1215: Lenny Bruce
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/18
Late 1940s–early 1950s
“I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.”
Early–mid-1950s
“Guys are like dogs. They keep comin’ back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a cat one time, they’re gone.”
1960–1961
“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
1961–1962
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
1961–1963
“It’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.”
1963–1964
“In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.”
1964–1965
“If you can’t say ‘fuck,’ you can’t say ‘fuck the government.’”
1965
“I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.”
1965–1966
“The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.”
1960s (amplified post-1966)
“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it.”
1964–1965 (re-popularized 2000s–2025)
“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.’”
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