"Pigs Ate My Roses": Media moralities, comedic inversions, and the First Amendment

Anna Lisa Candido Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University Montreal, Quebec

March 2018

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication Studies.

© Anna Candido, 2018 ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the politics of morality that structured the moral development of mass and niche media forms in America between the 1930s and late 1970s. In order to understand how media became entangled in moral struggles, this work begins by tracing the rise of moral regulation in film and broadcasting in the 1930s and 40s, and the ways that live performance, narrowcast recording, and listener-sponsored radio enabled forms of expression around gender, sexuality, race, crime, and vice that had been unconstitutionally prohibited in mass media. To do this, this dissertation examines a number of critical moments at which community and religious groups charged performers or media players with the loosely-defined concepts of “obscenity” or “indecency” as a way of establishing moral boundaries in mediated culture. By charging Mae West, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and listener-sponsored radio stations with obscenity or indecency, groups like the Legion of Decency and Morality in Media (in concert with other state and industry players) exerted significant control over forms of expression that may have otherwise circulated freely under the protection of the First Amendment. Although these groups succeeded in producing discursive and representational limits in film and broadcasting between the 1930s and 1970s, the semi-hiddenness of live performance spaces, niche recordings, and listener-sponsored radio partially or temporarily sheltered controversial performers and allowed like-minded people to convene over unorthodox expressions that more adequately reflected the depth and complexity of their affective states, experiences, or social positions. In presenting this cultural history of media moralities, this dissertation offers Media and Communication scholars a model of historicizing media in relation to ethical-cultural formations, while also intervening in remediation theory by illustrating how the movement of content across media not only has aesthetic, phenomenological, and economic impacts, but moral ones as well.

2 RÉSUMÉ

Cette dissertation examine les politiques de moralité qui ont structuré le développement moral de formes médiatiques de masse et spécialisées entre les années 1930 et la fin des années 1970 aux États-Unis. Dans le but de comprendre comment les médias sont devenus enchevêtrés dans des luttes morales, ce travail s’amorce en localisant la croissance de la régulation morale dans le cinéma, la télévision et la radiodiffusion des années 1930 et 1940, et les façons dont la performance en direct, l’enregistrement ciblé, et les radios parrainées par des auditeurs ont autorisé des formes d’expression gravitant autour du genre, de la sexualité, de la race, du crime, et du vice. Ces formes d’expression avaient été inconstitutionnellement prohibées dans les médias de masse. Pour les approcher, cette dissertation examine des moments critiques où des groupes religieux et communautaires usaient de concepts faiblement définis comme « indécence » et « obscénité » pour accuser les artistes ou les acteurs médiatiques dans l’objectif d’établir des barrières morales au sein de la culture médiatisée. En utilisant ces termes pour juger de Mae West, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, et de stations de radio parrainées par les auditeurs, des groupes comme Legion of Decency et Morality in Media (de concert avec d’autres acteurs de l’industrie et étatiques) ont exercé un contrôle considérable sur des formes d’expression qui auraient sinon pu circuler librement sous la protection du Premier amendement. Bien que ces groupes aient réussi à produire des limites discursives et représentationnelles dans le cinéma, la télévision, et la radiodiffusion entre les années 1930 et 1970, le caractère semi- caché des espaces de performance, des enregistrements spécialisés, et des radios parrainées par les auditeurs ont partiellement ou temporairement abrité les artistes controversés. Ces espaces ont permis aux personnes aux vues similaires de se réunir autour d’expressions non-orthodoxes qui reflétaient la profondeur et la complexité de leurs états affectifs, expériences, ou positions sociales. En présentant cette histoire culturelle des moralités médiatiques, cette dissertation offre aux chercheurs en médias et communication un modèle pour historiciser les médias en relation aux formations ethnoculturelles, tout en intervenant dans la théorie de la remédiation, puisque ce travail doctoral illustre comment le mouvement du contenu via différents médias n’a pas seulement des impacts esthétiques, phénoménologiques et économiques, mais aussi des impacts moraux.

3 Acknowledgments

This dissertation was made possible by a pretty unlikely confluence of forces that I am eternally grateful for. Nicholas Johnson, Paul Krassner, and Larry Josephson generously took the time to conduct interviews about satire, listener-sponsored radio, censorship, and the counterculture. Chuck Reinsch provided early assistance navigating the KRAB archive and connected me to Nicholas.

Grants from the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, Media@McGill, and the Faculty of Arts at McGill supported the research and writing of this dissertation. The Communication Studies department at McGill in general has been an incredible intellectual home over the years. A lifelong thank you goes out to Carrie Rentschler who has been a guiding light through this PhD. Your no-nonsense approach to scholarship, coupled with your deep understanding of the complex intersection of law, culture, subjectivity, and knowledge, provided a model of inquiry that I have worked from over the years. Further, your particular form of support—your ability to jump into the work when it was most needed and to give space when ideas (or life) needed to breathe—was integral to the completion of this dissertation. An enormous thanks to Jonathan Sterne for helping me navigate the world of Media Studies and for introducing me to the many thinkers and texts that provided a foundation for this dissertation. Thank you as well to Will Straw for your thoughtful and encouraging feedback as a member of my dissertation and dissertation proposal committees. Your attention to traditionally undervalued cultural figures and objects (I’m thinking of your impeccable presentation on Bess Flowers and your work on second-hand cultural commodities) influenced how I approached the writing of this cultural history. Kembrew McLeod, I am deeply grateful to you for coming on-board the dissertation committee and lending your expertise to this study of free expression. Thank you to Darin Barney and Charles Acland for carefully reading and reflecting upon the work, and for your thoughtful comments during the oral defence.

Sarah Shoemaker, Anne Woodrum, and Chloe Morse-Harding were gracious hosts at the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections at Brandeis University. Thank you, Chloe, for your warm and detailed correspondences. Sarah—generations of scholars are indebted to you for making the Lenny Bruce archive a reality. Thank you for seeing the importance of such an archive, for allowing me to access materials in advance of its formal opening, and for hosting a truly unique and incredible conference on Lenny Bruce.

I’ve benefited enormously in my work and life from the brilliance of my colleagues in the AHCS community. Thank you to Jonathan Rouleau for providing translation assistance for my abstract. And a very special thanks goes out to my closest friends and allies over the years: François Mouillot, the great instigator of many heartfelt and philosophically- inflected late-night conversations on the steps of Casa and all over Mile End; Paul Fontaine who was (and continues to be) the source of countless hours of laughter; and to my partner in everything PhD, from feminist interventions to KemCoBa, Abi Shapiro. Abi, I’m not sure where I (or this dissertation) would be today if it weren’t for your encouragement, good example, and great company. I hope one day to adequately express how important you’ve been to me.

4 Finally, thank you to my given and chosen family for feeding my curiosity and love of knowledge. Thank you to Kate Eichhorn for seeing something in me when I was a constantly devastated 22-year-old with nothing to my name. Thank you for going over my first SSHRC application many times until I got it right, and for checking in with me all these years, providing guidance, opportunities, and encouragement for over a decade. Thanks to George Blott for deepening my love of comedy and for being our anchor in Montreal. Thanks to my brother and sister, RJ and Trina, Caroline, Rizal, my dad, and the Burke family for your lifelong support. Mark Burke—your name should appear with mine on this dissertation. So many of the questions and ideas were generated in conversation with you. You were there at every step of the way, at just about every conference and research trip, beside me while I grappled with dozens of books, articles, recordings, and considered each problem or revelation with me. The strongest parts of this work were fortified by your clear eye and bottomless heart. I’m so grateful for your loving support, good humor, intellect, and homemade kimchi. Lydia, you are the light of my life, my hope and my inspiration. I will try to do right by you. Finally, my mom, Patty Candido, taught me the value of questions, education, curiosity, culture, laughter, and love. This dissertation is dedicated to her.

5 Table of Contents Introduction ...... 8 Aim ...... 10 Why Comedy? ...... 12 Chapter Outline and Methods ...... 15 Literature Review ...... 24 Chapter one: A Genealogy of “Good” and “Evil” Mass Media ...... 33 The Spatialization of Morality in 19th Century Cities ...... 34 Creating Moral Order: Ineffective Police and the Social Purity Movement ...... 38 Censorship in the Name of Childhood Innocence ...... 42 The Suppression of Vice Through the Category of Obscenity ...... 44 Indirect Censorship Through Self-Regulation ...... 49 The Ten Commandments of Film ...... 51 Vice, Crime, and Sexuality in Pre-Code Film ...... 53 The Indirect Censorship of Radio ...... 54 Mitigating Musical Values ...... 60 Chapter Two: The Threat of Comedy and the Suppression of Mae West ...... 69 Mae West, the Hays Code, and the Legion of Decency ...... 73 Imperfect Capture: The Shades of Mae West ...... 86 The Transmission of Media Codes: Televisual Restrictions ...... 95 Chapter Three: Live Performance, Lenny Bruce, and the Rise of New Wave Comedy ...... 100 Nightclubs: The social and cultural contamination of urban life ...... 103 The Chaos and Mimicry of Leonard Alfred Schneider ...... 105 Jazz, and the New Wave of Comedy ...... 108 Contagion: Impresarios, Wally Heider’s tapes, and the jazz columnists ...... 116 Fantasy Records ...... 121 Interviews of Our Times ...... 125 The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ...... 130 Frank Offender: Private words in public places ...... 139 The Politics of Offense ...... 145 Mitigating Televisual Harm: Caution and Censorship on the Steve Allen Show ...... 150 Playboy’s Penthouse and the Promise of Narrowcast TV ...... 155 Chapter Four: Remediation In and Out of the Courtroom ...... 160 Police as Arbiters of Culture ...... 161 Selective Hearing and Truncated Notes ...... 166 Audience Testimonies and the Reworking of “Community Standards” ...... 171 Lenny Bruce, In Substance ...... 181 Obscene in New York ...... 186 Posthumous Reinterpretations ...... 196 Chapter Five: How Listener-Sponsored Radio Bridged the Discursive Gap Between the Live and the Mass Mediated ...... 199 Early Appeals for Free Expression on the Radio ...... 203 The Pacifica Network and FM Experimentation...... 204 Supplementing the Spectrum ...... 211 Free Speech at Berkeley ...... 214 Social Movement Media: Amplifying the ‘60s ...... 218

6 Contesting Censorship by Interrogating Notions of “Obscenity” ...... 223 Broadcasting the Obscene Comic ...... 226 Free Reign Over Dispensable Hours ...... 230 The Free Speech Nebula ...... 243 Public Complaints and the FCC ...... 246 George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” ...... 248 Defining “Indecency”: Morality in Media, the FCC, and the Law of Nuisance ...... 253 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978) ...... 263 Conclusion: Moral Remediation in the Internet Age ...... 271 The Politics of Offense in the Internet Age: Free Speech vs. Privacy ...... 276 The Difficulty of Defining “Harm” Today ...... 283 Bibliography ...... 290

7 Introduction

Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising

intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold,

vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something

which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral? Among

them we may occasionally see some man of deep conscientiousness and

subtle and refined understanding, who spends a life in sophisticating with

an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity

in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with

orthodoxy, which yet he does not, perhaps, to the end succeed in doing. No

one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his

first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth

gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation,

thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them

because they do not suffer themselves to think.1

When John Stuart Mill wrote his resounding arguments for the freedom of consciousness and expression in On Liberty, perhaps the most difficult challenge he faced was in defining what the absolute limit to expression should be. For Mill, “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any members of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm

1 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis, In.: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978), 32.

8 to others.”2 In spite of widespread support for his idea that the principle of harm should guide judgment around state intervention, a clear consensus on exactly what constituted

“harm” was not reached in his lifetime or since. Over a century after the publication of

Mill’s work, the question of acceptable speech erupted during the 1960s Free Speech

Movement, and decades later the limits to allowable expression continue to riddle us. Part of what contributed to the on-going problem of acceptable expression in the 20th century were the challenges to social life precipitated by urban industrialization and the ways that cities brought previously disparate social groups together. The cauldron of early 20th century urban America inevitably produced forms of social organization and cultural innovation that simultaneously worked to articulate the inner lives of those living, or caught, in this new socio-spatial situation, as well as offended the sensibilities of groups who’d been invested in previously established ways of being. Compounding the problem of immoral urban expression was the proliferation of communications technologies that unearthed novel and momentarily unregulated modes of amplifying and representing subjects that had previously been deemed unfit for the public domain.

When new modes of communication present alternative ways of articulating bold, vigorous, and independent trains of thought, they recast centuries-old debates about how expression and representation are to be used for the improvement of self and society, and how they must be ruled to mitigate harm. As artists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs in the

20th century experimented with what media could do, they pushed amorphous media forms

2 Mill, On Liberty, 9.

9 clumsily into matrices of legal, social, and moral regulation, begging the question: what are or should be the representational and discursive limits of mediated culture?

Aim

My dissertation demonstrates the ways that mass media institutions acted as sites and mechanisms of moral regulation in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, and, more specifically, the ways that the concepts of obscenity, indecency, and profanity functioned as catch-all terms that were used to impose arguably unconstitutional limits to expression for decades in mass mediated film and broadcasting. I argue that it was through the work of performers and cultural figures working in or alongside small-scale and niche media that the unconstitutionality of discursive regulation in mass media was challenged and transformed.

This dissertation further illustrates how channeling became a principle way that competing cultural values could exist in the same media ecology, here treated as a method of spatially or temporally separating kinds of content. I approach channeling3 as the act of prescribing certain routes or avenues for content over others based on ideas of appropriateness. Certain types of live performance venues, limited recordings, urban radio, late night television, and

3 The term “channel,” derived from the Latin “canalis” meaning “groove” or “waterpipe,” designates the idea of a route. The Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies defines a channel by stating: “Each message-carrying signal requires a route along which it is transmitted from the sender to the receiver and along which feedback may be obtained. Channels may be physical (our voices or bodies), technical (the telephone) or social (our schools, media, etc.).” From this definition, we can understand channeling, as the process by which content (or, a “message-carrying signal”) is designated to move through a particular channel. Here, I am focusing on channeling as a practice shaped not just by physical, technical, and social considerations, but by moral-institutional considerations as well. "Channel," Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, by James Watson, and Anne Hill. 9th ed. Bloomsbury, 2015.

10 relatively inaccessible radio stations have all functioned at some point as appropriate vehicles for carrying “adult” and/or “offensive” content to audiences bound together by age, ideological-leaning, and taste. The movement, however, of contentious content into channels geared to general audiences destabilizes the existing compromises struck between audiences, regulatory bodies, media institutions, and cultural producers who at some point have come to de facto agreements of what kinds of ideas and representations can exist where and for which audiences. Remediation, the practice of representing mediated content from one medium by another, can complicate the moral boundaries of channels, posing questions to systems of morality, standardization in culture, and the kinds of moral zoning that happens across channels, media forms, and time blocks. In other words, this dissertation examines the ways that channeling has been used to mitigate the perceived harm of offensive representations, ideas, and speech, and the political-ethical work done through remediation that challenges ideas of appropriateness and acceptability in mass media.

To make this general theoretical argument, my dissertation draws on a variety of media and cultural histories united by the themes of experimentation, moral offense, criminality, regulation, and resistance. More specifically, by examining the politics of offense at play around the charges of obscenity or indecency in the cases of Mae West, Lenny Bruce,

George Carlin, and those involved in listener-sponsored radio, this dissertation illustrates the precariousness of moral boundaries that historically structured mass media in the first few decades of the 20th century. Further, these case studies illustrate how remediation has revealed: 1) the ways in which media institutions are caught in the political game of

11 morality, and; 2) the constitutional quandary underlying the use of channeling to both quasi-protect as well as condemn constitutionally-protected (but morally questionable) expression. Along with examining the politics of offense behind obscenity and indecency charges, the following chapters also illustrate the tactics employed by the aforementioned performers as well as a host of cultural intermediaries4 (jazz critics, club owners, lawyers, and media regulators) who facilitated the covert or niche circulation of “offensive” material. Word-of-mouth recommendations, hand-to-hand distribution of rare recordings, reviews and articles in industry or jazz publications, supportive testimonies and legal arguments, and small-scale broadcasting all contributed to the circulation and amplification of comedic performances and work that challenged standardized morality in culture, specifically around representations or articulations of sexuality, race, gender, vice, and crime.

Why Comedy?

The fact that the case studies relate in large part to comedy is deliberate. Comedy, like the concepts of obscenity and indecency, is amorphous. As a cultural genre, it can both employ fiction or truthful representations, it can aim to be serious or frivolous, it can seek to reveal universal experiences or speak to insider-knowledge, it can be used as a form of cruelty to inflict harm or it can be used to reveal harm. Worse still for conceptual clarity, comedy can perform seemingly conflicting things simultaneously, for instance, when a joke humiliates

4 The term cultural intermediaries comes from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, which identifies a class of cultural producers (e.g. TV and radio producers, critics, writer-journalists) whose key function is that of “divulging legitimate culture.” Cultural intermediaries in this sense are those who shape taste and exercise influence over how cultural works are valued. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 326.

12 a cruel person. Comedy is a genre of play and experimentation, and it is through comedy that figures like Lenny Bruce have unsettled expectations around aesthetics, narrative, and the representation of self and society. The multi-directionality, the endless functions, and the limitless forms of comedy are what make it such a powerful genre. It is also precisely because of the ambiguity and play of humor that Bruce and others experienced the unique constitutional problems that they have. The charges of obscenity against the work of Lenny

Bruce, for instance, took different form than obscenity charges lodged at literary authors or film-makers whose genres are taken more seriously by courts. How can the constitution protect speech when the nature and function of that speech (e.g. in a joke) eludes its audience? The absence of definitive and standardized modes of interpreting comedy puts comedy on tenuous grounds in situations requiring social, legal, and moral definition.

Furthermore, comedy plays a central role in the story of 20th century mediated morality. In the 20th century, broadcasting and film turned to comedians as reliable laborers and content providers for the mass media industries. Americans embraced traditions of humor before the emergence of mass media, for instance, in literature, cartoons, and live performance

(vaudeville, variety shows, burlesque, and minstrelsy). However, the development of broadcasting and film heralded a new era of mass mediated comedy. Along with drama, music, and the news, comedy became a key genre that could be taken in its existing forms and moulded to suit the profit-seeking imperatives of private industry. Comics who had a popular following moved from the relatively limited spaces (enclosed environments with set audience sizes) and economies of live performance to the indefinitely expansive and exponentially more profitable arenas of film, radio, and later television. The movement of

13 comedy from the live to the mass mediated, however, was not without consequence. Turn- of-the-century American comedy performed in live venues had absorbed social and moral qualities that came into conflict with sets of social and moral qualities that were expected to be cultivated by the film and broadcasting industries. Specifically, much of live

American comedy carried content or qualities deemed indecent, obscene, and improper, and when mediated to mixed audience in movie theatres or by the radio in the home, certain forms of comedy were seen as offensive, moral contamination, and a problem that required social, institutional, and legal responses.

This dissertation lays out a series of conflicts structured by the politics of offense that occurred in relation to the emergence of electronic mass media. Examining the social and judicial reactions to mainly comic performers who offended notions of “decency,” like

Mae West, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and a network of listener-sponsored radio stations, this dissertation explores the questions: what moral ideals have structured the mass media industries and ways of thinking about media in the early to mid 20th century? Where did these ideals come from? How were ideas about decency and obscenity given definition and force in American culture? And how have cultural figures like comedians and independent radio producers worked to challenge unconstitutional constraints on free speech and widen the boundaries of mediated discourse in the United States?

14 Chapter Outline and Methods

In order to understand how materials were identified for this study, how they were analyzed, and for what purposes, it is necessary to understand some of the backstory of this dissertation. Struck by the brilliant comedic insights and autobiographic revelations of figures like Dave Chappelle and Maria Bamford, my dissertation originally intended to provide a cultural history of frank speech and honesty in American stand-up comedy, demonstrating how the form of stand-up comedy has been used as a free-speech platform over the second half of the twentieth century. Studying histories of 20th century American comedy and reading histories of the new wave comics alerted me to two important facts: my interest in free speech comedy came out of a frustration with moral and discursive standardization in entertainment; and second, that many people considered Lenny Bruce the father of frank and personal expression in stand-up comedy for important historical reasons. It was at this point that the research questions and objects shifted from being focused on stand-up comedy as a cultural form to focusing on the moral, cultural, and legal conditions that allowed me to consider stand-up comedy a free speech form in the first place.

In Nietzschean fashion, the dissertation moved away from the “self-evident” categories of free and unfree speech to a consideration of the conditions that allowed certain forms of culture to be considered free or unfree in the first place.5 This is not to suggest that this dissertation does not inevitably see certain figures as free speech champions, but rather to

5 See pages 16-17 of On the Genealogy of Morals for more on how Nietzsche moved from the question of “where our good and evil really originated” to “under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess?” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, New York: Vintage, 1967.

15 note the constitutive nature of certain social groups, media institutions, and representatives of the state in developing discourses about wholesome, moral culture, and its counterpart— sick, indecent, and obscene culture.

The central event (or series of events) grounding the development of this dissertation’s research questions and methods of analysis were the obscenity arrests of Lenny Bruce. It was the complexity of his arrests that begged for a deeper understanding of his work, as well as for a better understanding of the conditions of interpretation that allowed audiences and the state to classify him obscene. In focusing on this event as historically peculiar and worthy of interrogation, I am drawing on Michel Foucault’s approach to “eventalization,” the work of “making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all.”6 The method “means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary. In this sense one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes… This procedure of causal multiplication means analyzing an event according to the multiple processes which constitute it.”7

Rather than simply determine the free speech components of Lenny Bruce’s work, this dissertation attempts to discover the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, and

6 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lecture and an Interview with Michel Foucault, eds. Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76. 7 Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 76.

16 plays of forces that allowed for people to interpret his work as either obscene or as brave, novel, necessary, and truthful. The study of comedy and Bruce histories was supplemented by listening to his recordings and the recordings of other new wave comics, which aided my understanding of some of the moral and political qualities developed in new wave/sicknik comedy. Newspaper archives, particularly articles reviewing his performances and mediated performances, as well as those detailing his obscenity trials, informed my understanding of the many ways he was understood or received by audiences or in the court. The relatively new Lenny Bruce Archive at Brandeis University (which contains letters from fans, correspondences with lawyers, letters from friends working in culture, and documents related to his trials) further enriched my understanding of: how

Bruce saw his own work and trials; the conversations he had with his lawyers and friends about obscenity or sick comedy; and the interpersonal networks involved in enabling, supporting, and defending his career.

The effort to uncover the historical conditions that allowed for Bruce’s obscenity trials brought me chronologically backward to histories of media regulation, from which I gained an understanding of the discursive conditions that Bruce was operating in. These histories of media regulation repeatedly singled out Mae West as an early figure whose boundary- testing in the domain of film prompted outcry amongst religious and community groups.

