivals on the English-speaking stage.

— Kenneth Tynan, Lenny Bruce Without Tears