The fact that she was also accused of obscenity based on comedic performances tied her history to the history of Lenny Bruce. It was not the similarities of her obscenity arrest to

Bruce’s, however, that I focused on in this dissertation. Rather, it was her belonging to a history of media regulation that seemed most relevant for this dissertation, specifically for

17 the ways controversy around her career illustrates the development and hardening of discourse and policies related to ideas about propriety and indecency. To this end, I focused on the controversy surrounding her radio appearance on the Chase and Sanborn Hour, and using the recording, considered her discursive offenses against the broader moral and political picture within which she was working. Discursive analysis of the program and its situation in a history of social conflict provides an understanding of the moral-political offering of the program and the ways that offering was received.

Similarly to the case of Mae West, histories of post-Bruce comedy and media regulation repeatedly pointed to a single figure, George Carlin, as Bruce’s free speech successor for the ways that the airing of Carlin’s Dirty Words routine challenged the regulation of radio broadcasting. It was while researching the case that I learned that it was not actually George

Carlin who was taken to court for his routine based on dirty words (he was not held legally responsible for committing the same offenses that Lenny Bruce committed), but rather, it was a radio station network held responsible for the discursive breech. Histories of the

Pacifica Network articulate the network’s free speech commitments, but the network’s connection to comedy remained curious to me. By tracing programs held by the Pacifica archives, and by conducting online and phone interviews, I was able to fill in the gaps about countercultural radio’s relationship to comedy in that era and came to see the ways comedy or comedic sensibility contributed to a discursive shift in radio. With these histories, archival materials, and interviews on hand, I then structured the chapters of the dissertation chronologically, starting with the historical moment at which point “obscenity” began to take on definition in relation to a new medium (railway-transported mail), and concluding

18 with the moment at which point “indecency” was removed from the regulation of the

Internet (specifically, when existing indecency definitions were removed from the

Communications Decency Act).

Chapter One summarizes histories of early 20th century urbanization, vice, entertainment, and social purity in an effort to present the moral backdrop of regulatory codes, which came to define broadcasting and film in the first half of the 20th century.8 This chapter asks: what were the social and cultural concerns that shaped the moral perceptions of radio, film, and television in their early stages of development? How were these media seen as capable of inflicting harm, and in what way did industry players attempt to mitigate that harm? To answer these questions, I examine the role of socio-religious groups like the Legion of

Decency in shaping understandings of obscenity, indecency, and profanity, and the ways that its mobilization of religious communities impacted the regulation of radio, film, and television, and set up a policy framework that would impact how leading comics and performers came to be understood.

Chapter two draws on biographies and scholarly accounts of Mae West to illustrate how the moral undertones of her work and persona were shaped by live performance spaces, and the ways that her representations of gender and sexuality troubled (or were seem as harmful to) certain social and religious groups. While a number of scholars have illustrated the significance of West and her work,9 this chapter presents a close-reading (or rather,

8 John Belton’s discussion of the Production Code, in the collection Movies and Mass Culture (1996), informs much of the history and approach taken in chapters one and two. 9 Murray (2000); Watts (2003); Craig (2010); Roessner and Broaddus (2013).

19 close-listening) of West’s “Adam and Eve” radio performance in order to more deeply demonstrate the political (specifically, pro-sex feminist character) of her work. Examining the controversy surrounding the broadcast illustrates the ways that mass media players and codes came to informally censor West in film and broadcasting.

Chapter three frames live performance spaces as breeding grounds of social, cultural, and moral experimentation. Nightclubs, jazz clubs, and coffee houses from the 1920s through the 1960s in particular are shown to be spaces of experimentation that convened open- minded and curious audiences hungry for new kinds of experience. Histories of live performance spaces and the stand-up comedy of the 1950s and 60s supply an understanding of how comedic experimentation, epitomized by the “new wave” or “sick” standup comics, was made possible not just by enterprising comics, but also by the proprietors of live performance spaces, jazz and avant garde audiences, and cultural intermediaries who participated in the circulation and distribution of a new and challenging kind of comedy.

San Francisco’s Bay area is also discussed as a force in this history because of the way it functioned as an intellectual and political home for many of the individuals discussed in this dissertation.

Of particular interest for much of the dissertation is the standup comic Lenny Bruce, a figure who has been studied by legal scholars, American historians, and discussed at length in the popular press, 10 but who has not yet been considered a figure of interest to

Communications and Media Studies scholars.

10 Lenny Bruce (1991—originally serialized in Playboy articles from the 1960s); Cohen (1967); Goldman (1974); Kitty Bruce (1984); Collins and Skover (2002); Kofsky (1974); Thomas (1989).

20

Chapters three and four illustrate the political qualities of remediating Lenny Bruce.

Chapter three emphasizes how the small-scale or niche character of media forms (like tape cassettes, records, nightclub performances, and late night television) allowed for the circulation of content among largely receptive audiences. Chapter four then examines how the remediation of Lenny Bruce into the courts recast the meaning of his work in a way that contributed to his criminal convictions. Remediation in this case is considered in relation to police testimonies that functioned to stand in for Lenny Bruce in the court and before juries and judges. Against the corrosive nature of police testimonies, however, were the nuanced understandings of Bruce’s satire articulated by Bruce’s lawyers, fans, scenesters, cultural critics, and educators who presented alternative perspectives into the courtroom when they testified on Bruce’s behalf during the trials. The Bruce trials not only carried Bruce’s comedy into the court, but also the moral and political ideals from the jazz and avant-garde literary and cultural scenes that had previously been missing in legal understandings of “community standards.”

In these two chapters, I hope to contribute to understandings of Lenny Bruce’s life and significance in a broader historical picture detailing the moral and cultural context of his work. By considering how the remediation of his work from live performance spaces to electronically-mediated ones complicated the moral boundaries of mass media, Bruce can be seen for the ways he had lasting effects, not just on free speech, satire and standup comedy, but on the boundaries of mediated discourse more generally. Lenny Bruce’s cutting humor, unorthodox perspectives, and insistence on using vernacular language

21 presented an alternative morality to that asserted in mainstream media. Asserting his right to speak his truth “as it is” rather than as it “should be,” he directly challenged what people expected from comedy, television, and culture more generally, adding to the growing set of artists and performers who insisted on presenting their views on the world in spite of the tremendous efforts to silence frank and offensive voices. For Communications and Media

Studies scholars, Lenny Bruce presents a study of moral contagion in media ecologies—a way of understanding how limits to discourse (via the category of “obscenity”) have been formulated in the loop of live and mass mediated culture,11 and how unorthodox speech and representation force us to reconsider the logic, function, and viability of certain kinds of moral codes perpetuated by media institutions. Through archival research and close- listening to his recorded material, chapters three and four build on existing bodies of literature (on Bruce and on media moralities) to show how Bruce directly posed a challenge to mainstream media codes and inspired many influential artists and performers to speak frankly and truthfully, in spite of systems of media regulation and norms in culture that suggested performers and artists should act otherwise.

Informed by histories of radio, interviews with countercultural satirists, and audio and newspaper archives, Chapter five examines the ways that listener-sponsored radio

(epitomized here by the Pacifica Network and KRAB Nebula) posed an alternative to commercial broadcasting in America starting in the 1940s and into the 1970s. Alongside those in live performance or at live events who were committed to novel expression, aesthetics, and New Left politics, the folks at Pacifica and KRAB departed from

11 This insight about the constitutive force of the live/mass mediated loop was very much brought about in conversation with Dr. Carrie Rentschler.

22 commercial norms and fought the informal censorship of the FCC in an effort to make radio a medium of free speech. Although the literature on non-commercial broadcasting has grown over the past few decades,12 less academic attention13 has been paid to the politics of the aesthetic and discursive innovation brought about by the free form and free forum DJs of listener-sponsored radio in the 1960s more specifically. This chapter shows how by presenting DJs or working with artists and performers dedicated to presenting frank autobiographical expressions and interrogating standard uses of language, listener- sponsored radio became a key site and mode of shifting the boundaries of discourse in broadcasting. This chapter provides a counterpoint to the discussion on the constitution of obscenity in the loop of live and mass mediated culture. Here, an idea of free speech is shown to be articulated by those working with or in listener-sponsored broadcasting. The social and institutional work to create a set of moral limits in mass media was slowly picked away at by those working in live and niche media. While an incredible amount of cultural, institutional, and legal effort has gone into dismantling 1930s-based media moralities, emerging technologies and shifting cultural norms in the 21st century continue to dredge up the question of the limits to allowable expression.

In its conclusion, my dissertation ends with a brief sketch of contemporary free speech problems that have arisen from the expressive possibilities of the Internet, networked

12 E.g. Land (1999); Lasar (2000); McCauley (2005); Mitchell (2005); Stern (2005); Walker (2001). 13 Radio practitioners have more actively archived and written about the innovations of 1960s countercultural radio –- see Steve Post’s Playing in the FM Band, John Whiting’s website My KPFA – A Historical Footnote, Chris Koch’s website Chris Koch Media, and the KRAB archive KRAB-FM 107.7 Seattle, Washington 1962-1984.

23 computers, and mobile technologies in order to illustrate how the problem of mediated harm is developing today.

Literature Review

The greatest influence on this dissertation in terms of method and treatment of the research objects that are obscenity and indecency is Marjorie Heins’ Not in Front of the Children, which presents a history of censorship around the “harm-to-minors” principle.14 Drawing largely from legal but also cultural and political histories, Heins demonstrates how “harm- to-minors” arguments function to censor culture in America over the 20th and into the 21st century. 15 Her legal history grounds the legal and cultural benchmarks that my dissertation follows. Building on her work, this dissertation brings this history of obscenity and indecency more in line with Communications and Media Studies, attending more deeply

14 Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 9. 15 Acknowledging legitimate concerns that there are kinds of cultural content that do have a negative impact on youth, she writes:

“The argument here is not that commercial pornography, mindless media violence, or other dubious forms of entertainment are good for youngsters or should be foisted upon them. Rather, it is that, given the overwhelming difficulty in even defining what it is we want to censor, and the significant costs of censorship to society and to youngsters themselves, we ought to be sure that real, not just symbolic, harm results from youthful pursuit of disapproved pleasures and messages before mandating indecency laws, Internet filters, and other restrictive regimes. Perhaps there are better ways to socialize children--among them, training in media literacy and critical thinking skills, comprehensive sexuality education, literature classes that deal with difficult topics rather than pretending they do not exist, and inclusion of young people in journalism and policymaking on this very issue of culture and values…

If speech is proven to cause direct harm—to personal privacy, to a fair trial, to physical safety, to the right to work, study, or vote—there is a good argument for suppressing or punishing it. The question is whether any similar, directly identifiable harm can be traced to minors’ access to sexual or other controversial information or ideas, or whether the issue is really a more generalized ideological one—censorship in the interest of moral values and symbolism. In exploring that issue, I have taken pains to be scrupulously accurate both in recounting the history of harm-to-minors and indecency law and in presenting the psychological questions. I think that neither indecency laws nor censorship of school libraries, neither v- chips nor Internet filters, are great ways to socialize youth and prepare them for an uncertain world; but my primary goal is to raise the question” (Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 11-14).

24 to the spaces and players that have contributed to cultural imaginaries around obscenity and indecency, and to the cultural networks and media artefacts that participate in the transmission or circulation of “obscene” or “free speech” ideas. Furthermore, close readings/listenings of brazen comedic works and countercultural radio broadcasts presents a more nuanced understanding of the significant role that comedy played in inverting cultural norms and expectations. Another way to think of this work, from a Communication standpoint, is as an extended deliberation on media existing in moral ecologies and the role that channeling plays in maintaining media as moral spaces.

Part of my dissertation also follows a lineage of works that consider how media are defined in relation to each other, specifically how a medium is shaped by its predecessors and contemporaneous media. McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in which he writes, “the

‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,” has been a guiding example of scholarship that examines how a medium borrows from earlier forms (the telegraph borrows print which borrows the written word, which borrows speech). 16 Bolter and

Grusin’s Remediation17 is similarly taken up with media borrowing and the ways that a medium (e.g. a networked computer) remediates, or presents another medium (e.g. a painting) to achieve the effects of immediacy or hypermediacy.18 A medium is not born in isolation, but rather borrows or refashions experiences, practices, and forms that existed with earlier media. For Bolter and Grusin, a genealogical approach to the study of media

16 Quoted in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4, no. 3 (1996): 339. 17 The authors define remediation as “the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 339). 18 “Immediacy” allows a viewer or user to “stand in an immediate relationship to the contents of the medium” (Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 318), whereas “hypermediacy” uses fragmentation and heterogeneity to emphasize user interaction, process or performance when encountering the medium (Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 327).

25 unearths the phenomenological or perceptual constants that link, for instance, perspective painting with virtual reality—they both seek to produce a sense of immediacy, or, bring the viewer/user closer to the content viewed. As Bolter and Grusin write,

All mediation is remediation because each act of mediation depends upon other acts

of mediation. Media are continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing

each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to

be media in the first place.19

Although their analysis is principally concerned with the formal and perceptual, they note that remediation takes place within material, social, and economic systems. 20 Their analysis, however, does not include a robust model for examining remediation in these ways.

The above authors’ studies emphasize qualities that remain consistent across a number of technological forms that emerge over generations or centuries. For McLuhan, those kernels of sameness are the amplification or acceleration of human ability. For Bolter and Grusin, the kernel of sameness is in phenomenological experiences, where mediation produces the experience of either immediacy or hypermediacy. My work is similarly interested in some of the constants that tie media forms together, but rather than focusing on cognitive experiences, this dissertation pivots toward the specifically moral and legal.

19 Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 346. 20 Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 357.

26 Following Lisa Gitelman’s argument that media21 should be studied in their historical specificity, and following her rejection of media studies approaches (which she accuses

Bolter and Grusin of doing) that trim “out any mention of human agents, as if media were naturally the way they are, without authors, designers” etc.,22 this dissertation is radically interested in how specific social actors and cultural institutions have defined guiding ideals that have shaped how media institutions have acted, how they have defined themselves, and what cultural actors have been able to express and represent through media forms.

More specifically, this dissertation examines the roles that ideas about obscenity, indecency, and free speech have played over time and across media forms in enabling or delimiting representation and expression in culture. Additionally, this work examines the transformation of discourses about obscenity, indecency, and free speech in relation to media forms over the late 19th and 20th centuries. By tying histories of media, morality, culture, and law together, this dissertation supplements media genealogies as it considers how 20th century media have been shaped by an intersection of moral, social, cultural, and regulatory decisions around obscenity, indecency, and impropriety.

This approach to studying media in specific historical moments echoes the approaches of writers like Fred Turner and Brian Larkin. Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture examines the significance of a figure named Stewart Brand who published the Whole Earth

Catalog, which supplied information and a kind of medium-based community for the New

21 Gitelman defines media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. 22 Gitleman, Always Already New, 9.

27 Communalists,23 a wing of the counterculture that rejected the military-industrial complex and sought to build ideal societies in rural America. Turner’s work provides an understanding of how social ideals are carried and worked on in cultural materials, and the ways that the hand-to-hand circulation of these materials tied otherwise disparate individuals together as the catalog created and circulated a shared body of knowledge (i.e. it identified the informational and material tools that could help the New Communalists thrive) and as it created a space of exchange for its members. Turner conceptualizes the

Whole Earth Catalog as a “network forum”—a space where members of disparate communities came together, exchanged ideas, and, in the process, synthesized new intellectual frameworks and new social networks.24 Turner’s work provides a model for considering how ideals and knowledge are worked on in media spaces and laid down in cultural objects that can be moved to a variety of social or temporal spaces, producing effects far removed from their original contexts. This dissertation follows a similar analytical model, as it examines networks of people and the movement of ideas and ideals in media objects. Further, this work is thematically close to Turner’s in the sense that it examines the politics of DIY efforts, niche communities, and the use of small-scale tools.

Another important influence on the methods of this dissertation is Brian Larkin whose

Signal and Noise asks the question of how space or location influences the development of media, and attends to the ways in which the built environment, infrastructure, and the materiality of a medium shapes its moral, political, and ideological meanings. His text

23 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, Il.: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33. 24 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 72.

28 presents a history of cinema in Nigeria, examining the ways that cinema has been used for a variety of purposes and developed in unexpected ways. Larkin shows, for instance, how cinema and radio were used by British colonialists in Nigeria who were intent on

“developing Nigerians into “modern” colonial citizens.”25 He then looks at how cinema was later transformed under Islamic law, 26 and the ways contemporary Nigerian subjectivities are differently explored in Northern versus Southern Nigerian videos. A guiding assumption grounding his exploration has been useful for my work: “The meanings attached to technologies, their technical functions, and the social uses to which they are put are not an inevitable consequence but something worked out over time in the context of considerable cultural debate.”27 Particularly helpful from his study is his examination of the political-moral conflicts behind the developments of film and radio in Nigeria (how the form of cinema developed under Islamic law was a direct response to the form of cinema used by British Christian colonizers). He also helpfully pays close attention to how these media have been used outside of their intended ideological or religious projects, or in other words, he examines “the technologies’ autonomous power, which create technical and social potentials outside the sponsors’ control.”28

Attending to the interpersonal networks, spaces, material affordances, and moral politics that shape mediation and remediation allows for a deeper understanding of media ecologies, media institutions, the movement of culture, and the influences that shape how

25 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 3. 26 Larkin, Signal and Noise, 4. 27 Larking, Signal and Noise, 3. 28 Larkin, Signal and Noise, 4.

29 culture is made and appears. Like Turner, this work is concerned with the movement of moral ideals through cultural artefacts and across media forms, and like Larkin, I’m interested in the productivity of restraints—here, this means the ways that ideas about immoral culture produced laws and regulation that prohibit forms of speech and expression that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment, and the ways that (what might be considered) unconstitutional restraints over expression in film and broadcasting contributed to the cultural fertility of live performance spaces and niche or narrowcast media. Informed by a cross-section of media studies and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, this dissertation can be understood as a genealogy of morality in 20th century mass and niche media cultures. The dissertation aims to shed light on the social tensions, moral conflict, and politics of offense that shape how 20th century media have been understood, defined, used, and (inevitably) transformed. In particular, this dissertation attends to controversies surrounding comedic figures (or figures whose politics and modes of expression were deeply influenced by comics) for the ways that comedy reflects (and contests) everyday beliefs, knowledge, senses of self, and even “truth.”

The general theoretical argument of this dissertation is that the processes of remediation are not neutral, nor do they only impact aesthetic and phenomenological experiences.

Rather, remediation can be read in relation to spatial-moral systems, institutional codes, social action, embodied practices, and the articulation of the self. The reason we need to think about the moral and social contexts of remediation is because they have implications for law, for what people can say, make, do, communicate, and connect by. In short, it has implications for free expression. This dissertation tells a macro-history of moral

30 transformations that have happened in relation to mass media, and it informs us of the social dynamics at play in the regulation of media forms. The lasting message it hopes to convey is that when we regulate a medium, it has often been the case that the moral content that was restricted moved elsewhere—to adjacent spaces, times, or frequencies that could only ever partially contain content. Censorial media regulation often does not solve moral problems, but instead pushes “immoral” content toward alternative channels and spaces of expression.

*A note about the use of “Pigs Ate My Roses” in this dissertation’s title. On its own, “Pigs

Ate My Roses” references a major theme of this work—the process by which a body

(regarded as unintelligent or uncivil) is seen to destroy a thing of goodness and beauty.

Above this, however, “Pigs Ate My Roses” is a multiply-leveled intertextual reference.

“Pigs Ate My Roses” appears in the photograph that was used for the cover of Lenny

Bruce’s first album, “Interviews of Our Times.” This is the same cover art used for the original “Interviews of Our Times” album featuring KPFA’s Henry Jacobs and Woody

Leifer (the album that was later reissued as an LP by Fantasy Records with Lenny Bruce’s tracks added to it—this is discussed further in Chapter 3). The album covers feature a photograph in which three contemplative individuals sit around a small round table surrounded by mitch-matched chairs in what looks to be a cozy kitchen with t back door opening up onto a sunny day. A barefoot woman in shorts and a t-shirt looks downward with a cigarette in her mouth, and sitting on the floor opposite her is an androgynous- looking woman leaning against a chair. Seated in the second chair is a man with glasses and goatee who is reading a book with the title “Pigs Ate My Roses” in large, bold letters.

31 According to the account of Brio Burgess,29 the man reading the book is Max Weiss, owner of Fantasy records; across from him is a woman named Irmine; and sitting on the floor leaning against Weiss’ chair is Peggy Tolk-Watkins, an artist, poet, and owner of the Tin

Angel (a jazz and lesbian bar in North Beach San Francisco). The confluence of these individuals in the photograph, along with the performers around the photograph (Jacobs,

Leifer, and Bruce), mirrors the confluence of worlds explored in this dissertation: the worlds of jazz, listener-sponsored radio, North Beach’s literary scene, and the new wave comics. By invoking the statement “Pigs Ate My Roses,” this dissertation’s title not only makes reference to these intersecting worlds and the ways in which these groups collectively contemplated the metaphorical destruction of roses, but also, the use of the statement is a performative gesture that enacts a major argument made by this dissertation—that the movement of statements across media/contexts loads statements with new (and often unanticipated) meaning.

29 Brio Burgess, Wail! An American Journey (San Bernardino, CA: Jacob’s Ladder Books, 2002), 49-50.

32 Chapter one: A Genealogy of “Good” and “Evil” Mass Media

The emergence of a new medium brings to light unique expressive possibilities distinct from those which preceded it—a film allows you to experience the Atlantic Ocean in an entirely different way from an audio recording, photograph, or poem. Just as novel expressive possibilities emerge with a new medium, so too do perceptions of new dangers that challenge existing moral, cultural, and political orders of expression. These expressive dangers provoke questions about what the new medium is, what it does, what it should do, how it should do it, and under whose authority. In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution, written before the proliferation of mass electronic media, could not sufficiently account for how a medium’s technical form and social organization might impact the protection of mass mediated expression. Film, radio, and television in the early

20th century prompted questions about the extent to which new, electronically mediated audio and visual expressions (created largely through capitalist frameworks) should be protected and the extent to which it should be forbidden. The question of what constituted morally acceptable content in early 20th century American mass media was ultimately decided by a mix of socio-moral action, court decisions, and media producers who valued the idea of social protectionism over free expression for at least five decades.

This chapter examines the social, spatial, and moral struggle that led up to the narrowing of mass mediated morality in America in the first half of the 20th century. More specifically, this chapter examines the co-constitution of, on the one hand, “wholesome” public morality in the mass media industries, and, on the other hand, moral corruption in live performance spaces. To begin, I delineate the social and moral problems of vice, sexuality, and gender

33 norms that arose out of American industrialization. Capitalist urbanization prompted the development of new forms of association, representation, and cultural practice, which resulted in the destabilization of Victorian morality. In an effort to resist the impending collapse of moral systems, social and religious groups who were invested in Victorian morality, like the YMCA, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Legion of Decency, arose to combat what they saw as new social ills: vice, crime, and the immorality of obscene, indecent, and profane culture.

In short, this chapter demonstrates the ways that American mass media industries from roughly the 1920s to the 1950s functioned as sites of moral struggle through which competing notions of “the good” were tested, decided upon, refined, and institutionalized.

What my following chapters demonstrate, however, is that as much as these struggles can and have defined cultural production for significant periods of time, the discursive and cultural rules established at a particular moment are never stable. Instead, rules around what is acceptable in public discourse change over time as new social actors, media forms, and technologies challenge the ever-shifting grounds of culture.

The Spatialization of Morality in 19th Century Cities

Marjorie Heins’ Not in Front of the Children illustrates how the concentration of previously disparate communities of people, habits, and cultures in industrializing American and

European cities during the 19th century led to a breakdown of traditional forms of social organization. Between 1892 and 1954, over twelve million immigrants entered the United

States through the small portal of Ellis Island, and of these, millions stayed in New York

34 City.30 In 1907 alone, approximately 1.25 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island and this massive influx put a strain on NYC’s space and resources as the city struggled to build facilities (e.g. accommodations, hospitals, and kitchens) fast enough to meet growing demands.31 Social and spatial cohesion were difficult to achieve with this unprecedented influx of new immigrants competing for resources, space, and work. The question of how to produce order in this heterogeneous environment was complicated by the fact that no single tradition of values would work for such a demographically novel society. The absence of social order made “urban poverty, crowding, prostitution, drinking, gambling, and other ‘vices’ increasingly visible.”32 While crowded slums in urban centers brought some bodies into closer contact with others, slums also prompted wealthier populations to seek refuge on the outskirts of the downtown core. Here, the bourgeoisie hoped to create and preserve their environmental and domestic ideals that were threatened by the spatial chaos of the newly crowded cities.

Several American thinkers proposed spatial distance, the movement away from crime, poverty, pollution, and labour unrest, as one solution to the unsavoury effects of the factory system on everyday life.33 Planner Raymond Unwin, for instance, wrote that “The rapid growth of towns and cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due to the organisation and concentration of industries, took place without any proper regard being shown for health, convenience or beauty in the arrangement of the town, without any effort

30 “Ellis Island – History,” The Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation, 2017, http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/ellis-island-history. Accessed April 17, 2017. 31 Ibid. 32 Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, 2001. (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 25. 33 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12-13.

35 to give that combination of building with open space which is necessary to secure adequate light and fresh air for health, adequate un-built-on ground for convenience, or adequate parks and gardens for the beauty of the city.”34 The unhealthiness of the city combined with the idealization of nature developed by the Romantic movement prompted the belief that homes built away from factories and in closer relation to nature would create healthier and happier lives.35 At the same time, the city afforded luxuries, leisure, and kinds of convenience that were less accessible in rural areas, so the ideal of a marriage between city and country life became increasingly appealing to a wide set of society.

Writers began theorizing “a new utopian social space located on the periphery of the city, at once rural and urban, a space that was prototypically suburban,”36 and over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these ideals began to take physical shape particularly in the UK and the US. For instance, Ebenezer Howard, a British parliamentary reporter and amateur inventor who had been exposed to many social ills while on the beat, criticized the urban crowding, high rents, dearth of natural beauty, “excessive hours of toil,” poor air quality, and “fearful slums” of the modern city.37 He posed the Garden City as a solution to these problems—a hybrid space, limited in size and population, that would have “all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country.”38 This environment would blend the high wages, employment, prospects for advancement, places of amusement, and social opportunities of cities with the spacious

34 Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City type of development may benefit both owner and occupier (Westminister: P.S. King & Son, 1912), 1. 35 Richard Harris and P.J. Larkham, Changing Suburbs: Foundation, form, and function (London: E & FN Spon, 1999), 4. 36 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 12. 37 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd, 1902), 16. 38 Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 15.

36 homes and gardens, natural beauty, low rents, pure air, and “natural healthfulness” of the country.39 A good, clean, and healthy society would require space for physical and spiritual nourishment.

While beautiful in theory, the grim reality of these utopian visions is that they were built on deeply entrenched social divisions around class, race, and religion. The urban exodus was spearheaded by the bourgeoisie who desired physical separation from degraded physical environments, “immorality,” and the “riotousness” of the “lower orders.”40 The move outward and away from the urban core was as much about physical health as it was about producing a closed environment that could protect the nuclear family. Many of these families were deeply influenced by the late eighteenth century Evangelical movement which taught that “urban life was essentially corrupt; that women and children were higher beings who must be separated from urban corruption; and that family life and contact with nature were the only true pleasures permitted a Christian.”41

Evangelical Christians thus sought to transform urban corruption. Although that mission targeted and operated within the city, the suburb would remain a haven for Christian domesticity. Central to the Victorian suburb, then, was the idea that the family home could act as a kind of incorruptible private haven of “moral sanctity.”42 As much as anyone might

39 Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 16-17. Howard’s influential text was taken up by figures like engineer, architect and planner Raymond Unwin who designed a Garden City (Letchworth) in 1903, and Victorian socialist reformer Henrietta Barnett who envisioned a model suburb—the Hampstead Garden Suburb. 40 Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 239-40. 41 Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, 240. 42 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 13.

37 appreciate the ability to move away from conditions of unrest, decay, and squalor, the movement away from cities rather than the investment in them amounted to the movement of wealth out of the city. The movement away from the city also reinforced a logic of escapism and separation, which fueled social ignorance.

Creating Moral Order: Ineffective Police and the Social Purity Movement

An initial response to the new visibility of crime and vice came through police initiatives.

In 1844, the New York State legislature passed the Municipal Police Act, which authorized the creation of a police force that could address the increasing lawlessness of the

“immigrant-packed” New York City,43 but in these early days of the modern American police force, there was “little emphasis upon legal procedure.” 44 In 1894, concerns regarding police involvement in election irregularities prompted a New York State Senate probe into police corruption called the “Lexow Commission on Criminal and Political

Corruption in New York City.” One of the findings of this report was that rather than suppressing vice activities, officers allowed activities like gambling and prostitution to occur on the condition that officers receive a portion of the profits.45 In 1943, police reformer, theorist, and avid anti-corruption proponent Orlando W. Wilson published the influential text Police Administration, in which he discussed the difficulty of policing vice.

He writes, “Moral laws constituted a particularly difficult problem for the police because of the frequent resistance of the public and sometimes of officials to their enforcement.

Although violations of the laws regulating or prohibiting prostitution, gambling, and the

43 Robert H. Williams, Vice Squad (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973), 100. 44 Haller quoted in Carol A. Archbold, Policing: A Text/Reader (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 7. 45 Archbold, Policing, 8.

38 sale, possession or use of narcotics and liquor are referred to collectively as vices, the public often prefers to think that motivation or environment alter the seriousness of the offense; e.g., gambling for charity is fashionable.” 46 Wilson here suggests that the acceptance and adherence to moral laws by both citizens and the state is subject to the shifting modes of interpretation of an ill-defined “public.” Crimes of vice at any time are difficult to define and police as attitudes, cultural practices, and mores change. Because the state alone is unable to manage underground vice economies (never mind manage their own workforce), supplementary groups have arisen to curb what are seen as illicit and immoral activities.

In the 19th century, Christian Evangelists took it upon themselves to combat vice in the city. Urban environments were regarded as hot beds “for all the passions; ripening all the powers too early, and causing [the child’s] decay proportionally early.”47 Psychologist and educator Granville Stanley Hall explained this phenomenon of moral decay by claiming that urban life would present adolescents with sexual temptations that could lead to perversion, hoodlumism, and secret vice. He argued that the dangers for adolescents were grave, especially given the “temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli” of urban life.48 The availability and visibility of spaces of vice would unduly corrupt adolescents. Some believed that children could “catch” deviance and argued that girls raised by prostitutes would grow up defiant, flirt with boys, and stay out late at night

46 Williams, Vice Squad, 33. 47 Gregory; 1848, cited in R. Egan and Gail Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (New York, NY: Springer, 2010), 39. 48 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 39.

39 associating with girls of “questionable reputation.”49 In response to the proliferation of societal ills, new evangelical strands of Christianity arose to address these problems through a host of measures, including moral-purity crusades, the creation of the Young

Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) that sought to provide alternative leisure activities to unchristian ones, and “sex hygiene” campaigns that discouraged people from participating in prostitution by “detailing the ravages of venereal disease.”50 Sexuality in particular was a target of reform,51 evident with the spread of social purity activism during the 19th century, which held that the cornerstone of all moral action was virtuous sexual behavior.

Between 1860 and 1916, Social Purity Alliances arose in Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. Their early campaigns focused on the abolition of prostitution and pornography, higher ages of consent, and the education of children.52 Educating the young was their primary mode of activism, and much of their work focused on how to instruct youth in Christian theological tenets of sexual asceticism and the dangers of masturbation in order to steer people away from sexual deviance.53 For instance, in 1879, feminist and social reformer Josephine E. Butler was invited to give a talk to students on social purity at Cambridge on the questions “What can we do practically to promote Social Purity, and to combat the evil around us?”54 She began by first identifying the grounds of social

49 Egan and Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity, 39. 50 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 25. 51 See Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 for more on the proliferation of discourse on sexuality in modern societies since the seventeenth century. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, an introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). 52 Egan and Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity, 36. 53 Egan and Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity, 37. 54 Josephine Butler, “Social Purity,” (London: Morgan and Scott, 1879), http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view?docId=VAB7160&doc.view=print. Accessed April 18, 2017.

40 impurity, claiming “The root of the evil is the unequal standard in morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women.”55 The result of this moral imbalance, she suggests, is that “a large section of female society has to be told off— set aside, so to speak, to minister to the irregularities of the excusable man. That section is doomed to death, hurled to despair; while another section of womanhood is kept strictly and almost forcibly guarded in domestic purity.”56

The categories of pure and “doomed” women, Butler suggests, are maintained spatially: the domestic space is characterized here as refined, protected, and good, whereas the non- domestic space of economic sexual exchange is “evil,” degenerate, and contaminating.57

In this view, a man’s participation in degenerate space leads to his debasement, and he becomes a contaminant in the home as he “transmits a degraded nature to his children. The poison is in his soul. His children inherit the mixed tendencies of their parents—good and bad.”58 The solution, Butler suggests, requires that men and women “understand the truth concerning their relations to each other,” Christianize public opinion, and “demand of men precisely the same chastity [that is demanded] of women.”59 Along with educating the young in formal learning institutions, Evangelists also looked to the control of culture as a means of influencing the morality of the broader English and American publics.

55 Butler, “Social Purity,” 6. 56 Butler, “Social Purity,” 9. 57 Butler, “Social Purity,” 10-11. 58 Butler, “Social Purity,” 11. 59 Butler, “Social Purity,” 13.

41 Censorship in the Name of Childhood Innocence

Censorship was practiced before the 19th century on works dealing with heresy and sedition,60 and obscenity laws had already existed in the early 1800s. But a new effort to enforce the censorship of sexual and obscene materials developed in the mid- to late- 19th century. The breakdown of sexual propriety in urban spaces was echoed in literature and art that was sometimes considered dangerous for fostering libidinous thoughts that would

“lead to the ‘secret vice’ of masturbation.”61 The goal for religious reformers was to halt the spread of libidinous texts through a concerted effort to control the circulation of information. But why did this intervention occur?

As Philippe Ariès demonstrates in Centuries of Childhood, the notion that children need to be protected from obscene and immoral text and images is a fairly modern invention. Heins suggests that the “idea did not yet exist [in the 1500s] that references to sexual matters ... could soil childish innocence ... nobody thought that this innocence really existed.”62 It was only toward the end of the 16th century that certain models of pedagogy, for instance the censorial model of Jesuit education, began restricting cultural texts for the purpose of protecting childhood innocence.

By the 19th century, the belief that libidinous texts harm childhood innocence rose to a critical point in the U.S. The spreading railroad network and postal reforms of the 1850s and 1860s increased the speed and efficiency of the postal system, lending to the increased

60 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 23. 61 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 8. 62 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 18.

42 circulation of, ironically, both Christian texts as well as obscene literature.63 During the

Civil War especially, the movement of both kinds of texts became common as Christians delivered thousands of religious publications to soldiers, while others used the mails to send sexually explicit or “obscene” books, papers, pamphlets, poems, and pictures. 64

Knowing that the postal system was being used to send obscene texts to Union soldiers,

Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, a deeply religious man, ordered the removal of degrading books and papers from the mail.65 The justification behind this unlawful action had to with the protection of “servants, the mentally deficient, women, or minors” from accidentally acquiring these materials. 66 In 1864, a new Postmaster General, William

Dennison, submitted a request to Congress that they consider a law that would permit the removal of certain materials from the mails. In February 1865, a senator from Vermont and former Postmaster General, Jacob Collamer, supported this position before the Senate, and stated that “our mails are made the vehicle for the conveyance of great numbers and quantities of obscene books and pictures, which are sent to the Army, and sent here and there and everywhere, and that it is getting to be a very great evil.”67 Congress then enacted the first federal ban on obscenity authorizing the U.S. Customs Service to confiscate obscene or immoral pictures or prints.68 The 1865 law legitimized the seizures, stating that no “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of vulgar and indecent character shall be admitted into the mails.”69 Even with this law in

63 Wayne Fuller, Morality in the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 99. 64 Fuller, Morality in the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, 98-99. 65 Fuller, Morality in the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, 100. 66 Fuller, Morality in the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, 100-101. 67 United States Postal Service, The United States Postal Service: An American History 1775-2006 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Postal Service). 68 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 25 69 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 27-8.

43 place, obscene material continued to be mailed because Congress had not provided a specific means for enforcing the law.70

Supplementing the newly developed framework of obscenity law, in 1872, Christian activist Anthony Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

(NYSSV), an organization dedicated to supervising the morality of the public primarily through the censorship of lewd cultural texts. With his wealthy supporters in the YMCA, he sponsored passage of a federal anti-obscenity law that would forbid the use of the postal service for distributing obscene materials, prompting nearly half of the states afterward to pass similar laws. 71 Heins notes that these kinds of proscriptions against libidinous literature were relatively rare before 1800, but became pervasive by the end of the century.72 With the emergence of community and legal moves to censor objectionable texts, a particular logic of censorship was legitimated and has continued to influence debates about American culture ever since.

The Suppression of Vice Through the Category of Obscenity

The reason why this model of censoring obscene materials is so important in the context of the United States is because it comes into conflict with the First Amendment’s protections of free speech. The amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to

70 Fuller, Morality in the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, 101. 71 Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and family reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3. 72 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 8.

44 assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”73 The difficulty with this amendment is that provisions have since been made to allow for some degree of government interference—so long as the government can provide substantial justification for interference to the Supreme Court, Congress can prohibit the free exercise of speech and the press. Categories of unprotected and less protected speech exist that allow the government to interfere when the expression incites illegal actions or violence, or when speech is intended primarily for commerce, or when speech is obscene.74 Of concern for this dissertation in particular is the category of obscenity and the centrality of sexuality to its definition.

Obscenity as a formal category of unprotected speech has proven difficult to define, but

20th and 21st century understandings first began to be established in United States v. One

Book Called “Ulysses” in 1933. This case centered around James Joyce’s work which illustrates the lives of the Dublin working class using the structure of Homer’s Odyssey.

Of particular offence to some audiences was a scene (entitled “Nausicaa”) involving the depiction of masturbation. Prior to its publication as a book, the work was first serialized in an American journal called The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, but the US Post Office confiscated and burned the journal issues on the grounds that it would incite lustful thoughts in American readers. One of hundreds of letters received by Margaret Anderson, founder and editor of the journal, reads “I think this is the most damnable slush and filth

73 “The Bill of Rights: A Transcription,” National Archive. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill- of-rights-transcript. Accessed April 22, 2017. 74 “First Amendment: An Overview,” Legal Information Institute, http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/first_amendment. Accessed April 22, 2017.

45 that ever polluted paper in print.”75 Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of

Vice then initiated a prosecution of the publishers who were taken to court for violating

New York’s obscenity law.76 In 1920, “Nausicaa” was ruled obscene and the text was banned.

In 1933, the full-length version of Joyce’s work was brought again to court when the publishers at Random House challenged the legality of the ban by attempting to import the book Ulysses into the country, at which point U.S. Customs seized the book and a case was filed with the federal court. After a month of careful study, the presiding Judge John M.

Woolsey found that the book was not pornographic, nor should it be considered “obscene” in a legal sense because it was a work of literary merit:

Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions… He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing...

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words

75 Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 79-80. 76 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 41.

46 and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.

Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique seems to me to be little short of absurd.

Accordingly, I hold that "Ulysses" is a sincere and honest book, and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed of by its rationale.77

Woolsey’s elegant opinion produces a legal justification for Joyce to employ offensive words in the service of a “sincere and honest book.” Importantly, he ties the use of this language to subject position as he notes this language is native to “types of folk whose life… Joyce is seeking to describe.” In this judgment, Woolsey produces a legal right for the representation of life and voices as they exist in their bare and honest forms. While this judgment goes further than those previously to recognize the role that offensive speech might play in communication, Woolsey does not espouse an absolutist position on free speech. His note that the “theme of sex in the minds of his characters” occurs in the context

77 United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933).

47 of a Celtic locale during the spring suggests that, along with the “sincerity and honesty” of the book, the way a work contextualizes a questionable topic or language is integral to the text’s interpretation.

The legality of frank speech in this case is entirely dependent upon Woolsey’s judgment of the work as a contribution to culture. For Woolsey, an offensive expression may be tolerated if it has cultural value, and may be censored if it does not. Joyce’s success in producing a “somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women” becomes the crux of Woolsey’s obscenity test. For Woolsey, the use of offensive words in a text is not alone sufficient to determine if the text is obscene. Instead, the questionable utterance must be read or weighed in relation to the work as a whole.

While in this particular case, the opinion was beneficial for Joyce and the publishers at

Random House who were subsequently authorized to sell the work, Woolsey created a precedent for courts to determine obscenity based on literary or cultural merit. This judgment produced a procedure for defining obscenity which requires that courts make the final determinations regarding what can be classified as having social and cultural value and what can be classified as falling outside of those values. As this dissertation later demonstrates, this formula would prove to be untenable in subsequent decades.

Determinations of obscenity in broadcasting and film in the 20th century have similarly been shaped by vague notions of cultural value and social importance. The difference with the regulation of these media, however, stems from the technological, economic, and spatial ways they operate. The development of film and broadcasting long after the drafting

48 of the First Amendment and within the political-economic organization of mass consumption meant that film and broadcasting were not explicitly granted the same legal protections enjoyed by the written word. The logic of protectionism and the tactic of censorship that once took place through the postal system appeared again in the regulatory frameworks of radio, film and TV.

Indirect Censorship Through Self-Regulation

As early as 1908, cities began responding to concerns expressed by religious leaders that the new nickelodeons, with their depictions of Chinese opium dens, peeping toms, and scenes of women's skirts being blown by the wind, were breeding grounds for vice.78 In

1909, the Motion Picture Patents Company, an association of film producers, established a censorship board named the National Board of Censorship (later renamed the National

Board of Review), and several states followed by establishing their own censorship boards over the 1910s and 1920s.79 In 1915, a movie distributor took issue with local censors citing free speech violations, but the Supreme Court case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial

Commission of Ohio determined that movies were not covered by First Amendment protections:

The exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated

and conducted for profit like other spectacles, and not to be regarded, nor

intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the

78 John Belton, “The Production Code,” in Movies and Mass Culture, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 135. 79 Belton, “The Production Code,” 135-6.

49 press of the country, or as organs of public opinion. They are mere

representations of events, of ideas and sentiments published and known;

vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but, as we have said, capable of

evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and

manner of exhibition. It was this capability and power, and it may be in

experience of them, that induced the State of Ohio, in addition to prescribing

penalties for immoral exhibitions, as it does in its Criminal Code, to require

censorship before exhibition, as it does by the act under review.80

In the court’s 9-0 decision, films were construed to be commodities, and that the “mere representation of events” is categorically different from constitutionally protected ideas and sentiments. By describing movies in this way (as opposed to considering film a potential vehicle for expressing ideas that contribute to public discourse and knowledge), the court ruled that the First Amendment did not extend to film and that the expression of filmmakers was not subject to free speech protection.

At the same time that film was being classified as a commodity rather than a vehicle of public opinion, film was also being legally codified as a moral actor “capable of evil.” Film censors in Maryland, Virginia, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania took this moment to further implement measures to censor film content. The Pennsylvania Board of Censorship, for instance, forbade scenes featuring “pandering, prostitution, white slavery, strumpets and houses of ill fame, the seduction of women, habit forming drugs, nudity, knifings,

80 Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915). Later, in 1952, the courts would overturn this, ruling that movies were a form of expression protected by the Constitution (Belton, “The Production Code”, 136).

50 abortions, birth control, light treatment of the church, fornication and adultery, honeymoon scenes, drunkenness, gun play, sensual kissing and lovemaking, lewd dancing, men and women in bed together, venereal disease and lingerie displays.”81 Under these guidelines, then, offence to religion, sexual impropriety, and crimes against the state were prohibited.

Even with censorial regimes established via local and national censorship boards, the following decades would continue to see heightened efforts to further curb the moral content of film.

The Ten Commandments of Film

As the U.S. Congress began considering a censorship bill, the studios formed the Motion

Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), “a united front for the industry in public relations.” 82 The producers wanted a respectable figurehead to lead this organization and appointed former Postmaster General William H. Hays to oversee their organization, which became popularly referred to as the Hays Office. In 1927, Hays formed the Studio Relations Department (SRD), an industry-run censorship arm of the MPPDA,83 and worked with producers to draw up a regulatory framework called the “Don’ts and Be

Carefuls” that detailed unacceptable subjects for film.84 The document lists 36 topics, 11 of which are totally prohibited “irrespective of the manner in which they are treated,” and

25 topics that require “special care” in how they are treated.85 Like the guidelines of the

81 Films for the Humanities and Sciences (Firm), Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen: The Early Decades (New York, NY: Films Media Group, 2008). 82 Sarah Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids (London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 37. 83 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 37. 84 Ibid. 85 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, Appendix 3.

51 censorship boards, Hays’ concerns pivoted around the subjects of sexuality, crime, violence, and religion. The very first item on the list is a prohibition on “Pointed profanity” including the words “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ” and even misspellings of these words (e.g. “Gawd”). Other total prohibitions include licentious nudity, the illegal traffic of drugs, “miscegenation,” and sex perversion. The list of “be carefuls” are aimed at treatments of the flag, international relations, various forms of crime (arson, theft,

“dynamiting of trains”), sedition, and several relating to gender and sexual relations (“the sale of women”, rape, the institution of marriage, “Man and woman in bed together,”

“excessive or lustful kissing,” and the “deliberate seduction of girls”). These guidelines were not strictly adhered to by producers, resulting in the growing collaboration of religious leaders who sought to regulate the moral content of film.

Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, professor of dramatics, and editor of a Catholic youth publication, and Martin Quigley, a Catholic publisher of the Motion Picture Herald, were the two figureheads who took up the task of pressuring producers into exercising more discretion over film content. Quigley commissioned Lord to draft a Catholic-friendly film code of conduct, which they then brought to William Hays at the MPPDA. Hays enthusiastically supported their work: “this was the very thing I had been looking for.

Fundamentally, these were the Ten Commandments and the natural law which is written into the heart of every human being of sound reason and morals.”86 The Motion Picture

Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code, was thus implemented in 1930. In these early days, however, the absence of an enforcement mechanism meant that the Hays

86 William Hays quoted in Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen.

52 Code was ignored as often as it was observed.87 Furthermore, larger historical factors meant that censoring film was financially impractical for studios.

Vice, Crime, and Sexuality in Pre-Code Film

With the Wall Street Crash of 1929, studios and exhibitors fell under the weight of the economic downturn as weekly cinema attendance plummeted from over 100 million in the

1920s to under 40 million during the Depression.88 In an effort to survive, studios produced even more sensational and provocative films that would attract large crowds. Producer and director Cecil B. DeMille claimed “The producers are in a state of panic and chaos. They’ve rushed for the bed springs and lingerie the moment the phantom of empty seats rose to clutch them.”89

Along with the economic disaster, technological developments in cinematic sound meant that the new “talkies” added another obstacle for censors. During the silent film era, “only the eyes of children were offended,”90 while talkies “could deliver far more offensive language and innuendo per reel and could be both subtle and racy, using combinations of quick-fire dialogue, meaningful pauses, colourful language, slang, wisecracks, double entendres and sexual innuendo.”91 Language in film gave new life to the much older problem of how offensive language effects the moral well-being of society. 92

87 Belton, “The Production Code,” 136. 88 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 46. 89 Quoted in Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen. 90 Compton MacKenzie (1931) quoted in Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 47. 91 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 47. 92 As Jacob Smith’s work on phonograph cultures in the postwar period demonstrates, the linguistic content of indecent phonograph records would also become a concern for law enforcement officers and legislators throughout the 1940s and 1950s (see Spoken Word, 80-83). In the interest of space, I have chosen to exclude an extended discussion of LPs in this chapter to focus on mass media forms.

53 Objectionable language was especially apparent in the cycles of gangster, sex comedy, and horror films that became popular between 1930-1934 (the “pre-code” era). Studios drew on reports of organized crime and vice in Prohibition America to make gangster films based on the exploits of figures like Al Capone and John Dillinger,93 filling their narratives with

“slangy dialogue, dark humour, sexual impropriety, flashy cars and violent gun battles.”94

Similarly, films focusing on stories about sex were layered with immoral aural content.

Smith writes: “If silent sex pictures had been inflammatory, the talkie cycle was positively incendiary, as dialogue and sound effects were fully employed in a proliferation of films exploring themes of adultery, divorce, promiscuity and prostitution.”95 Film thus posed a moral problem for Christian ideals of marriage, sexuality, and gender both in the visual and aural depictions of vice, crime, and sexuality of pre-code film.

The Indirect Censorship of Radio

The radio industry was similarly pulled between competing demands to protect public morality and serve free expression. In the 1930s, however, this competition would be resolved by the actions of social actors who worked vigilantly to persuade networks to regulate radio content.

Like film, the early days of radio were replete with experimentation and a general enthusiasm for pushing the boundaries of expression. In Susan Douglas’ Listening In, she writes that the 1920s

93 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 48. 94 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 49. 95 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 52-53.

54 were the frothy ‘boom’ years of radio, when virtually nothing was fixed—

not the frequencies of stations… not the method of financial support, not

government regulations, and not the design or domestic location of the radio

itself. There were no networks—known in the late 1920s as the chains—and

there was very little advertising on the air. With a few exceptions, like the

Sunday broadcasts of church services, there was not a predictable program

schedule… Department stores, newspapers, the manufacturers of radio

equipment, colleges and universities, labor unions, socialists, and ham

operators all joined the rush to start stations.96

Ham operators, like Internet enthusiasts today, were at the helm of the technological and cultural innovations of radio as they, for instance, used radio to search frequencies to discover far off sounds that they otherwise couldn’t hear, or amused themselves with practical jokes,97 sending obscene or false messages to the American Navy.98 Hostility toward ham operators grew as the navy struggled to assert its dominance over the airwaves, and when (possibly spurious) narratives emerged that ham operators were responsible for circulating incorrect information about the Titanic disaster, Congress was pressed to create order over the airwaves. The Radio Act of 1912 mandated that all radio stations required a government-issued license to operate. 99 In these early days, the Act prohibited the

96 Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 56. 97 Not unlike trolls on the Internet today. 98 Douglas, Listening In, 58-59. 99 Douglas, Listening In, 60.

55 circulation of fraudulent information, but was not taken up with the moral content of broadcast radio.

Over the following decade, radio broadcasting for the purposes of amusement and edification became increasingly popular which led to the crowding of the airwaves and the diminished clarity of stations. Congress soon passed the Radio Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), a body responsible for bringing order to the airwaves by limiting the number of stations in existence and allocating licenses to parties. Importantly, the FRC’s assignment of frequencies was determined by ideas about who could best serve the “public interest, convenience or necessity.” 100 It was not inevitable that private commercial groups would be at the helm of running radio in the public’s interest—several non-commercial groups (educational, interest groups, religious, political, etc.) sought to provide programming in the public’s interest early on.101 However, operating by the logic that business interests could best serve the public since they could grant airtime to any party willing to pay (as opposed to, say a political, religious, or interest group that would readily bar opposing opinions), the FRC allocated the best frequencies at the time to corporate interests, resulting in the corporate-sponsored network system that came to define the character of radio in the 1930s and 40s.102

100 Robert McChesney, “The Battle for the U.S. Airwaves, 1928-1935,” Journal of Communication 40, no.4 (1990): 29. 101 McChesney, “The Battle for the U.S. Airwaves, 1928-1935.” 102 Lori Roessner and Matthew Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat: Public Reaction in the Press to Mae West’s Adam and Eve Skit,” American Journalism 30, no. 4 (2013): 530.

56 While the Radio Act was primarily aimed at facilitating a kind of technical order, there were deep implications for content as well. Unlike the film industry whose discursive parameters were set by the notion that a film was a commodity rather than a public good, the spectrum was considered a public good: radio early on was likened to the press and seen as an important instrument for public discourse. The idea that radio could foster free speech is clear in Section 29 of the Radio Act of 1927 which states, “Nothing in this Act shall be understood or construed to give the licensing authority the power of censorship over the radio communications or signals transmitted by any radio station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the licensing authority which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communications. No person within the jurisdiction of the United States shall utter any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communications.”103 On the one hand, the Act sought to guarantee free speech on the radio. On the other, Section 29 created a grey zone which allowed for the control of certain kinds of content (whatever was deemed “obscene, indecent or profane”).

A few years later, this provision was carried forward in Section 326 of the Communications

Act of 1934, which soon replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal

Communications Commission (FCC), and which similarly created a limit to free speech on the radio.104

The rationale behind this provision had to do with the idea that because radio entered the home and was listened to by impressionable young children, this kind of speech was

103 “United States Radio Act of 1927,” Public Law 632, 69th Congress, February 23, 1927. http://earlyradiohistory.us/1927act.htm. Accessed April 22, 2017. 104 Roy Moore and Michael Murray, Media Law and Ethics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 349.

57 unacceptable.105 As Adam Samaha notes, these provisions built in a degree of flexibility in radio regulation, allowing the FRC (and later FCC) a degree of power to cleanse the airwaves of whatever they determined could fall into the category of “obscene, indecent, or profane language.”106 Christopher Sterling suggests that while the Radio Act (and its successors) formally prohibited the government’s censorship of radio programming, the

FRC and then the FCC’s power to grant and renew radio licenses gave these bodies power to determine which stations were acting in the public’s interest, thus granting these bodies an indirect mode of influencing station programming choices. 107 This provision empowered the FCC to regulate the unpredictable and increasingly problematic content flowing over the airwaves and into American homes.

As radio broadcasting developed in the 1920s, one of its great affordances was that it could bring live, ephemeral events to a broad and physically disparate audience. Sports and music events, speeches, educational topics, religious offerings—much of which catered to the pastimes and activities of the middle class—were all on offer over the new medium.108 One of the early reasons for networking radio stations (NBC and CBS, which were founded in

1926 and 1927, respectively), was to link radio stations using telephone lines so they could broadcast the same show at the same time, particularly sporting events or other fleeting events that took place in fixed locations.109

105 Christopher Sterling, The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 137. 106 Adam Samaha, "The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and Its Second Life)," University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper, No. 314 (2010), 3. 107 Sterling, The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio, 137. 108 Douglas, Listening In, 64. 109 Douglas, Listening In, 63.

58 Radio brought the world to the home, and over time it became a welcomed alternative to, as Douglas puts it, the “Hurly-burly public entertainments—the theater, vaudeville, amusement parks, baseball, world’s fairs, the circus—[that] had exploded onto the national scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often bringing people of differing classes, ethnic groups, and neighborhoods into common public settings.”110 While there was pleasure in getting lost in a crowd, the crowding and shoving, unwanted attention, noise, and foul smells of small theatres also “undercut such public pleasures” and increased the desirability of radio which allowed people to hear voices and music from afar, without the inconvenience and minor irritations of public spaces.111

In transmitting content throughout American homes, radio was seen as a medium that could

“unite a far-flung and disparate nation,” creating understanding among citizens unified by the thoughts, ideals and purpose that was transmitted over the air.112 Employing the work of Benedict Anderson, radio historians113 show how radio, like newspapers, produced a sense of nationhood – a national “imagined community” as listeners from across the nation were simultaneously “transported” to events across the country. And, as Douglas observes, advertisers and networks that sought to maximize profits had an interest in promoting radio as a “nation-building technology.”114 The problem with this community, Hilmes suggests, was that “The erasure of distance and separation held a threat as well as a promise. In a society built on structured segmentation and social division as much as on its rhetoric of

110 Douglas, Listening In, 65. 111 Ibid. 112 Michele Hilmes, Radio voices: American broadcasting, 1922-1952 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 13. 113 Michele Hilmes’ Radio Voices and Susan Douglas’ Listening In. 114 Douglas, Listening In, 24.

59 democratic equality, connectedness posed a danger to the preservation of those physical and geographic divisions supporting social distinctions, such as the separation of racial and ethnic neighborhoods, preferred leisure and cultural sites for different classes and social groups, the insulation of traditional rural society from ‘corrupting’ city influences, and the home as private, feminine domain distinct from the masculinized public sphere.”115 Radio broadcasts were a welcomed innovation because of the way they could carry the dynamic world into the home, and radio was also treated as a problem for the very same reason.

Mitigating Musical Values

The history of jazz shows the problems of trying to, on the one hand, use radio to mediate the live and, on the other, use radio to uphold Victorian morality and cultural life. Susan

Douglas notes that early radio broadcasters privileged musical genres that reflected the cultural values of an educated bourgeoisie, “what one program director called ‘potted palm music,’ the sort of straight laced, high-culture recital music played in conservatories or hotel lounges.”116 She further explains that in the 1920s, “stations were notoriously averse to criticism, so they played it safe most of the time. In the decade forever labeled the Jazz

Age, classical music and opera were brought to more listeners, on a regular basis, than ever before. So were hymns, waltzes, male quartets, brass bands, light opera, hillbilly music, and song and patter groups.”117 The airing of these genres “reflected many stations’ own sense of their mission, that radio be culturally uplifting and proper.”118 Jazz, however, was becoming more popular in live venues, particularly with the rising popularity of black jazz

115 Hilmes, Radio Voices, 15. 116 Douglas, Listening In, 86. 117 Douglas, Listening In, 85. 118 Douglas, Listening In, 86.

60 musicians like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Where would this genre fit in radio culture? Jazz posed a moral dilemma for the world of bourgeois radio.119

For many, listening to traditional and classical music on the radio became repetitive and boring, especially in light of the fact that jazz and blues were becoming both popular and profitable in black communities and increasingly of interest to white youth.120 However, critics were offended by the genres’ articulations of sexuality (particularly of African

Americans) in the lyrics, dance, and performance spaces associated with jazz and blues.121

Jazz was seen by some as vile, uncivil, “unhealthy,” “immoral,” and an “abomination” that had to be “absolutely eliminated.” 122 However, the very fact that jazz represented

“immorality” infused it with cultural value for those, particularly white youth, who wanted to break with the tradition of staid Victorian morality. Douglas writes, “Radio was the agent through which this African American music, for the first time on a mass scale, helped define the rebellion of young whites… Not only did jazz provide white youth with a vocabulary for rebellion, it gave them an opportunity to engage with black culture in a way that was difficult amidst systemic segregation. Jazz over the radio acted as a kind of

‘auditory turnstile’ between cultures.”123 Jazz and blues provided “both a scepticism, a sexual vitality, and a revolt against repression and propriety missing from, say, ‘Sweet

119 Douglas writes, “Would radio be an agent of respectability or of impudence? Would it ‘elevate’ people’s tastes by showcasing opera, classical music, and music appreciation shows, or would it ‘degrade’ public taste by pandering to the popular. These were the questions posed by the intelligentsia, who wanted radio to educate and uplift ‘the masses.’ But those on the other side, especially many young people, wanted radio to repudiate such cultural hypocrisy and to be the agent of rebellion, ‘truth,’ and a grassroots cultural authenticity. They wanted jazz. Debates quite familiar to us today, about whether popular music corrupts American values, began in earnest in the 1920s. Music became politicized, reflecting racial and class tensions…” Douglas, Listening In, 88. 120 Douglas, Listening In, 87-91. 121 Douglas, Listening In, 91. 122 Ibid. 123 Douglas, Listening In, 96-98.

61 Adeline.’ For many jazz was protest music.”124 The airing of “race records”, as they were known, made radio more vital, socially relevant, and economically profitable.

Around the same time that film censorship boards and the Hays administration were trying to tame the sexual content of the film industry, measures were being taken to tame lewd content in live performance spaces and the radio. Douglas explains,

By the late 1920s various groups pushed for censorship of “lewd, lascivious,

salacious, or suggestive” titles and lyrics, and the National Association of

Orchestra Directors appointed a “czar” to police hotels and nightclubs for

the “kind of jazz that tends to create indecent dancing.” The National

Association of Music Merchants condemned the proliferation of “smut

words” in jazz and demanded that Congress act to permit the censorship of

music. Congress didn’t oblige, but section 26 of the 1927 Radio Act

provided that “no person within the jurisdiction of the United States shall

utter any obscene, indecent or profane language by means of radio

communication,” a provision adopted by the FCC in 1934. By the early

1930s the networks had imposed internal censorship, and within ten years

NBC had blacklisted 290 songs.

The discourse surrounding jazz was, of course, a discourse about race, about

fears of miscegenation, pollution, and contamination. Even articles praising

jazz referred constantly to “the jungle,” “savages,” and “primitivism,”

124 Douglas, Listening In, 91.

62 noting how staid, white, European culture was being forced to respond to

more exotic, feral influences.125

In spite of the fact that the Radio Act of 1927 and later Communications Act expressly prohibited state censorship of radio, the obscene, indecent, and profane language provisions helped support censorial actions, which were intimately tied to the politics of subjectivity. Furthermore, over the 1930s, jazz would be adapted and tamed for radio by white bands. Douglas notes that “Once the networks and advertisers began to control programming in the early 1930s, segregation on the air became more pervasive and rigid.”126 Black musicians and less standardized music did air, particularly on unsponsored shows and during late night remote broadcasts from clubs and ballrooms,127 but the quality of rebellion associated with jazz in the 1920s was tamed in the 1930s during network broadcasts. The early associations of African Americans with jazz made some members of the American public interpret the genre as vile, uncivil and immoral, but the adaptation of jazz by white bands enabled its revaluation and massification. The taming of content via the FRC/FCC’s rule on obscene, indecent, and profane language, and through the cleaning up of live performance by the National Association of Orchestra Directors’ nightclub

“czar,” was supplemented further by an industry-wide consensus on self-regulation by radio stations and networks themselves.

Around the time the state both asserted free speech rights and language limitations for radio in the Communications Act, radio networks were similarly ambivalent about what was

125 Douglas, Listening In, 91-2. 126 Douglas, Listening In, 94. 127 Douglas, Listening In, 95.

63 permissible on the radio. This is clear in NBC’s Broadcasting (1935)—the section on

NBC’s Free Speech Policy states, “From its beginning the National Broadcasting Company has striven to give free expression to the thought of the country and to the various civic organizations which develop and formulate that thought… To-day the National

Broadcasting Company is able to prove by abundant testimony that its administration of its facilities is steadily conducted ‘with the maximum of service and without unfair discrimination.’”128 Here we see NBC echo the Communications Act’s desire for free speech over the airwaves. This policy, however, contradicted the reality of the network’s control over content. Rules around obscenity, indecency, and profanity, and the networks’ reliance on advertisers and sponsors, meant that firm limits for broadcast speech were established and enforced.

Like the film companies, in an effort to stave off government regulation, broadcasters formed an industry lobby group called the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which worked with Congress and the FCC to determine how to best regulate the radio industry. Of particular concern were problems stemming from the stipulation that radio should not censor free speech, but that the industry still had to contend with: 1) limited radio frequencies which required decisions about which broadcasters to grant licenses to

(or, privilege over others), and; 2) the fact that radio was broadcast into the home at all hours of day and thus accessible to impressionable young children. 129 The NAB determined that a code was needed that would “enunciate acceptable program standards

128 National Broadcasting Company, Broadcasting (New York, NY: National Broadcasting Company, Inc., 1935), 42. 129 Neville Miller, “Radio’s Code of Self-Regulation”, The Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1939): 685.

64 for commercial broadcasting stations.” 130 NAB president wrote, “The code does not propose to cover all the problems which radio faces. In no sense of the word does it attempt to set a ceiling for the broadcasters, but rather a floor below which we hope no station will go.”131 In spite of the expressed desire not to “set a ceiling for the broadcasters,” the effect of the code was a push toward stations’ self-censorship around many themes.

Samaha suggests the increasingly dominant large-scale radio operations “were influenced by mainstream social norms and market discipline—and possibly a desire to avoid the kind of government censorship applicable to motion pictures at the time… self-regulation constrained most broadcast content for generations. Networks wanted affiliate stations to abide by program standards established over the years by the National Association of

Broadcasters (NAB), and these standards largely kept stations clear of FCC and congressional ire.”132 One of the most important mechanisms of self-censorship were the in-house departments (rather than an external body, like the MPPDA for film) that reviewed content for acceptability. In 1934, NBC established a Department of Continuity

Acceptance with the aim of ensuring that their programs remained in “good taste.” Headed by director Janet MacRorie, the department’s staff scrutinized scripts and ad-agency copy to ensure their station was free of “obscene or off-colored songs or jokes [and] language of doubtful propriety.”133 This mission to scrutinize material for obscene language may have been in line with FCC regulations, however what constituted “propriety” was much more

130 Miller, “Radio’s Code of Self-Regulation,” 686. 131 Ibid. 132 Samaha, "The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and Its Second Life)," 4. 133 Robert Pondillo, America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 4.

65 vague. The politics of morality exploded in these offices as the network censors (as they came to be known) elaborated upon notions of good taste and gave previously non-existent definition to what subjects could be considered obscene, off-colored or against propriety.

Echoing what happened in the film industry, by 1939, many subjects had been identified as unsuitable for radio, including treatments of suicide, homicide, horror, the morbid or hysterical, many kinds of medical procedures or treatments, “effeminate gentlemen or sex- perverted characters,” and “Sexual radio content was almost nonexistent, and even atomized words were scrutinized for double entendre.”134

While it would be a discredit to the cultural and aesthetic innovations of the 1930s to broadly characterize golden age radio as entirely homogenous and formulaic, the network’s aversion to risk excised previously aired political, ideological, and aesthetic content from many radio stations. The early broadcasting networks, NBC and CBS, in an effort to serve the public’s interest and avoid further governmental interference, had a stake in presenting radio material that would largely not be construed as offensive or objectionable, and that would appeal to as large an audience as possible. Christopher Sterling explains, “Private censorship refers to the various program (or advertising) prohibitions undertaken by radio stations and networks. The most commonly restricted subjects during radio’s golden age were labor unrest, socialist politics, pacifism, political ‘radicalism,’ birth control advocacy, criticism of advertising, anti-Prohibition speeches, unorthodox medical practices, unorthodox religious opinions, excessive excitement in children’s shows, ‘offensive’ words, and suggestive situations. Private censorship often stemmed from stations’

134 Pondillo, America's First Network TV Censor, 4.

66 unwillingness to offend advertisers or listeners (based upon feedback or the assumed preferences of their audience).” 135 Michele Hilmes writes that national broadcasting

“would be dominated from the beginning by large commercial corporations, and decisions made on the basis of their corporate interests would influence the scope of radio’s free speech.”136 In spite of the fact that the FCC had determined that radio should not limit free speech, by the 1930s radio broadcasts were regularly censored in the name of good taste and for the public’s interest.

This chapter has sought to demonstrate how the early discursive, representational, and aesthetic promise of American film and radio was quelled over the 1920s and 30s as leaders of industry worked to meet the moral demands of religious and community groups who sought to purify mass media of “offensive” content. Social and religious reformers intent on remedying the social and moral ills of urban life pushed for the regulation of media in the 1920s and 30s as these industries increasingly came to be seen as transmitters of immorality and vice. The legal definitions of “obscenity” and “indecency” shifted and grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the terms were used with increasing frequency as instruments of censorship over mail, literature, film, and broadcasting. In an attempt to cater to community demands, radio broadcasters and film producers in the mid-1930s and through the 1940s incorporated prohibitions on obscenity, indecency, and blasphemy into their regulatory codes, which were enforced by industry-wide or in-house regulatory

135 Sterling, The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio, 137. 136 Michele Hilmes, “NBC and the Network Idea: Defining the ‘American System,’” in NBC: America’s Network, eds. Michele Hilmes and Michael Lowell Henry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 16. Also see her discussion on the role of sponsors and advertisers in shaping the character of content as networks became time brokers (18-20).

67 bodies. Restrictions on certain kinds of language and certain kinds of themes—for instance, words like “alley cat,” discussion on birth control, and criticisms of religion—came to be the norm in mass media. What history has shown, however, are that these discursive and representational prohibitions were largely ineffective over time.

Rather than eviscerate “immoral” and “offensive” ideas from the public domain, mass media prohibitions moved the immoral and offensive to the domains of live performance and niche media. Suppressed forms of expression, thought, and representation remained very much alive in Americans’ homes, social interactions, semi-public spaces, and in entertainment cultures. The limited ability of moral reformers to rid American culture entirely of “immoral and irreligious” content is especially clear in the career of Mae West, whose style of comedy and performances of gender and sexuality posed a threat to religious groups and moral reformers. Although she was effectively banned from mass media by the late 1930s, her thriving career in the live performance circuit illustrates the limits of moral censorship and culture. Additionally, the story of her movement from mass media to niche live performance provides context for understanding the development of “sicknik” comedy that would emerge in America’s jazz clubs and coffee houses of the 1950s.

68 Chapter Two: The Threat of Comedy and the Suppression of Mae West

Building on the previous chapter’s genealogy of morality in mass media, this chapter examines the specific struggles of the controversial performer Mae West to illustrate how morality was contested through media sites and to show the difficulties of censoring such a popular figure entirely. Of significance to this discussion is attention to how comedy works to invert expectations—comedy is used to disrupt, critique, or undermine everyday uses of language, everyday forms of logic, and everyday or standardized ways of being.

The subversive potential of comedy poses a problem for reverence, for maintaining and upholding order or respecting traditional systems of thought.

The trouble with Mae West’s comedy was not only that it subverted ideals around gender, race, sexuality, and vice, but that it also presented young women with an alternative model of womanhood that was not based in Victorian social purity, but rather celebrated qualities traditionally associated with condemned or “fallen” women. Furthermore, Mae West was clever—she found ways to get around regulatory codes to infuse her performances with her intended meanings without explicitly committing discursive offenses. Although West managed to work around film censors for years, her brazen displays of pro-sex, pro-vice femininity eventually pushed religious groups over the edge. Although community groups had sought to have West’s films banned for years, it was her appearance on a radio program—the transmission of her brand of “immorality” into the sanctity of the home— that galvanized a significantly large segment of the public to work against her.

Just as early broadcast music was, early on, used in the service of producing or enforcing certain ideas of propriety, so too was broadcast language early on seen to be an instrument

69 of edification and enlightenment. As a medium that was expected to help educate and edify the nation, radio was seen as a mode of promoting proper speech, which, Douglas observes, contributed to Americans becoming “pronunciation conscious” in the time—radio announcers, newscasters, dramatic actors and actresses all became “custodians of ‘official’

English in America.”137 With the hold that proper speech had over Americans, it comes as no surprise that language-based humor (its misuse, distortion, or total debasement) became so popular. Appropriately, early radio comedians reveled in what Douglas calls “linguistic slapstick,” which itself had largely incubated in the live and rowdy space of vaudeville theaters.

Radio comedy’s reliance on linguistic slapstick was an auditory

exaggeration of what had gone on in vaudeville for years. Vaudeville had

popularized a new kind of humor, a humor like gunfire, more brash, defiant,

and aggressive, more reliant on jokes and punch lines than on tall tales or

monologues. It threw verbal pies in the face of Victorian gentility: it

showcased hostility, not politeness; misunderstandings, not conversations;

and it acknowledged that disorder, not order, governed everyday life. Its

argot was slang, dialect, malapropisms. The wisecracks often took deadly

aim at the gap between the sunny myth of success and the more overcast,

unyielding realities of urban and industrial life. This was the humor of

resentment and retaliation and, with the enormous influence of Jewish

comics and minstrelsy, was the humor of the underdog trapped by verbal

137 Douglas, Listening In, 102-3.

70 misunderstandings and barricades, tripped up by verbal codes he could

never completely crack. Some of its roots could be traced to minstrelsy, in

which actors in blackface mangled ‘proper’ English, and to burlesque in the

late 1860s and 1870s, in which women, often dressed as men, used puns to

lampoon much that bourgeois culture found sacred.

Although there was plenty of slapstick for the eyes—bizarre costumes,

exaggerated facial expressions, and pratfalls—it was wordplay that was

central to vaudeville humor…138

Like the perception of the cultural break from Victorian gentility that had arisen in relation to black jazz, a perception of the comedic resistance to Victorian gentility was in part made possible by Jewish humor. Pondillo further explains the significance of Jewish comics on the radio:

During the 1932 season, a host of new radio personalities burst upon the

scene, among them Benny, Fred Allen, George Jessel, Burns and Allen, and

Ed Wyn. Vaudevillians all, they ‘participated in the ‘new humor’ brought

by immigrants to the vaudeville stage.’ Theatrical historian Albert F.

McLean Jr. characterizes vaudeville humor as ‘more excited, more

aggressive, and less sympathetic than that to which the middle classes of the

nineteenth century had been accustomed.’ The vaudeville stage comics,

138 Douglas, Listening In, 106.

71 McLean reveals, would employ varying levels of vulgarity (also known as

‘jasbo,’ ‘hokum,’ ‘gravy’) to milk a joke for laughs—although, he notes,

early-twentieth-century vaudeville was consciously targeting a middle-class

family audience and moving away from the notion of hard burlesque.

Vaudeville management, therefore, constantly censored comics for using

indelicate language and joking about taboo subjects.139

The changing character of comedy, like the changing character of music with jazz, was significantly shaped by live performance spaces and minority groups. And like jazz, vaudevillian humor was tempered the closer it moved toward the nuclear family and as it was amplified for a mass audience in America.140 Just as the aesthetic and moral qualities associated with jazz had an important relationship to the African American communities that jazz came out of, the “new” more excited, aggressive, and indelicate humor developing in radio was a direct result of the contributions of Jewish performers moving away from the intimate and indelicate vaudeville stage to mass broadcasting.

While vaudeville performers may have avoided more explicitly offensive language and topics, they broke the comedic and linguistic molds as their comedy, Douglas writes,

“elevated the wisecrack, the witty comeback, the put-down to an art… Now, commentators noted, the air was filled with puns, malapropisms, insults, quips, and non sequiturs.

139 Pondillo, America’s First Network TV Censor, 5. 140 This happened both as vaudeville actors made their way to radio, but also earlier on in live performance spaces. In the early vaudeville of the 1850s and 60s, obscene comedy was often performed to a largely male audience. However when it became clear that profits could be made by catering to families in the 1880s, many proprietors began cleaning up the acts. “About Vaudeville,” American Masters, PBS (1999). http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/vaudeville-about-vaudeville/721/. Accessed April 22, 2017.

72 Obviously, in this nonvisual medium, words, tone of voice, and sound effects carried all the freight.”141 The salty impropriety of vaudeville, then, did not disappear entirely with the dissolution of the live stage. Instead, explicit impropriety was transformed in the obfuscation of linguistic play.

Despite concerted efforts to ensure the cleanliness of radio broadcasts, Murray writes, that

“After several years of relative tranquility regarding this subject, a crescendo of objections emerged in 1937. Daytime serials, variety comedy acts, and children’s programs were singled out for critique.”142 Audience objections to the moral content of radio were coming to a head at the same time that frustration about the moral content of film had come to a peak. Examining the mass mediation of Mae West illustrates the intersection of efforts made by social and religious groups intent on cleaning up mass culture once and for all.

Mae West, the Hays Code, and the Legion of Decency

Mae West, originally Mary Jane West, was born in Brooklyn on August 17, 1893 to working-class immigrants—her father John West was a magnetic, street-savvy Irish-

American prizefighter “who hung out with punks, bodybuilders, two-bit gamblers, and racetrack touts,” and her mother Matilda Delker Doelger West was a Bavarian corset- maker who possessed a more European sexual moral code than American puritans (which she eventually passed down to Mae), and who devoted much of her energies to advancing her daughter’s career.143 At 7 years old, West began appearing in amateur shows and

141 Douglas, Listening In, 104. 142 Matthew Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” Colby Quarterly 36, no. 4 (December 2000), 140-1. 143 Emily Wortis Leider, Becoming Mae West (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 7-8.

73 gained the stage name “Baby Mae” in 1907. At 14 years old, she made her professional debut in a Hal Clarendon production – a burlesque show that played in NYC cheap theaters and “attracted large working-class audiences with affordable prices and vulgar plots…

Soon after West began her career on the vaudeville circuit, the NYSSV [New York Society for the Suppression of Vice] launched a crusade to shut down burlesque theaters and film houses that showed lewd material and promoted white slavery [the forced prostitution of white women].”144

From an early age, then, West was caught in the moral game of culture. Influenced by a wild vaudeville star nicknamed the “I Don’t Care Girl,” Eva Tanguay, West “soon gained a reputation for her willingness to perform sexually provocative ‘cooch’ dances and belt out suggestive lyrics that included clever double entendres.”145 West began writing plays that grappled with the subject of sexuality, first the unproduced plays The Ruby Ring and

The Hussy, and then her 1924 play about a gold-hearted prostitute called The Albatross

(later renamed Sex and which ran for several months at Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theater beginning in April 26, 1926).146 The taboo-breaking play garnered mixed reactions, as it prompted some audience members to laugh, others to leave, but most, as the Herald

Tribune noted, to “[remain] in a state of stunned silence, wondering, no doubt, what was to be the next exhibition of complete frankness.”147

144 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 525. 145 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 526. 146 Ibid. 147 Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono. 1991. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 20.

74 The production did not go unnoticed by NYSSV leader John S. Sumner who filed a complaint about the “filthy and obscene” production with the New York City police. In spite of growing objections to the play, it ran for 37 performances before acting mayor

Joseph V. McKee halted productions and West was fined $500 and sentenced to ten days in jail charged with “obscenity and corrupting the morals of the youth.”148 West’s next play, The Drag, centered around homosexual love affairs in New York, and was stopped by the NYSSV before it was even staged. These obstacles did not stop her. She produced two more plays in the 1920s—The Wicked Age which closed after a 3-week run in 1927, and then the smash hit Diamond Lil, 149 a play based in the 1890s in NYC’s Bowery and set in a saloon called Suicide Hall, run by Tammanyite Gus Jordon who runs a white slavery ring.150

West’s innovative and daring theatrical productions courted controversy with local moral guardians at the same time that the film industry struggled to rein in the moral content of films. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, many Americans became increasingly concerned with both the real life and onscreen violence, crime, and sexual scandal infiltrating the film industry. Between 1921 and 1922, comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was embroiled in highly publicized trials for the rape and manslaughter of an actress named Virginia Rappe; in 1922, a director and actor named William Desmond Taylor was found mysteriously murdered; and in 1923, a silent film actor named Wallace Reid (referred to as the “screen’s most perfect lover”) died from a drug addiction that he’d developed working on a film.151

148 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 527. 149 Ibid. 150 Jill Watts, Mae West: An icon in black and white (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100. 151 Belton, “The Production Code,” 136.

75 Celebrity scandals were covered regularly in the press lending to public outrage at

Hollywood and its degradation of morality. Mae West’s move from the New York stage to

Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures in 1932, then, only exacerbated ongoing problems for moral guardians in Hollywood, particularly William Hays.

In Hollywood, West starred in several popular sex comedies that were considered deeply offensive for their representations of sex, gender, crime, and vice. West’s first role was a small part in Paramount’s 1932 film Night After Night. Perhaps because of the notoriety she gained in the live performance circuit, West was a great box-office draw so after her

1932 success in Night After Night, the studio allowed her to choose her next role.

Paramount had purchased the rights to her hit Broadway play Diamond Lil, but the Hays

Office had placed it on a list of prohibited films—Hays himself reiterated time and again that Diamond Lil would not be produced.152 Instead of abandoning the project entirely,

Paramount “disguise[d] and launder[ed] it,” altering the script in minor ways, and censoring the more blatantly objectionable material, like references to drugs, prostitution, references to Sunday school and psalm singing, and even lines like “I always knew you could be had.”153 When the Hays Office caught on to Paramount’s ploy, they conceded to its release after six weeks of negotiations from October 18 until December 2, 1932. The

MPPDA allowed Paramount to release the film under the new name She Done Him Wrong, and with further provisions that they remove sexually suggestive lines and all references to white slavery.154

152 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 246-7. 153 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 247. 154 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 528-9.

76 The film still managed to exhibit undercurrents of the profane as Lil states she has “no conscience”155 and has “got no soul”156 and as West’s character tries to seduce a young

Catholic missionary named Captain Cummings, played by Cary Grant, using her infamous line “Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?” The film was important for West’s career, Watts notes, as it “perfected both the Westian character and her performance style.

Her years in melodrama, burlesque, vaudeville, and musical comedy had converged with her realization that she could ‘create an illusion’ and ‘say almost anything, do almost anything on stage if I smiled and was properly ironic in delivering my dialogue.’ Mae had mastered the art of signification: Her basic messages remained unchanged, but she now had refined her ability to obscure them.”157 Rather than limiting West, Watts suggests,

Hays’ “efforts to mediate Mae West drove her to rely more heavily on signification. The result was a more nuanced but, in some ways, more powerful rebellion.”158The film cost

Paramount less than a quarter million dollars, but was a hit, grossing $2.2 million and attracting an estimated 60,000 American viewers a week.159 Coming just a few years after the Wall Street Crash and declining box office revenues, the film was thought to save

Paramount from financial ruin. Her next film I’m No Angel (1933) also passed through the

Hays Office with only minor revisions (the main ones centering around the censorship of illicit song lyrics)160. Her success from the period was clear in the fact that her two films,

She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel had sold approximately 46 million tickets.161

155 Watts, Mae West, 104. 156 Watts, Mae West, 157. 157 Watts, Mae West, 104. 158 Watts, Mae West, 156. 159 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 528. 160 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 282. 161 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 285.

77 Although wildly popular, West’s contributions to film only aggravated moral guardians, particularly the Catholic church, even more. Hays Code author Father Lord said “She Done

Him Wrong is the filthy Diamond Lil slipping by under a new name. The motion picture industry will be very unwise to incur the militant enmity of the Catholic hierarchy.”162 In spite of this disapproval, the studios continued to pepper their films with sexual content.

One Variety article estimated that between 1932-3 “over 80 per cent of the world’s chief picture output was... flavored with the bedroom essence.” 163 Like the earlier social reformers who believed youth would “catch” deviance from urban environments, 20th century reformers feared that the sex comedy cycle of films would “prematurely inflame the unhealthy passions of boys... [as well as] corrupt innocent girls and lead them into inappropriate sexual behavior.”164 William Hays himself circulated a memo to the MPPDA claiming Mae West’s negative effect on girls: “The very man who will guffaw at Mae

West’s performance as a reminder of the ribald days of his past will resent her effect upon the young, when his daughter imitates the Mae West wiggle before her boyfriends and mouths ‘come up and see me sometime.’”165 Hays’ appeals to the decency of families and to the purity of young girls could not initially convince the studios to change their ways, but an impending economic threat did.

By 1932, approximately 40 religious and educational groups had called for censorship,166 and in 1934, Catholic Bishops in the United States organized the Legion of Decency, a

162 Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen. 163 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 54. 164 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 55. 165 Ibid. 166 Steven Mintz, Randy Roberts, and David Welky, Hollywood’s America: Understanding History Through Film (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Songs, 2016), 120.

78 group dedicated to boycotting offensive films and the cinemas that screened them.167 The

Legion claimed 2,000,000 members, largely from the Catholic community but substantial numbers of Protestants and Jews joined as well.168 Archbishop McNicholas declared, “The sole purpose of the Legion is to arouse millions of Americans to a consciousness of the dangers of salacious and immoral pictures and to take action against them.” 169 Like

Josephine Butler’s much earlier invocation to Columbia students to affect change by rousing public opinion, the Legion wanted a change of consciousness in America. Their difference would be in that the Legion threatened the film industry with a nationwide boycott of films that “offend decency and the principles of Christian morality”170 if the code was not strictly enforced.171

To combat the vile unwholesomeness of gangster films and sex comedies, members were asked to sign a pledge swearing to “do all that I can to arouse public opinion against the portrayal of vice as a normal condition of affairs and against depicting criminals of any class as heroes and heroines, presenting their filthy philosophy of life as something acceptable to decent men and women.”172 The tenacity and economic power of religious individuals would work together to ensure the efficacy of the Legion’s program. It was the specific fear of lost revenues from widespread boycotts that made film producers take criticisms more seriously than they had in the past, and in July of 1934, the Motion Picture

167 Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 59. 168 1934. "Legion of Decency." Time 23, no. 24: 39. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost. Accessed April 22, 2017. 169 Gerald Kelly and John Ford, “The Legion of Decency,” Theological Studies 18, no.3 (1957), 394. 170 Kelly and Ford, “The Legion of Decency,” 395. 171 Belton, “The Production Code,” 137. 172 John Springhall, “Censoring Hollywood: Youth, Moral Panic and Crime/Gangster Movies of the 1930s,” The Journal of Popular Culture 32, no. 3 (1998), 144.

79 Producers and Distributors of America finally buckled under the pressure and created an enforcement body called the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Under the Legion’s influence, Joseph Breen, “a rabid Catholic anti-Semite,” 173 was appointed head of the PCA and producers agreed to submit their scripts to his team for review, or else face a fine of $25,000.174 Breen and his staff read over a thousand scripts each year and screened up to three films daily, logging kisses, murders, bedroom scenes, lewd language, and mental illness.175 Breen’s assistant, Jack Vizzard, said of the process that “keeping up with the endless flow of screenplays was like trying to run up a hill of sand.”176

With the PCA in place, the code would finally be enforced to ensure the wholesomeness of films. The subjects dealt with in the Hays Code overlapped with those listed in the

“Don’ts and Be Carefuls” list, but Lord’s document far more fully articulated the vision of the code, the position of film in society, and elaborated upon the necessity of the code to ensure the moral well-being of the American public. The medium here mattered. The code states, “Films, unlike books and music, can with difficulty be confined to certain selected groups… The latitude given to film material cannot, in consequence, be as wide as the latitude given to book material…”177 Several other reasons were given for why film has

“larger moral responsibilities” than other media, including “the mobility, popularity, accessibility, emotional appeal, vividness, [and] straightforward presentation of fact in the

173 Springhall, “Censoring Hollywood,” 145. 174 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 297. 175 Sex, Censorship and the Silver Screen. 176 Ibid. 177 Cited in Belton, “The Production Code,” 143.

80 film.”178 In order, then, to take on this moral responsibility, the Hays Code outlined guidelines for filmmakers.

The guideline largely deals with the subjects of crime, sex, dance, religion, and vulgarity,179 all framed by a sense of the force of film: “Motion picture producers ... know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.”180

Further, they argued that as a persuasive form of art, motion picture films “can be morally evil in its effects. This is the case clearly enough with unclean art, indecent books, suggestive drama. The effect on the lives of men and women is obvious.”181 It would be incumbent on producers, in cooperation with the PCA, to ensure that movies were directed, then, toward “spiritual and moral progress” rather than “evil.”

Where the glorification of crime and illicit sex in gangster films and sex comedies worked to complicate ideas about law, gender, and sexuality in film, the specific tenets of the code’s distinctly Judeo-Christian framework aimed to standardize the ethical messages of films.

The very first general principle listed in the code states, “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.”182 Religious ideals here are conflated with state law, as evil, sin and crime are lumped together into the same category of prohibited content. This principle did not just mean that a kind of fun

178 Belton, “The Production Code,” 145. 179 Belton, “The Production Code,” 136. 180 Belton, “The Production Code,” 138. 181 Belton, “The Production Code,”142. 182 Belton, “The Production Code,” 138.

81 salaciousness and grittiness of gangster films and sex comedies was banned, but more importantly, the rule meant a ban on narratives of moral, sexual, gender, and criminal complexity that mirrored the actual lived experiences of Americans navigating the social upheaval of the Depression era. All this just a year after the Volstead Act, which had established the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S., was repealed, and all the hidden vices and activities that had happened under Prohibition were now unleashed on American society.

Further noting the moral importance of film, the Hays Code claims that entertainment could be “helpful or harmful to the human race,” and that “correct entertainment raises the whole of a nation” while “wrong entertainment lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideas of a race.”183 Implicit here is a theory of transmission: motion pictures could be

“morally evil” in their effects because they “reproduce the morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the expression of their ideas and ideals” as well as “affect the moral standards of those who through the screen take in these ideas and ideals.”184 In this model, film works to both double the morality of filmmakers as well as carry it to the impressionable audience that is asked to “take in” the filmmakers ideas.

To protect against the production of what was considered immoral content then, a list of more specific principles was provided to guide depictions of law, sex, vulgarity, profanity, and even “national feelings” (“The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful”).

183 Belton, “The Production Code,” 142. 184 Belton, “The Production Code,” 143.

82 Perhaps of most significance to this dissertation is the provision that “obscenity ... is forbidden”185. Of vulgarity, obscenity, and profanity, the code states that:

The treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil,

subjects should be subject always to the dictate of good taste and a regard

for the sensibilities of the audience [...] Obscenity in word, gesture,

references, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood

only by part of the audience) is forbidden [...] No film or episode may throw

ridicule on any religious faith.186

This language had clear implications for free speech in film. For instance, with regard to the last statement, the use of the word “ridicule” in the code is telling. The code suggests that it’s not just that you couldn’t speak against religion or mischaracterize it, but you specifically couldn’t debase it through humor in any way. If satire is the art of using humor to expose falsity, then the satire of religion (which in America is otherwise protected by the First Amendment) was expressly forbidden by the Hays code.

In these principles, moral standards for film began to take shape, but the language used to elaborate upon principles was somewhat vague. What exactly counts as a “low, disgusting,” or “unpleasant” subject? And how precisely can film producers know if their treatments have followed the “dictates of good taste”? The code was built to be somewhat open-ended, and indeed, enforcement of the Hays Code was still difficult even with the

185 Belton, “The Production Code,” 141. 186 Ibid.

83 PCA in place. Just as vice police struggled to determine when vice activities were acceptable or criminal, so too did film regulators struggle with determining which scenes and representations constituted a transgression of the code and which did not.

Breen and Hays adamantly targeted the films of Mae West, hollowing them of their sensationalism and the clever impropriety that made her famous. For instance, Breen censored content related to prostitution, convicts, lustful kissing, and theft in West’s next film Belle of the Nineties. Leider writes, “such changes could not help but inflict damages.

Considering the virulence of the assault, it’s amazing that Belle of the Nineties manages to be as entertaining as it is.”187 Over the coming years, the PCA continued to dramatically alter the tenor of her films, as “they altered characters and attitudes, deleted roles, tampered with song lyrics and plots, cut scenes, insisted on ‘moral endings.’”188 On the heels of

Hays’ and Breen’s condemnations of Mae West, film producers began toning down sexually suggestive scenes. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) was one such example of “Hollywood’s newfound modesty,”189 and the film is widely remembered for a scene in which Clark Gable hangs a blanket across a motel room and says to Claudette

Colbert “I like privacy when I retire, yes I’m very delicate in that respect. Prying eyes annoy me. [Pointing to the blanket barrier] Behold! The walls of Jericho.” Evasion was used in this instance by Capra, but script rewrites were regularly asked of other filmmakers.

Casablanca, for instance, originally involved a more illicit extramarital love affair between the characters Rick and Ilsa. Before the rewrite, Ilsa and Rick have a love affair while her

187 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 300. 188 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 303. 189 Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen.

84 husband is away on business, but once the censors reviewed the script and determined that the affair was against the code, the plot was rewritten so that Ilsa’s spouse was killed off first, thus preserving the sanctity of marriage.190

In spite of the PCA’s steadfast attempts to clean up Hollywood, it was unable to catch every film transgression. Plays on language, for instance, were common ways writers worked around the code, prompting the Hays office to compile a long list of words routinely censored from screenplays, including “alley cat, broad, fairy, [and] nuts.”191 The difficulty with such a list was that it was not the words themselves [the signs] that were entirely at issue, but what they were employed for, the content [the signifieds] or function [effects] of their use, that could be seen as morally damaging. With the appropriate framing, plot trajectory, or actor gestures, commonly innocuous signifiers like “alley cat” are quickly transformed. A list of dirty words, then, could only ever act as an imperfect mechanism to help signal potential breaches.

Assisting the PCA on the quest to cleanse the cinema were the local censor boards that had been operating for years before. While the Hays Code was especially focused on problematic depictions of crime, sexuality, religion, and the state, some local boards were also keenly sensitive to depictions of race relations and even intellectualism. The morality of films, then, was given further definition in their more localized settings. Heins writes,

“Until the 1960s, a multitude of city and state licensing boards practiced film censorship

190 “CENSORED: Wielding the Red Pen,” Online Exhibit by the University of Virginia Library. https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/censored/walkthrough/film1. Accessed April 22, 2017. 191 Sex, Censorship, and the Silver Screen.

85 alongside the industry-imposed strictures of the Hays Code. These boards granted or denied permission for film exhibition based on varying local standards--pictures with racial themes, for example, often being denied permits in southern states--but the suppression of sexual subjects was almost universal. In New York, licensing was handled by the education department, which, as one critic commented, tended to fix its standards ‘at the intellectual level of school children.’” 192 The list of objectionable material was thus lengthened according to the cultural and ideological needs determined by more specific locales. The

Hays Code along with these local censorship boards came together to approximate some vision of American wholesomeness, but the differential application of standards across cities or states leant to overly-broad censorship in the name of propriety across American cities.

Imperfect Capture: The Shades of Mae West

The film industry was not the only one to firm up its censorship policies in response to Mae

West. The discursive limits of 1930s radio, too, would in part be set by the public’s response to Mae West. Moral groups like the Legion of Decency had early on focused on the film industry in part because radio stations and networks were largely themselves averse to broadcasting risqué content. Networks sold programming blocks to advertisers who produced many of the radio industry’s programs.193 However growing concerns about radio content prompted Harold Vincent Milligan to establish the Women’s National Radio

Committee in 1934, intent on “cleanin[ing] up the ‘man-made’ and ‘man-regulated’

192 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 54. 193 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 530.

86 problems with radio content.194 This was followed, in 1935, by the emergence of the

National League for Decency in Radio (NLDR) who joined in protesting radio content leaning toward “sexual delinquency and moral perversion.”195 Along with the Continuity

Acceptance Department created in NBC’s New York studios, the network also created such a department in their Los Angeles headquarters in the summer of 1937 and appointed

Andrew Love to work with MacRorie to oversee materials for their West coast operation.196

Matthew Murray notes that networks avoided “spontaneous digressions by radio comedians by requiring that agencies submit scripts of forthcoming shows” and “clamped down on lewd jokes and double entendres,” blatant euphemisms, or anything that would offend the “good taste” of any portion of the listening audience.197 In spite of their best efforts to avoid offending listeners, NBC’s continuity director MacRorie admitted that “it is not always possible to foresee in reading the script the exact shade of meaning that the actor will give the line when it is read.”198 Likely without meaning to, MacRorie implicitly provides a theory of obscenity which situates it not in words alone but also in meaning as it is expressed through embodied performance–qualities like persona, delivery, inflection, and use of silence have their own objectionable semiotics. Indeed, West had discovered the importance of performance and comportment early on in her career. Leider writes, “She had known since her early days in vaudeville that censors can delete words but it’s much harder for them to apply the shears to manner, tone, insinuation. It’s not what you say but

194 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 531. 195 Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 531. 196 Ibid. 197 Matthew Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals’: regulation and irregular sexuality in golden age radio comedy,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the cultural history of radio, eds. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 143. 198 Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’”143.

87 the way you say it that makes the difference, she was fond of repeating. ‘It’s the sex personality, it’s not the words. The censors could never beat that.”199 This assertion that she could beat the censors through performance tactics only ended up being partially true.

West demonstrated the imperfectability of script censorship during her guest appearance on NBC’s popular variety show, The Chase & Sanborn Hour, hosted by Eddie Cantor. The program in question aired on December 12, 1937 on NBC’s Red Network, which reached a national audience of 7 to 8 million homes.200 In spite of her broad popularity, this was

West’s only major radio performance,201 which was arranged to promote her film Every

Day’s a Holiday. West proposed to do scenes from the upcoming movie, but the producers instead decided that she do a Garden of Eden skit that the station had already used three times previously. 202 The skit, produced by the prolific and sometimes controversial playwright Arch Oboler, was revised a number of times shortly before the broadcast.203

On this episode, West was featured in two segments during the show—the first a nine- minute satirical skit on the “Garden of Even” featuring West as Eve opposite Don Ameche as Adam. The second was a 5 ½ minute dialogue littered with sexual innuendo with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, a young but not so innocent boy named Charlie

McCarthy204 – a character known for his “perpetual lusting after women, while Bergen remained the polite, perfect gentleman.” 205 While West’s skit with McCarthy drew

199 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 303. 200 Steve Craig, “Out of Eden: The Legion of Decency, the FCC, and Mae West’s 1937 Appearance on The Chase & Sanborn Hour,” in Journal of Radio Studies 13, no. 2 (2006), 234. 201 Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’” 136. 202 Watts, Mae West, 230. 203 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 234. 204 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232. 205 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 235.

88 criticisms for its “depiction” of sexual tension between West and a prepubescent (rather than, perhaps, an adult) dummy, it was West’s depiction of gender and sexuality in a

Biblical story that moved religious members of the listening audience to outrage and collective action.

The first skit was a play on the classic Biblical Adam and Eve story, in which West, devises a plan to break free from the boredom and monotony of her life in the placid garden, in order to chase excitement and “fulfill her potential.”

Eve: “Listen, tall, tanned, and tired. It’s time I told you a thing or two. Ever since creation, I’ve done nothing but played doubles solitaire. It’s disgusting, it’s got me down.

Adam: But we’ve got a nice place here.

Eve: That’s the trouble... It’s too nice.

Adam: Well I’m not complaining.

Eve: mmm… But I want something to happen, a little excitement, a little adventure. A girl’s gotta have a little fun once in a while. There’s no future under a fig tree.

[audience laughter]

Adam: Now come on, woman, be like me. Why don’t you relax and just take it easy.

Eve: ‘cuz I’m a lady with big ideas.

Adam: Ya, what kind of ideas?

Eve: [in characteristic West growl] ohhah… you have No idea. Listen Adam, I’ve got to get a chance to expand my personality.

Adam: Well go on, expand!

Eve: I will! Out there.

Adam: Out there? You mean outside the gates of the Garden of Eden?

89 Eve: Now you’re talkin’!

Adam: But who knows what’s out there?

Eve: Let’s find out.

Adam: Ah no, no, we can’t go, we’ve still got a lease on this place.

Eve: You mean to tell me a lease is the thing that’s holding me back from developing my personality?!

Adam: Well a lease is a lease. Anyway, we’ve got a nice place here. Temperature perfect, sun always shining, nothing but a heavy dew once in a while.

[audience laughter]

Eve: What are you, the Chamber of Commerce?

[audience laughter]

Adam: Ah go away and let me sleep, will ya?

Eve: Listen Adam. I tell ya, ya gotta get me out of this place. You gotta break the lease.

Adam: Ya but what for? This is Eden. Everything is peaceful and quiet and safe.

Eve: That’s the trouble, it’s too safe. I tell ya, it’s disgusting.

Adam: But what are you talking about?

Eve: Adam… You don’t know a thing about women.

Adam: Oh, you apparently forget you were originally one of my own ribs.

Eve: Yah, a rib once, and now I’m beefin’.

Adam: Me, I know everything about women.

Eve: That’s covering a lot of territory. Listen, Long, Lazy, and Lukewarm, you think I want to stay in this place all my life?

Adam: I do, and I tell you you’re one of my ribs!

Eve: Yahhh, but one of your floatin’ ribs. A couple of months of peace and security and a woman’s bored all the way down to the bottom of a marriage certificate!

90 Adam: Then what do you want? Trouble?

Eve: Trouble. Listen. If trouble means something that makes you catch your breath, if trouble means something that makes your blood run through your veins like seltzer water, mmm,… Adam… my man, give me trouble!!206

The sketch goes on with Adam withholding the secret to breaking out of “paradise,” and

West then manipulating the snake to deliver her the apple that will cause her and Adam to be cast out of the Garden. Before she offers the apple [turned into apple sauce] to Adam, she gives him a last opportunity to help her of his own volition, saying “Before you eat, answer me this. Are you gonna take me out of this dismal dump and give me a chance to develop my personality??” Adam answers: “Oh Eve, are you gonna start that over again?”

To which she decidedly replies, “No, I’m going to end it. Eat your sauce, big boy, and hold your hat if you’ve got one!” A timpani crashes and Adam awakes outside of the Garden in a daze, as if awaking from a hangover. Adam groans, “ohh Eve, what have you done?” to which Eve responds “I’ve just made a little more history, that’s all! I’m the first woman to have her own way, and a snake will take the wrap for it!”

While the sketch had been used by the network before, it appears that writer Arch Obler edited the script to more fully fit Mae West’s persona. He stated, “Instead of going on the premise that the snake tempted Eve… It occurred to me, since Miss West was such a dominant woman, to have Eve tempt the snake.”207 Obler’s Eve was conceived as “a highly sophisticated, clever female who… induces the snake to do her bidding.”208 The sexism

206 “Mae West Banned,” audio file of December 12, 1937 episode of The Chase & Sanborn Hour, uploaded by user “WA4CZD,” Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/MaeWestBanned. Accessed April 22, 2017. 207 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 340. 208 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 341.

91 implicit in the Biblical story here is overturned with the transformation of Eve from a dupe to a quasi-Femme Fatale who uses her sexuality and cunning on her quest for freedom and self-development outside the confines of a boring and patronizing domestic sanctuary.

Prior to broadcast, the network censors had gone over her script to ensure the language was clean, but what they did not anticipate, however, was her tone and manner of saying things

– the spirit of West in audio form. The episode generated a storm of controversy that was relatively new to radio, a medium that had previously been left alone by moral reformers who had dedicated a majority of their energies to protesting the film industry.209 Murray notes, “Mae West’s performance was doubly offensive to the reformers and religious groups since it constituted an invasion of the home and a public declaration of female wantonness.”210 Exacerbating the offense was the fact that it aired on a Sunday night.211 It was this combination of qualities that highlighted the danger of radio as a medium that could collapse decidedly distinct and segregated spatio-moral spheres.

After the broadcast, radio faced what the trade journal Variety described as ‘the most aroused public criticism it ha[d] yet encountered.’”212 FCC chairman Frank McNinch sent a letter to NBC describing the sketch as “offensive to the great mass of right-thinking, clean-minded American citizens” and further claimed the broadcast was “a serious offense against the proprieties and a rather low form of entertainment.”213 Catholic publications,

209 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 233. 210 Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’” 140. 211 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 341. 212 Quoted in Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’” 137. 213 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 341.

92 women’s groups, and editorial writers criticized the episode. The Catholic Monitor claiming “Mae West Pollutes Homes”, and calling the episode vulgar, irreverent, pornographic, offensive, and an “insolent caricature of religion and the Bible.” 214 A prominent Catholic leader threatened the sponsor with a mass boycott of the program, and when Catholic publications called on their readers to send protest letters to the FCC, audiences acted accordingly sending the FCC 400 letters of complaint. 215 Along with religious and social groups, members of the State expressed alarm, for instance, a

Massachusetts congressman “demanded an investigation of the FCC, which had allowed a

‘foul and indecent broadcast’ to invade millions of American homes.”216

Of course, not all listeners and publications were on the side of condemnation—members of the press came to West’s defense by advocating for more relaxed policies regarding the representation of sex and female sexuality over the air. 217 West responded, “Did they expect a sermon? Why weren’t they in church if they were so religious? Forty million people listened to that broadcast.”218 Furthermore, Mae West was not solely responsible for the offensive content—West may have brought her persona to the episode, but it was supported by the many other players who were responsible for writing, producing, sponsoring and airing the episode.219 In any case, Murray observes, “The fierce exchanges that took place in the aftermath of West’s appearance attested to a wider divergence of opinion over what constituted normative gendered sexuality and the limits of acceptable

214 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 236. 215 Craig, “Out of Eden,” 233-6. 216 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 341. 217 Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’” 136. 218 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 342. 219 Roessner and Broaddus argue that West was treated as the scapegoat of the controversy so the network could escape further FCC regulation. Roessner and Broaddus, “The Sinners and the Scapegoat,” 523.

93 female public deportment.”220 In spite of West’s popularity and support from substantially large segments of the listening audience, her performance had been too controversial to stand. The following Sunday, the program announcer aired an apology on behalf of NBC, the program, and sponsor. Furthermore the executives at NBC agreed to exile West from radio, going so far as to forbid even the mention of her name on all of the network’s affiliates.221 To make matters worse, the radio episode and controversy failed to push audiences to see the film she’d been trying to promote, Every Day’s a Holiday. Within weeks of the film’s release, Paramount severed their ties with West.222 A few years later, the critical and box-office failure of a film she appeared in (but did not write), The Heat’s

On (1943), cemented her conviction to pursue her own works where they could live on her terms—in live performance spaces.

After Hays and Breen gutted Mae West’s films of their guile, West left the film industry for twenty-six years,223 turning down choice parts in Roustabout (starring Elvis Presley), a couple of Fellini films, she turned down the role of Vera Simpson (opposite Frank Sinatra) in Pal Joey, and the part of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.224 In 1944, she returned to her “dazzling tricksterism” 225 when she staged her play Catherine Was Great on

Broadway (derided by the press but met with overwhelming public support),226 which, after thirty-four weeks in New York City, she toured throughout the East and Midwest.227 In

220 Murray, “‘The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,’” 136. 221 Watts, Mae West, 232. 222 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 342. 223 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 347. 224 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 349. 225 Watts, Mae West, 250. 226 Watts, Mae West, 249. 227 Watts, Mae West, 253.

94 the late 1940s and early 50s, she went on to revive her play Diamond Lil, touring packed theaters in England and across the US.228 In the mid-50s at the age of 61, she joined the ranks of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Marlene Dietrich taking up a spot in Las Vegas where she signed with the Sahara casino to appear for three weeks at

$25,000 a week.229 The act, which featured her trademark gender inversion and a cast of young musclemen, “existed only for the pleasure of the female spectator.”230 It was a success, and allowed her to secure bookings at top nightclubs all over the country including

Chicago’s Chez Paree and New York’s Latin Quarter.231 Although she had experienced some censorship in live theater in the early 20th century, by the 1940s and 50s it was solely in live performance spaces that she could most comfortably perform to her fullest.

The Transmission of Media Codes: Televisual Restrictions

In the late 50s, Mae West went on to write her autobiography Goodness had Nothing to Do with It, for which she made limited TV appearances on Dean Martin’s and Red Skelton’s shows (her appearance on CBS’s Person to Person was cancelled for its ambiguous content).232 When asked about television, she stated “I’m not too crazy about the TV scene because it places too many restrictions on my type of material… I don’t like being censored, I don’t think I deserve it.”233 Television, which had followed in radio and film’s footsteps, would remain a largely incompatible medium for someone as controversial as

Mae West.

228 Leider, Becoming Mae West, 347. 229 Watts, Mae West, 269. 230 Watts, Mae West, 271. 231 Ibid. 232 Watts, Mae West, 280. 233 Watts, Mae West, 282

95

Concerns over the effects of television on children were particularly heightened during the postwar moment at which point a desire to protect and preserve the innocence of children was especially important. In particular, groups like the PTA and the National Councils of

Catholic Women and Men demonstrated a concern with television’s effects on “children’s moral and physical welfare. As early as 1949, PTA members voted at their national convention to keep an eye on ‘unwholesome television programs.’ Religious organizations also tried to monitor television’s unsavory content.”234 The popular press (for instance, women’s magazines) articulated fears that television would encourage passive and addictive behavior, reverse habits of good hygiene and nutrition, or cause physical, mental, and social disorders. 235 Similar to controversies surrounding film decades earlier, the emergence of television produced questions about childhood innocence and heightened fears of the negative effects of violent or sexual programming on television.236

In 1952, TV producers created the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. Like for radio decades before, the National Association of formed a mode of self-regulation that would work to ensure that television would contribute to social good rather than to various forms of harm. TV broadcasters’, particularly NBC’s David Sarnoff’s, experiences in radio regulation made them realize early on the importance of an industry-led regulatory framework that would keep Congress and the FCC from regulating the television industry.

To do this, it was important for television to be understood as a public servant of the

234 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54. 235 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 50-1. 236 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 52.

96 American people in order to enjoy widespread consumer acceptance of the new medium237.

NBC’s code created in 1951 (entitled the NBC Radio and Television Broadcast Standards), along with the Motion Picture Production Code and the 1948 National Association of

Broadcasters Standards of Good Practices (a.k.a. the Radio Code) were drawn together to form the Television Code made by the National Association of Radio and Television

Broadcasters (NARTB).

The language of the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters, like the film and radio codes, articulated a responsibility to inform, educate, and entertain in “good taste,” stating that “Program materials should enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has toward his society.” Furthermore, profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, attacks on religion, and “sex crimes and abnormalities” were forbidden. Programmers were to treat marriage and the home with respect, narcotics addiction should not be represented except as a vicious habit, and representations of brutality or physical agony were not permissible.238 While this code was created ostensibly in the service of American society, the American Civil Liberties Union attacked it, arguing that it illegally suppressed free expression, and asked the FCC to determine if the code violated the Communications Act banning censorship.239 Interestingly, as parents were finding ways to influence the direction of televisual content, children were indicating through surveys that they preferred the shows parents found unwholesome, especially sci-

237 Pondillo, America’s First Network TV Censor, 55. 238 David Silverman, You Can’t Air That: Four cases of controversy and censorship in American Television Programming (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 7. 239 Silverman, You Can’t Air That, 8.

97 fi, serials, and westerns.240 As parents were fighting to suppress the wrong kinds of content, children were fighting to consume more of it.

As had happened with film and radio, television was caught between the illicit desires and moral demands of its divided audiences. Between film, radio and television in the early to mid 1900s, mass media had curbed and quelled its moral and social content, largely steering clear of performers who, in spite of their popularity, spoke frankly on the subjects of race, crime, sexuality, and gender. At the same time that controversies over the moral messages of radio, film, and television were occurring, the geopolitical context of the Cold

War was chilling political expression. In the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with Senator Joseph McCarthy at the helm, vigilantly worked to rid the United States government of Communists, “real or imagined.” Krutnik et. al write that the un-American hearings were “a Cold War containment initiative that sought to co-opt allegiance and muzzle dissent.”241 Along with calling up government employees to testify about their political allegiances, the HUAC also targeted Hollywood to ensure that producers, directors, writers, and actors that were sympathetic to communist or “anti-American” tendencies would be unable to sway

American minds.

To aid in the project of ridding television of communist sympathizers was a publication entitled Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (1950)

240 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 57. 241 Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, “Introduction,” in ‘Un-American’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, eds. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2007), 3.

98 that listed people in show business who were to be avoided for their political inclinations.

Silverman argues that those listed were not of a single, unified political orientation, but were targeted for a variety of reasons: “They had opposed Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini, tried to help war refugees, combated race discrimination, campaigned against poll taxes and other voting barriers, opposed censorship, criticized the House committee on un-

American activities, hoped for peace, and favored efforts toward better U.S.-Soviet relations.”242 Networks, advertising agencies, and sponsors would exchange information regularly about blacklisted performers so that they could employ individuals who were politically secure. 243 Many lost their livelihoods, some found ways to write under pseudonyms, and still others found their way to the space of live performance. As

Silverman notes, Broadway producers often ignored the list, and many of the blacklisted performers like Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel were able to find regular work there.244

Together then, film and broadcasting in the first half of the 20th century produced a cultural environment that attempted to be as inoffensive as possible on ethical and ideological grounds. A cultural standard, thus, was set in the new mass electronic media environment of the 20th century.

242 Silverman, You Can’t Air That, 8. 243 Silverman, You Can’t Air That, 12. 244 Silverman, You Can’t Air That, 8.

99 Chapter Three: Live Performance, Lenny Bruce, and the Rise of New Wave Comedy

In Philip Auslander’s work Liveness, he illustrates how mass mediated and live entertainment are co-constructed in a cultural ecology in which the actions of one media domain impact the aesthetics, content, and/or conditions of existence for other media and performance spaces. His work is principally concerned with addressing aesthetic and ontological questions regarding the difference between the “live” and the “mediated” in a manner that problematizes existing distinctions between the two categories.245 Moreover, the relationships between live and mediated cultures are also political. For instance, competition for limited audience attention and dollars leads, in some instances, to the domination of one form over another—this was the case in the early 20th century with the displacement of vaudeville theaters by film theaters.

Like Auslander’s Liveness, this chapter similarly analyzes an ecology of live and mediated culture to examine how cultural categories are constructed in relation to each other, and to understand how a cultural circuit becomes politicized. While I follow Auslander’s thesis that the live and the mediated are co-constitutive, my work moves away from his primary focus on aesthetic, ontological, and economic questions to explore the moral politics of live and mediated performance during a specific historical moment.

245 For instance, he proposes the following:

“the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as ‘live.’ Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as ‘live’ performance, for that category has meaning only relation to an opposing possibility.” Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 51.

100 The case this chapter examines is the rise of what was termed “sick” (or, more generously the “new wave” of) stand-up comedy in the 1950s, and the way that it responded to the ideological, aesthetic, and political repression that occurred in the film, radio, and television industries (outlined in Chapter 1). Moving away from Chapter 1’s focus on mass media to niche performance spaces and narrowcast media, this chapter illustrates how sick comedy developed its moral character in relation to the live spaces in which it was incubated, and was disseminated by likeminded cultural figures catering to niche media audiences. By focusing on this story, Communications, Media Studies, and Cultural

Studies scholars are offered a reading of the roles that niche spaces and narrowcast media play in the processes of moral transfer. I argue that moral codes move through media objects (records and radio programs), interpersonal networks, and through the cultural labor of, for instance, Lenny Bruce performances, Pacifica radio programming decisions

(the subject of Chapter 4), and legal battles to protect free expression.

Moral reformers in the first half of the 20th century exercised their collective influence over mass media to affirm and disseminate an image of the good that was based on a certain confluence of ideological, racial, sexual, gender, and political ideals. Their work to excise undesirable ideas, bodies, and ways of being from mass media drove those ideals and bodies into the domain of live performance where, instead of being extinguished, they transformed and, in some instances, thrived. Niche and narrowcast media that escaped the notice of moral reformers captured what was happening in live performance spaces, and moved that content into the homes of consenting, receptive audiences. Just as Auslander

101 suggests the live and mediated are conceptually constructed in relation to each other, so too did an idea of “clean” culture work to provide definition for “sick” comedy.

Many of the subjects prohibited by the codes of practice for radio, film, and television were directly taken up by stand-up comics in the 1950s and 60s: off-color language, drugs, crime, vice, non-heteronormative lifestyles, critiques of the state and religion, experimental aesthetics, and a general celebration of the unorthodox were found in the nightclub circuit.

These topics were explored in live performance spaces and went under the radar of community and religious groups who were primarily focusing their efforts on the moral content of film and broadcasting. Live performance in nightclubs, captured by tapes, records, late night television, and non-commercial radio, allowed for the expression and movement of material that was suppressed in mainstream media. Following “sicknik” comic Lenny Bruce’s movement through this media circuit illustrates the on-the-ground work done by performers and media workers who fought for a shift in culture and the protection of their First Amendment rights.

In sum, this chapter examines the politics of morality that in part structured the character of mainstream and niche comedy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and demonstrates the ways that narrowcast media’s remediation of “sick” comedy posed a challenge to nearly

20 years of discursive censorship in mainstream entertainment. Live performance spaces provided a welcomed reprieve to the moral censorship that limited representations of gender, sex, race, and America’s thriving underbelly in 1950s mass entertainment.

102 Narrowcast media broadened this challenge as it carried offensive content out of clubs and into the homes of the American public.

Nightclubs: The social and cultural contamination of urban life

In the 1920s with the onset of Prohibition, speakeasies began to form and changed the landscape of American nightlife. While spaces dedicated to performance, food and drink, and vice had existed prior to the 1920s, the speakeasies that arose out of Prohibition functioned as semi-private, semi-public urban spaces that both hid as well as invited

Americans to participate in illicit activities. In these dark, closeted, intimate, and secretive environments,246 employees and clientele communed over entertainment, leisure, vice, and the evasions of law enforcement. “Boisterous rooms filled with illegal liquor, female dancers, well-heeled revelers, and multiethnic employees”247 made speakeasies spaces of rebellion from the temperate self-discipline of the white middle class.248 In November of

1925, a wealthy and well-known socialite wrote an article for The New Yorker entitled

“Why We Go to Cabarets” explaining how the anonymity and informality of the nightclub circuit afforded liberation from strict rules of propriety and sociality, and allowed goers to associate with people from all walks of life instead of those from the same social class.249

With the repeal of Prohibition, nightclub establishments continued to serve as spaces of leisure, but out in the open, they were more easily subject to scrutiny. For urban reformers,

246 Burton Peretti, Nightclub City: Politics and amusement in Manhattan (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 10-11. 247 Peretti, Nightclub City, x. 248 Peretti, Nightclub City, 11. 249 Peretti, Nightclub City, 12-13.

103 nightlife regulation was crucial to addressing urban depravity, and nightclubs in particular were special targets since they acted as spaces through which “sexual, ethnic, and criminal transgressions were funneled into a dense and lurid urban underground.”250 In spite of being condemned by moral groups, nightclubs in urban America continued to thrive over the decades. Jacob Smith writes that in the 1940s and 1950s, the booming wartime economy helped to fuel nightclubs as uprooted soldiers with money to spend sought spaces of leisure and entertainment while they were away from their homes. 251 Noting the prominent use of nightclubs as backdrop in the film noir genre, Vivian Sobchack notes that nightclubs represent the dark alternative to the postwar suburban home and provide a critique of mainstream culture.252 This space of critique is indeed why many sought out nightclubs, since they offered the “exotic, the naughty, the ‘adult.’”253 Nightclubs would often mix cultural influences, including Black music, Jewish humor, Latino dancing, white socialites, elements of French cabaret, and female display.254 Individual nightclubs might also emphasize cultural elements or cater to certain social classes in such a way as to differentiate themselves from others, creating a broad range of offerings for nightclub patrons. For instance in New York City, the theater district, Greenwich Village, and Harlem were considered three parts of the nightclub circuit that one might traverse in a single night.255 With the emergence of jazz and beat poetry, nightclubs also became associated with aesthetic transgressions, racial collaboration, drug cultures, sexual experimentation,

250 Peretti, Nightclub City, xii. 251 Jacob Smith, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 157. 252 Smith, Spoken Word, 157-8. 253 Smith, Spoken Word, 158 254 Peretti, Nightclub City, 4. 255 Peretti, Nightclub City, 6.

104 and intellectual openness. In short, nightclubs offered forms of moral, social, sexual, and cultural transgression and hybridity that were missing in mass mediated entertainment.

Entertainers, of course, were not limited to working either in nightclubs or mass media, and instead regularly moved between spaces. The problem, as we saw with Mae West, was that the movement of people and cultural material from the relatively confined spaces of live performance to the varied and multiply situated spaces of mass media could not come without certain implications or consequences. Remediation, then, is not a politically or morally neutral act. Performers who take their aesthetic, ideological, discursive, and political cues from live performance spaces function as more than mere entertainers or isolated cultural phenomena. Live performers moving into mass media act as a cultural conduit who carry ideas and aesthetics across spaces, audiences, modes of interpretation, and sets of assumptions. The ambivalence of cultural, aesthetic, and ideational movement was the seed of conflict that arose with the new standup comedy of the 1950s. The moral conflict of remediated comedy in the 1950s is perhaps most clear in the career of stand-up legend Lenny Bruce. In order to understand the moral and political controversy surrounding his work, it is helpful to examine the people and scenes that influenced his belief systems and his comedy.

The Chaos and Mimicry of Leonard Alfred Schneider

Lenny Bruce, originally named Leonard Alfred Schneider, was born on October 13, 1925 in Mineola, New York. As chapter one demonstrated, competing moral demands were being made of the mass media industries in the 1920s. Bruce’s childhood was similarly

105 shaped by a similar moral dynamic in his family. On the one hand, you had Lenny’s father,

Mickey Schneider, a podiatrist and a serious and frugal man who’d scraped by during the

Depression. Lenny’s mother, on the other hand, was a vivacious entertainer named Sadie

Kitchenberg, who went by the stage name Sally Marr. Sally worked in vaudeville, as a burlesque comedian, an impressionist, and a dancer. From early on, Sally’s personality demonstrated to her young son a lighthearted disregard for conservative propriety, while

Mickey attempted to impart structure and more conservative values to his son. These competing influences contributed to Lenny’s appreciation of chaos and a tendency to skew or invert the lessons that his betters tried to instill in him. In his autobiography, Bruce writes:

My father instilled in me a few important behavior patterns, one of which

was a fantastic dread of being in debt… He would constantly remind me

that we were living on the brink of poverty. He would go miles out of his

way to look for bargains. He would wear clothes that friends gave him. I

became so guilty about asking for anything that I concluded it was much

more ethical to steal.256

When Bruce was 16, he enlisted in the navy and was in active service during WWII from

October 1942 to July of 1945. After a few years of service, he wanted to leave the navy so he told a medical officer that he was experiencing homosexual desires. He was also found wearing women’s clothing and performing a comedic drag show for his shipmates, and his

256 Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An autobiography (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1991), 11.

106 superiors deemed him “potentially dangerous socially to himself and his shipmates.” He was issued an honorable discharge “by reason of unsuitability for the naval service.” 257

After the war, young Leonard changed his name to Lenny Bruce and pursued an entertainment career in New York City, working amateur nights in clubs across Long

Island, New Jersey, Greenwich Village, and Jackson Heights. In these early days, he practiced “clean comedy,” performing a form of comedy that was of general acceptability to the broadest possible cross-section of American audiences—impersonations of entertainers. In 1949, Bruce’s manager Marvin Worth (who later wrote for the Steve Allen

Show) got him a spot on the TV talent show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,258 and while the performance went well and he managed to find some work with this act, it became more difficult for comics to find work after the war and his career stagnated.259

Critically, it was around this time that Bruce met Joe Ancis and began spending more time working in the club circuit. Ancis is credited with influencing a shift in Bruce’s comedic persona.260 While relatively unknown today, Ancis was beloved in the comedy community for his unique persona—an intellectual hipster who spoke in stream-of-consciousness monologues and who delved into sexual fantasy, all while threading Yiddish words and hipster slang into his bits.261 Ancis presented an alternative comedic style to the clean impersonations common at the time in mainstream media, undoubtedly showing Bruce that

257 “Lenny Bruce’s Gay Naval Ruse: Unearthed documents detail comedian’s discharge,” The Smoking Gun website, last modified August 31, 2010, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/lenny-bruces- gay-naval-ruse. Accessed January 4, 2017. 258 Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!! (New York, NY: Random House, 1974), 103. 259 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 43. 260 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 118-121. 261 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 109.

107 a comic’s persona did not have to be a costume but could be more intimately related to, and reflective of, the life world of the performer. Additionally, the fact that Bruce worked in a series of nightclubs at that particular moment was significant for how his work would develop, since many nightclubs and live performance spaces in the 1940s and 1950s deliberately sought to create cultural environments that broke away from the social, political, sexual, and gender standards presented in mainstream media.

Jazz, and the New Wave of Comedy

The permissiveness of live performance spaces infected mid-century American comedy, as these spaces cultivated aesthetic and ideological experimentation, improvisation, idiosyncrasy, and the de-centering of traditional social norms and mores. Mort Sahl is a figure regularly credited with initiating a shift in stand-up comedy, a shift that was enabled by the coffee houses and jazz clubs he frequented, and the cultural environment of

Berkeley, California. Comedy historian Gerlad Nachman explains the shifting by describing pre-Sahl comic monologists like Milton Berle or Jack Carter as having “little to say about society, much less about their own real lives. They were, in the purest sense, entertainers who had no public worldview.”262 Their jokes centered around the comic’s

“grotesque mother-in-law, his wife’s lousy cooking, or his brother-in-law’s inability to hold a job.”263 What this culture of comedy meant for someone like Jules Feiffer, satirical cartoonist for the Village Voice, at the time was that “If you were in your twenties back in the mid-fifties and living in an urban center, you felt generally unspoken for. If you picked

262 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The rebel comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2003), 21-2. 263 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 7.

108 up The New Yorker, you felt unrepresented…”264 Sahl is considered to have changed comedy “simply by the unheard-of comic device of being himself and speaking his mind onstage.”265 His mind, however, would not work for just any stage. It was in small and intimate coffee houses and jazz clubs that Sahl found receptive audiences who allowed him to bring his idiosyncratic personality and frank speech to the stage.

Like Bruce, Sahl began his career doing clean comedy impressions under the folksy stage name “Cal Southern.” He was generally not successful performing in this manner, nor was he successful shortly after in his attempt to sell jokes to other comics who claimed his humor “wasn’t commercial.”266 In the 1950s, Sahl dated a woman named Sue Babior, a

University of California at Berkeley student, who connected him to the Bay’s community of jazz-loving, left-leaning, intellectual types.267 Babior encouraged Sahl to perform at

Enrico Banducci’s nightclub, the hungry i (which originally stood for “hungry id”) in North

Beach,268 a move that proved to be critical to Sahl’s career.

North Beach in the 1950s was the hub of the beatnik’s thriving literary scene with its “deep immigrant, bohemian, and nightlife traditions.”269 It was home to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s

City Lights Bookstore, and generally attracted people who rejected the racial, sexual and gender ideals promoted in mainstream culture.270 The hungry i was originally dedicated

264 Quoted in Nachman, Seriously Funny, 7. 265 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 7. 266 Sahl quoted in Nachman, Seriously Funny, 56. 267 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 57. 268 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 57-8. 269 Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the creation of a cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 43-46. 270 Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco, 41. Perhaps not incidentally, Alvah Bessie, one of the infamous Hollywood Ten who were arrested after refusing to testify during the HUAC trials, operated the

109 solely to showcasing folk music and poetry—Banducci initially envisioned it as “part coffeehouse, part cabaret, part salon.”271 Lucky for Sahl, Banducci allowed him to perform stand-up comedy there in 1953.272 Banducci, a former violin prodigy, revered and nurtured talent and once noted, “the most important thing we had in the room was the quietude, the silence we maintained.”273 Silence, the natural enemy of the stand-up comic, in this case was a necessary condition that allowed Sahl to speak in a new way, and allowed Banducci’s audience to receive a new style of humor.

Sahl shed the traditional look and material of a comic, and instead donned the attire of a graduate student – his red pullover sweater over buttoned up shirt signaled his association with the Berkeley crowd. He carried a rolled-up newspaper up on stage, giving the impression that he had pressing, off-the-cuff things to say about current events. He’d wryly describe the attire of conservatives who dressed in charcoal gray suits with comments like,

“modern science was looking for a color more somber than black.”274 While his persona and style of humor today seem typical of stand-up comics, his turn away from conventional stand-up allowed other comics to imagine new directions for stand-up comedy entirely.

Woody Allen, who saw Sahl at a venue called the Blue Angel in 1954, explains that Sahl

“totally restructured comedy. He changed the rhythm of the jokes. He had different content, surely, but the revolution was in the way he laid the jokes down... with such guile… Mort was the vanguard of the enormous renaissance of nightclub comedy that ended not long

lights and sound at the hungry i and was often found introducing the talent. Chris Koch, “Who Stole My Country 27 – Mort Sahl,” Chris Koch Media, last updated October 16, 2015, https://chriskochmedia.com/2015/10/16/who-stole-my-country-27-mort-sahl/. Accessed May 3, 2017. 271 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 11. 272 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 58. 273 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 10-12. 274 “Biography,” The Mort Sahl Website, http://mortsahl.tripod.com/id15.html. Accessed January 4, 2017.

110 after Bill Cosby and I came along… he had genuine insights. He made the country receptive to a kind of comedy it wasn’t used to hearing. He made the country listen to jokes that required them to think.”275

Along with performing in North Beach’s folk and beatnik scene, the jazz fanatic Sahl276 also began playing in jazz clubs. He once said: “I had to build up my own network of places to play because the others weren’t available to me.”277 It was after playing jazz rooms like

Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, the Village Vanguard in New York, and the Crescendo in Los

Angeles, that those venues started booking other comedians, creating an informal comedy circuit. Another new wave comic, Shelley Berman, notes of the jazz audience that they were “used to listening to jazz players and singers, and what I was doing was also the result of improvisation. It was the right audience in the perfect room, with college grads, people who would shift their love of jazz to us.”278 Jazz clubs, then, acted as the physical spaces in which new comics could thrive—they convened audiences who would be open to novel comedic aesthetics and content, and functioned as reliable sites of employment for standup comics.

Jazz clubs and beatnik coffee houses were, like for Sahl and Berman, critical to the career of Lenny Bruce. Along with being influenced by the bohemian and avant garde club circuits, Bruce’s persona and style were also impacted by his work in a circuit of strip and

275 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 68. 276 Sahl wrote liner notes for jazz albums and brought other comedians (Shelley Berman and Jonathan Winters) onto Norman Granz’s formerly jazz-only Verve records (Daniel Blazek, “‘At Sunset’—Mort Sahl (1955),” Library of Congress National Registry, 2), a label that released records by musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Coleman Hawkins, and Sonny Rollins (Smith, Spoken Word, 160). 277 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 69. 278 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 308.

111 burlesque clubs. Biographer Albert Goldman suggests that after WWII, strip and burlesque clubs became reliable places for jazz musicians, female entertainers, and comedians to find work. 279 While playing a Baltimore nightclub in 1951, Bruce met an entertainer and burlesque dancer, Harriett Jolliff aka Honey Harlow, whom he married later that year. The pair moved to California where Harlow began working at the highly reputed burlesque club, The Colony Club, while Bruce found regular work as a comic MC in LA’s strip and burlesque circuit. Working at clubs like Maynard Sloate’s Strip City or at Duffy’s in LA between 1953-1956, Lenny began punching up his jokes with raunchy material and experimenting with his style. Harlow explains that it was while working at Strip City that

Bruce began improvising and working with audience participation, buying newspapers and satirizing an article from the newspaper, as well as commenting on what was happening in the club, doing bits on the staff and clientele, and over time, replacing rehearsed routines with ad-libbing. “It seemed he could hold the audience better, and it made him feel freer also. People came back to see him because they knew they weren’t going to be listening to the same jokes night after night. They’d tell each other: ‘Come down and listen to this guy.

He’s always got something funny to say...’”280 No longer sticking to routines, Bruce built up improvisational skills and an ability to interact with the audience, becoming topical and reflexive in the process.

More importantly, Bruce was often found “playing to the band.” In his autobiography,

Bruce suggests the aesthetic importance of this when he writes, “The reports on me were now: ‘All Lenny Bruce seems concerned with is making the band laugh.’ That should have

279 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 123. 280 Harlow quoted in Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 69-70.

112 been my first hint of the direction in which I was going: abstraction. Musicians, jazz musicians especially, appreciate art forms that are extensions of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form.”281 Goldman further suggests, “The musicians were the only intelligent people on the premises. The only people who dug fantasy and abstraction and alliteration and the comedy of crazy non sequiturs. They’d heard dozens of comics and thousands of lines… They were the toughest audience on earth. If you could break up the boys in the band, you were cooking!”282 Playing to jazz musicians pushed Bruce to develop a jazz aesthetic in his humor, and to write jokes that stood out from those of other comics.

This drove Bruce’s comic sensibility toward the lives and perspectives of jazz musicians

(evident below in the discussion of his albums). Working and living among jazz musicians also had implications for Bruce’s moral life as well.

Goldman writes, “Part of being a great jazz cat in those days was being a junkie. Jazz and junk were words that went together…”283 According to Goldman, the longer Bruce was in the jazz scene, the more seriously he became involved with drugs. A telling detail, Bruce became very close with a “disciple of Charlie Parker,” the jazz musician Joe Maini whom

Bruce called his “junkie lover.”284 Bruce eventually became addicted to prescription drugs, and his first (of many) arrests were for narcotics. Over the 1960s, his ideas about drugs began appearing in his work (using varying degrees of seriousness and condemnation) as he spoke of hypocrisy around drug use,285 the criminalization of junkies, the disconnect

281 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 46. 282 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 133. 283 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 139. 284 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 141. 285 For example: “I do not understand the moral condemnation of marijuana, not only because of its nontoxic, nonaddicting effects as contrasted with those of alcohol, but also because, in my opinion, caffeine in coffee, amphetamine, as well as all tranquilizers--from Miltown to aspirin to nicotine in cigarettes--are crutches for

113 between the idealized vision of the medical profession and corporate greed in the drug industry,286 and being arrested for drugs.

Bruce’s speech, references, and ethics were shaped by his personal life and the performance spaces that housed him during the early part of his career. He affected a cool hipster persona, sprinkled Yiddish, off-color words, and hipster slang into his speech, occasionally referenced psychoanalytic and existential concepts, and he regularly touched on the politics of racial segregation. The structure of his comedy drew on the aesthetics of abstraction,287 improvisation, and fantasy in jazz, and he regularly made inside jokes while performing to jazz musicians (and later, jazz writers). In the early to mid-1950s, then, Bruce’s comedy shed mainstream “cleanliness” as his style grew to reflect the various underworlds he traversed.

Ralph Gleason’s liner notes on Bruce’s Curran Theater album reflect how historically specific and radically situated Bruce’s comedy was in his personal experiences and cultural scenes. Gleason writes, “Because Lenny was, in a real sense, especially in his original work, the child of his own frames of reference, and because some of those references need

people who can face life better with drugs than without. Part of the responsibility for our indiscriminate use of drugs is the doctors...” who give in to patient demands; who overprescribe to the point that drugs lose their effects; and who accept, as though inevitable, the rising production of new kinds of drugs (Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 61). 286 Lenny Bruce, “The Kid In the Well,” Lenny Bruce Originals Vol. 1 CD audio, (Berkeley CA: Fantasy, 1991). 287 Bruce’s “abstraction” is best characterized by his statement: “I see things in a ludicrous sense, and I report that kind of scene” (Ronald Collins and David Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, Naperville, Il: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002, 59). He would take a decently concrete event or idea and move away from the realism related to that topic, creating a ludicrous tale or fantasy from it instead. The joke “Non Skeddo Flies Again” is based on a real event--John Graham blowing up an airplane with his mother on it. The joke, which begins with a short (and “sick” as in morbid) dialogue between Graham and his mother, quickly (d)evolves into a ludicrous vignette featuring the pilots of the flight who are imagined to be cruel and incompetent buffoons attempting to convince passengers to “volunteer” to jump out of the plane in an effort to lighten the plane’s load.

114 explanation now for full understanding, I am going to run down here some aids for listening to the tracks on this collection.”288 Gleason provides some translations of Yiddish words

(“zugnisht, which means, loosely, ‘don’t tell.’… ‘g’zint in dein pippick,’ which translates, again loosely, as ‘a health on your belly button,’ or simply, ‘I love you.’”)289 He then goes on to decode: a number of Bruce’s references related to the Lone Ranger; the famous impressionist Will Jordan; a joke that refers to John Graham; and a number of jokes related to jazz musicians (“Philly Joe says ‘hello’” refers to the jazz drummer Philly Joe Jones,290 while the joke “The Sound” “is Lenny’s classic satire on the history of jazz in which he drops the names of many jazz musicians. Buck Clayton Oliver… Leroy Vinegar” etc.) 291

Gleason’s liner notes highlight the extent to which Bruce’s comedy was played to a very specific in-crowd; without understanding these references, much of Bruce’s humor is largely incomprehensible.292 Bruce’s insider knowledge and experimental style is often said to have worked best in live performances, specifically nightclubs.293 The character of

288 Ralph Gleason, Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 206. 289 Gleason, Music in the Air, 206-7. 290 Gleason, Music in the Air, 208. 291 Gleason, Music in the Air, 209. 292 YouTube comments published to pages showcasing Bruce’s recordings reflect this confusion of contemporary audiences who simply do not see the humor in these dated or scene-specific references. 293 Jacob Smith explains:

Clubs such as the Purple Onion, the Hungry i, Ann’s 440, Mister Kelly’s, the Bitter End, and the Cafe Wha had originally appealed to the beat subculture but began attracting a culturally elite, sophisticated, middle-class clientele, in part by booking a new breed of socially aware comedians. In these nightclubs, comics such as Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl developed what David Marc describes as ‘a relatively didactic, politicized, sometimes even angry response to mass society, the Cold War, the indignities of Jim Crow, the denial of free speech, and a hypocritical web of traditions and taboos that gratuitously valorized religion and vilified sexuality.’ Nightclubs such as these fostered a discourse that was opposed to mainstream American life as depicted on network television. Marc argues that the urban nightclub audiences demanded ‘something of the exotic, the naughty, the ‘adult,’ otherwise, why not stay home and watch TV?’ (Smith, Spoken Word, 158).

115 Lenny Bruce’s humor reflected his environment, and his environment consisted of moral, aesthetic, and political content that had been banned in mainstream media—overt displays of sexuality, racial integration, experimental aesthetics, vulgar language, sympathetic treatments of crime, etc.—these topics not only found expression in live performance spaces, but thrived in them. Bruce’s innovative comedy, however, did not mean anything for the history of American comedy until a network of influential nightclub operators and writers worked to legitimize and promote his work.

Contagion: Impresarios, Wally Heider’s tapes, and the jazz columnists

Just as the jazz scene had provided much of the aesthetic and social foundations of Lenny

Bruce’s work, the jazz scene also provided a kind of cultural home for those who would help to elevate Bruce’s career. Jazz aficionados’ word-of-mouth reviews, legitimate clubs, and hand-to-hand distribution of rare tape recordings were responsible for the elevation of

Bruce’s career. Tastemakers in California and New York supplied the logic of Bruce’s legitimacy: first, interpersonally to each other as they encouraged each other to attend one of Bruce’s performances, and second, to American audiences whom they worked to influence by producing the intellectual narratives that framed Bruce’s work as innovative, daring, and (for some) even prophetic. Cultural intermediaries like Ann Dee, Wally Heider and Ralph Gleason not only supported Bruce by creating works that generated publicity for Bruce, they also either intentionally or inadvertently aided him during his obscenity trials by furnishing legal arguments in support of Bruce’s First Amendment rights.

In the autumn of 1957, a nightclub operator and talent scout came to see Bruce perform at

Duffy’s in LA on the advice of Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr. Ann Dee ran a small club

116 called Ann’s 440 in San Francisco’s North Beach, in the same neighbourhood as the hungry i and establishments like the famous Jazz Workshop and Finocchio’s (once a speakeasy that later became renowned for its female impersonators). Recognizing his potential to draw crowds, Dee offered to pay Bruce more than she usually paid her performers and helped to advertise his shows in newspapers and on the radio.294 Bruce began performing at Ann’s in April 1958, and because of Ann’s credibility in the local community, others in the entertainment industry began taking note of Bruce. Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff, Hugh

Heffner, and Paul Krassner saw Bruce at Ann’s and became some of Bruce’s most loyal and vocal champions.

The prolific writer, jazz critic, and co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine Ralph J. Gleason was writing for the jazz publication Down Beat, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, and the entertainment industry’s Variety magazine at the time. He recalls the word-of- mouth publicity in the jazz scene that first alerted him to Bruce’s existence: “It was the phone call from his Alto saxophonist Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, who was the first person to tell us in San Francisco about Lenny, and a year or so before he opened at Ann’s 440, when I was in L.A. along with Sol Weiss… and Saul Zaentz [of

Fantasy Records], I went out to some club on the outskirts of town to see him but he wasn’t there. He’d been fired the night before for taking his clothes off onstage.”295 The trio dismissed Bruce for some time until a “tape nut” (a lawyer-by-day, tape-recording enthusiast by night) named Wally Heider happened to catch Bruce’s act while remotely taping the Woody Herman big band’s set at a Hollywood club called Peacock Lane in

294 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 188. 295 Gleason, Music in the Air, 193.

117 January of 1958.296 Shortly after, Heider sent Gleason the recording of the “unknown and hysterically funny comedian.”297 Perhaps because of the crass earlier first impression,

Gleason did not immediately listen to the recording, but when he heard Bruce would be playing at Ann’s, he gave the comic a second chance and finally listened to the tape. What was Gleason’s experience of listening to the tape? He writes, “I fell out. No other way to describe it. I could not believe what I heard. It is hard now to appreciate how wildly exciting his original things were because in the sixteen years since, so many taboos have been lifted and so many comedians… have rushed through the doors Lenny opened…”298

Heider’s tape and Dee’s endorsement opened Bruce to a network of writers and cultural figures who further opened doors for Bruce beyond San Francisco. Gleason sent the Heider tape to a critic and jazz writer in New York, Ira Gitler, who Gleason believed would “dig it, not just because of the jazz references in it, but because Ira was himself a student of humor, especially Yiddish humor…”299 Gitler “played that tape for everybody in New

York. There was a command performance of Ira and the tape at the home of Dorothy

Kilgallen, then a leading columnist,300 and Ira even played it for prospective employers, nightclub owners…”301 The tape would anticipate the popular stand-up comedy records of the 1960s, that functioned both as home entertainment (bringing nightclub entertainment

296 Wally Heider went on to become a great recording engineer. He opened the Wally Heider Studios in 1969, recording studio to Jefferson Airplane, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, and many others. Recording Wally Heider website, wallyheider.com. Accessed May 15, 2017. 297 Gleason, Music in the Air, 193-4. 298 Gleason, Music in the Air, 194-5. 299 Gleason, Music in the Air, 195. 300 Kilgallen was a Broadway columnist and panelist on the hit television game show What’s My Line. She was later called to testify as an expert witness for one of Bruce’s obscenity trials, and she spoke in favor of him and his work, as she was asked about subjects like “community standards” and “literary value.” 301 Gleason, Music in the Air, 195.

118 to the home) 302 and a publicity mechanism (getting audiences to go to the club to see the live act).303

In San Francisco, Gleason first went to see Bruce live at Ann’s with Lou Gottlieb (who would later form the folk music group The Limeliters), and after hearing Bruce’s bits

“Religions, Inc.”, “Fat Boy”, bits about Eisenhower, Hitler, satires on commercials, and commentary on the news of the day, he wrote a review in Variety praising Bruce for his

“attacks on the pompous, the pious, and the phony in American culture… a good bet for any jazz club in the country… his humor is right out of a road band sideman’s perspective and delivered in a heterogeneous mixture of underworld argot, hipster’s slang, and show business patter…” 304 Similarly, columnist Herb Caen stated in the San Francisco

Chronicle: “They Call LB a sick comic—and sick he is. Sick of the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful… [there are] egos that need deflating…”305 In Chicago during February 1959, radio host Studs Terkel for WFMT described Bruce as one of the most irreverent but deft comedians of the year.306 Gleason notes that between “the leading columnist in the city, [who] plugged him frequently and the word-of-mouth plugs on radio shows, all combined to fill the club.”307

302 Smith, Spoken Word, 158. 303 Goldman writes: “This was the age of the comedy album. No longer a dumb ‘party record’--a couple of little bits squeezed onto a ten-inch 78--the new comedy LP’s were heavy-selling home entertainment. Served up on platters, Jonathan Winters, Nichols and May, Tom Lehrer, and Shelley Berman found a vast new living- room hi-fi audience… Records were really great because they got you into places where no comic could ever stretch. They let you work the middle-class living room, the college dorm, the Bohemian-Beatnik pad. People played them over and over again, until they really heard what you had to say. Records were the greatest advance publicity and audience-building device that had ever been invented.” Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 205-6. 304 Gleason, Music in the Air, 195-6. 305 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 210. 306 Kitty Bruce, The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce: From the private collection of Kitty Bruce (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984), 15. 307 Gleason, Music in the Air, 196.

119 It was in this era that Hugh Hefner saw Bruce at Ann’s and subsequently invited him to perform in Chicago (later, Hefner invited Bruce to serialize his autobiography in Playboy and appear on his late night TV show, Playboy’s Penthouse). Like Heider, Hefner had

Bruce’s performances taped, allowing him to share his excitement “with other liberated, fun-loving minds. Word got around quickly, and soon enough Lenny was gigging before enthusiastic crowds at Mister Kelly’s and performing twice at the Trade Winds.”308 Bruce’s audience was frequently comprised of a mix of jazz musicians, hipsters, “night people,” beat poets, prostitutes, college professors and students, comics, black celebrities, newspaper reporters, intellectuals, homosexuals, and “seminarians and clerics who wanted to hear the satire on organized religion.”309

Through the enthusiasm of community leaders, writers, and jazz scenesters, Bruce’s comedy was circulated and amplified in a circuit of avant garde and high profile nightclubs.

Dee and Hefner’s endorsements, Heider’s and Hefner’s tapes, and the laudatory reviews of

Gleason, Gitler, and Terkel, lent credibility to the fledgling comic and generated publicity that would help to pack Bruce’s live shows. Bruce officially moved up to a higher echelon of performance, boosting his pay, prestige, and visibility, leading to what many see as the peak of his career with his sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in 1961. Leaders in various cultural communities boosted Bruce’s reputation in the domain of live performance, and comedy records would further bring Bruce to the record-listening public.

308 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 141. 309 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 40-1.

120 Fantasy Records

Fantasy was a small jazz label founded in 1949 by Max and Sol Weiss in San Francisco

(about 20 minutes away from Ann’s 440), and the company gained its initial success when they teamed up with Dave Brubeck to distribute some of Brubeck’s earlier recordings.310

Under Brubeck’s influence, the company began pressing records for other prominent West

Coast musicians, including Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Cal Tjader, and Vince Guaraldi.311

At the time of their inception, San Francisco was not a major center for recording artists –

Hollywood and NYC housed many of the major labels – so Fantasy stood as one of the few San Francisco labels available for local artists.312 Live venues and informal jazz- friendly spaces were critical to the character of Fantasy’s early jazz albums and Fantasy’s professional networks. For instance, the Weiss brothers had a stake in the North Beach jazz venue the Blackhawk, a “distinctively San Franciscan center of modern jazz,”313 and also built their relationships with jazz musicians at a local Italian restaurant called Original Joe’s where Max Weiss lunched for several decades,314 making deals with the jazz musicians who hung out there daily.315 The neighborhood was integral to the scene.

310 As important as Fantasy was for recording local and niche performers, the company was not without controversy. When Brubeck agreed to work with the Weiss brothers, he originally believed his collaboration with Fantasy was more substantial, that he was half-owner of Fantasy. Later, he learnt his contract only entitled him to half-interest in his own master recordings. “Early on he had served as a musical director of sorts to the label, encouraging the Weisses to record Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Red Norvo, and others. Only after the company’s rise to success did he learn that he had no financial stake in the success of these releases. Even as to his own recordings, Brubeck was often kept in the dark by the Weiss brothers. Not only would they release projects without his approval, but they went so far as to record performances without his permission. At the Blackhawk they resorted to wiring microphones through the ventilation system into a mobile recording unit parked outside, all without Brubeck’s knowledge. Such goings-on made his move to a major label all but inevitable.” Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern jazz in California, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95. 311 Hank Bordowitz, Bad Moon Rising: The unauthorized history of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Chicago Il.: Chicago Review Press, 2007), 21. 312 “Local Label Builds Acts, But…” Billboard Vol 79, No. 18 (May 6, 1967), 32. 313 Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz, 66. 314 Bordowitz, Bad Moon Rising, 22. 315 Gioia, West Coast Jazz, 63.

121

Saul Zaentz, who’d been an assistant to jazz impresario and founder of Verve Records,

Norman Granz, joined Fantasy in 1955 and later took the company over from the Weiss brothers as president in 1967. Zaentz recalls that, like the Weiss brothers, he was invested in “recording adventure-some new artists no one else would gamble on,”316 “the kind of jazz we liked, even if it didn’t sell.” 317 In the late 1950s, this risk-taking attitude began to extend to spoken word performers, but they seem to have been discerning and deliberate in their dealings with controversial artists, exercising caution when they introduced controversial and potentially offensive material to home audiences.

Max and Sol Weiss learned of Bruce from Wally Heider’s recording and, like Gleason, went to see Bruce perform at Ann’s 440.318 According to writer William Karl Thomas, who teamed up with Bruce on three screenplays, initially, the Weiss brothers did not want to sign Bruce because his comedy was “too brief, too nebulous, too controversial.”319 Thomas then taped Bruce’s act and discovered the jokes were only around 30 seconds each, after which Thomas helped Bruce script the routines into longer pieces by taking one-liners and extending them, or by connecting previously disparate bits. 320 They worked for three months building Bruce’s bits this way so that they could be used on Bruce’s Fantasy albums.321

316 Bordowitz, Bad Moon Rising, 37. 317 Bordowtiz, Bad Moon Rising, 22. 318 Gleason, Music in the Air, 197. 319 William Karl Thomas, reflections on Lenny Bruce presented at Comedy and the Constitution: The Legacy of Lenny Bruce conference, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, October 26, 2016. 320 Thomas explains that one of Bruce’s most well-regarded and controversial bits, “Religions, Inc.,” was a one-liner that had been extended in this way. 321 Thomas, Comedy and the Constitution.

122

The tape recorder, then, functioned to aid Bruce’s career in many ways. First, the tape recorder acted as a mechanism of cultural preservation when used by Wally Heider who captured Bruce’s live material and transported it to like-minded listeners outside of the club. Second, and related to the first, the tape recorder functioned to generate publicity for

Bruce in his early career, as it produced an easy-to-share and transportable comedy tape, which doubled as a kind of informal audition tape that opened doors to certain scenes and venues. Finally, the tape recorder also functioned as a feedback mechanism allowing for the self-correction and narrative improvement of Bruce’s comedy. Bruce’s ability to play back his routines allowed him to hear and rehear his act and to compare one set against others to see what worked best and how to sew disparate bits together. In these ways, the tape recorder helped to organize cultural activity and community around Bruce, facilitated his movement through circuits of labor, and enhanced the aesthetic or formal characteristics of Bruce’s work. As we will see in later chapters, the virtue of the tape recorder would be tempered by the ways tape recordings would later work against his interests.

Once his material was more cohesive and structured, Fantasy began their work with Bruce.

While Fantasy’s contemporaneous decision to allow poet Allen Ginsberg to include offensive language in his “Howl” album322 suggests that Fantasy was not entirely averse to

322 In October of 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his iconic poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery, a moment which was considered a high point of the San Francisco Renaissance (Bill Morgan, Howl on Trial: The battle for free expression, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2007, 36). He recreated the reading at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley in March 1956, at which point a number of jazz musicians approached him with the idea of teaming up and traveling with Howl as a kind of “Jazz Mass” to be recorded by Fantasy Records (Morgan, Howl on Trial, 38). The poem, however, became embroiled in controversy in March of 1957 when federal customs officials seized hundreds of copies of the poem (published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books) on the grounds of the poem’s obscenity and indecency (Joel E. Black, “Ferlinghetti on Trial: The Howl court case and juvenile delinquency,” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 39). In

123 controversial material, they proceeded with caution in their dealings with Bruce. Perhaps testing the waters, Fantasy first offered Bruce’s tracks alongside the popular and established satirical recordings of ethnomusicologist, sound artist, and humourist Henry

Jacobs and his colleague Woody Leafer, who’d previously released an album with

Folkways Records in 1955 called Two Interviews of Our Times. The two-track album was based on Jacobs’ show called “Music and Folklore” (later renamed “Ethnic Music”) on the

Pacifica Network’s radio station KPFA in Berkeley (discussed in Chapter Four). On the radio program, Jacobs began recording satirical ethnomusicological interviews with his colleague Woody Leafer, where they mimicked Jacobs’ own music interview genre with imaginary characters like a pompous ethnomusicologist Sholem Stein who, for instance, related calypso music to Hebraic texts, and Shorty Petterstein, a spaced-out jazz musician.323 Gleason explains that Jacobs and Leafer’s original recording “was a big hit,

May 1957, the controversy went further when two police officers of the Juvenile Division of the San Francisco Police Department arrested Shigeyoshi Murao, an employee of City Lights Bookstore, for distributing obscene material, with Ferlinghetti’s arrest following a few days later (Black, “Ferlinghetti on Trial,” 27). The controversy likely put a momentary halt on Fantasy’s Ginsberg recording.

It was perhaps Judge Clayton Horn’s ruling in October 1957 that the poem “Howl” was not obscene that led the Weiss brothers at Fantasy to go ahead with recording and distributing a poem containing controversial language. In February 1958, Ferlinghetti sent a letter to Ginsberg, expressly stating that Ginsberg did not have to censor his recorded version of the poem (Morgan, Howl on Trial, 81). In 1959, Fantasy Records released “Howl and Other Poems,” and perhaps in an effort both to attract customers to the rare and risky recording, as well as to stave off any obscenity prosecutions, they included the following in their liner notes:

October 4, 1957, in the Municipal Court of San Francisco, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that HOWL is not obscene or pornographic. Judge Horn observed: ‘A work may be deemed obscene only if it intends to deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or inciting to immoral actions and there is no obscenity in a work which has ‘redeeming social importance’.’ ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ Evil to him who thinks evil.

Liner notes from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems Fantasy, 7006, 1959, LP. https://www.discogs.com/Allen-Ginsberg-Howl-And-Other-Poems/release/555164. Accessed June 25, 2017. 323 Meredith Holmgren, “Henry Jacobs: An Interview,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine (Fall/Winter 2012), http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine-fall-winter-2012-henry-jacobs-interview/sounds-humor-spoken- word/article/smithsonian. Accessed June 25, 2017.

124 but the recording business was then turning to the 12-inch Long Playing record and Fantasy wanted to flesh out the ‘Two Interviews’ with enough material to make a 12-inch album,” 324 so they made a deal with Bruce to use some of his shorter bits on the

“Interviews” reissue.325

Interviews of Our Times

The 1958 Interviews of Our Times LP combined two Jacobs and Leafer tracks with seven new Bruce recordings.326 Bruce’s tracks were taken from the recordings of multiple live shows, and Fantasy seemed to have chosen the seven Bruce bits cautiously, as they deleted lines and certain words, and chose material that was “least likely to offend the code of the day.”327 Collins and Skover note that the album was mostly “tame stuff compared to his contemporaneous acts at clubs like Chicago’s Cloister and San Francisco’s Ann’s 440 and

Facks II.”328 Fantasy’s caution, however, was warranted since only a few years had passed since record companies and distributors were being charged with obscenity,329 and Bruce

324 Gleason, Music in the Air, 197. 325 Gleason suggests that while Lenny allowed Fantasy to use some of his bits on the album, he did not want his name to be used on the cover of the “Two Interviews” album because he did not want his name to be coupled with other comics. 326 Initially, Fantasy tried to record Bruce’s tracks in their studio, but found Bruce worked best in the club where he could interact with the audience (Gleason, Music in the Air, 199). The albums were difficult to cut because of Bruce’s dynamism and improvisation. Bursting with energy and leaping around on stage, his microphone would lose Bruce’s volume (Gleason, Music in the Air, 197-8). Furthermore, Bruce’s tendency to improvise and speak to the audience (particularly when his friends were in it and he went off making inside jokes) meant that Bruce rarely did a bit the same way twice. “It took quite a while to put together the early Lenny Bruce pieces, especially the long ones. Saul Zaentz and Lenny would work for hours snipping bits from various performances and splicing them together to make the whole thing include as many of his goodies as possible. But inevitably there were things that were lost, which is why so many people who heard him do, say, Religions, Inc., remember something that is not on the final recorded version. He may only have done it once. There was really no final version” [my emphasis] (Gleason, Music in the Air, 199-200). 327 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 206. 328 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 92. 329 Smith explains that adults-only records incorporating sexually-explicit material had been available under- the-counter since at least the 1930s (Smith, Spoken Word, 9), and in the 1940s, they began gaining public notoriety. Over the 1940s, there was enhanced scrutiny over obscene phonographs, with the late 1940s seeing a peak in law enforcement activity related to these records (Smith, Spoken Word, 81). Individuals working

125 was an untested entertainer in the recording industry. While Bruce may have resented having been put on a record with other performers, it was a wise move (whether they meant it to be or not) on the company’s part. As much as Bruce was loved by a segment of the nightclub population, he was also widely regarded as offensive. By putting Bruce on an album with KPFA’s Henry Jacobs, Fantasy funnelled Bruce to a very specific and appropriate audience: people who were fans of satire, who could appreciate jazz references, and the Pacifica Radio crowd—known intellectuals who were open to cultural experimentation and free expression.

Along with channelling Bruce to jazz audiences by teaming him up with Jacobs and Leafer, the album discursively situates Bruce in the jazz scene. The liner notes 330 on the

“Interviews” album include a partially satirical jazz essay, which was published on the original “Interviews” album. Although the piece was written originally without Bruce in mind, by keeping the essay on the reissue, Fantasy aligned Bruce’s comedy with the jazz ethos and aesthetic. The essay is “penned” by Jacobs’ fictional Shorty Petterstein, who articulates commonly held beliefs about jazz: the essay characterizes jazz as a “music of protest” and notes its practitioners express the “vitality, confusion, the intellectualism and humanism of the great culture of America.” By representing the essay in relation to Bruce’s

in music shops and in radio were charged with possessing and distributing (locally or across states) “obscene” or “pornographic” recordings (Smith, Spoken Word, 81-82). However, prosecutions over obscene records seemed to have waned in the 1950s. Smith suggests, as “hard-core visual images in magazines and theatrical films were becoming more prevalent and when 8 and 16mm adult films made for home consumption were a growing concern of the U.S. Post Office, the content of these records must have seemed comparatively less prurient, not the pressing legal concern that obscene records had been a decade earlier” (Smith, Spoken Word, 87). It is perhaps for this reason that comedy records containing illicit or otherwise objectionable material could more easily fly under the radar of moral authorities in the 1950s. 330 See the liner notes in John Whiting’s “Pigs Ate my Tapes: The Aleatory World of Henry Jacobs,” My KPFA – A Historical Footnote, http://www.kpfahistory.info/dandl/jacobs.html. Accessed June 25, 2017.

126 tracks, the essay does the work of claiming Bruce as part of the jazz scene – “these are original artists, speaking in an original language, the new thoughts and ideas and feelings of a new generation…” In the context of a comedy album, the Petterstein essay operates partially ironically, reflecting the satirizing that happens on the album’s tracks about jazz, and partially sincerely, enveloping Bruce’s comedy with the rebellion and vitality associated with jazz music.

Furthermore, the liner notes claim, “This album is the first in Fantasy’s proposed Social

Study Series in which it is hoped to present in-person documented interviews and all-too- revealing vignettes with a series of representative in-group figures to give a cross-section sampling of the intricate and complicated cultural patterns of our times.” While Fantasy did not seem to market their other albums with this “Social Study Series” label, their 7000

Comedy/Spoken Word series does present the works of performers who would have reflected the “complicated cultural patterns” of the time—the poetry readings of Kenneth

Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg, along with other (potentially offensive) Bruce records, and the harsh social and political indictments characteristic of

Mort Sahl’s comedy. It is within this discourse of Bruce’s social significance that Fantasy also explicitly acknowledges that some tracks may offend listeners. Each track listed is accompanied by an asterisk, where one asterisk denotes the track is “*Suitable for radio broadcasting… PLEASE!” while two asterisks warn “**Suitable for air play ONLY if station plans to terminate its broadcasting activities.” The guide playfully warns listeners of the potential offensiveness of the album tracks, but in the context of Bruce’s social significance, Fantasy suggests that the potential offenses are worthwhile, tolerable, or even

127 socially and cultural significant. The asterisk guide also signals the suitability of the material for a narrow audience,331 acknowledging that certain tracks will not only offend some members of the general public, but that the offense would be so grave that the public outcry would result in the termination of the station’s license. The “in-group” performers in Fantasy’s 7000 series are for an “in-group” audience.

In conversation with the album title, the first track on the reissued Interview of our Times is called “The Interview,” Bruce’s mock dialogue between band leader Lawrence Welk

[his name was used in the live performance but bleeped out on the album for legal reasons] looking to hire a new band member, and the interviewee, a struggling drug-addicted jazz musician. The source of humor comes from the dynamic of misunderstanding that happens between the oblivious and good-natured Welk and the spaced out, hustling jazz musician whose jazz-speak confuses Welk. In his nearly inaudible, muffled, drug-induced speech, the musician says,

Musician: “I knewww Basie before he could count, ain’t that wild? So, like,

rehlly, if you wanna do the thing… like, baby, can ya dig?”

Welk: “What the hell you talking about?!”

Musician: “Hey, really, you’re pretty wild… Hahaha. Hey I don wanna bug

you, but can I get a little bread and shrimp?”

Welk: “You’re hungry you wanna sandwich?”

331 In this way, the album follows Smith’s notion of LPs as a type of “narrowcast” media. Comedy that was not permissible in broadcasting and film could find expression in “narrowcast” records. This is because the LP allows for individual electivity in home media consumption—unlike television whose content is predetermined by programmers and then “flows” into the home, records require that the consumer choses the content he listens to from a range of possibilities (Smith, Spoken Word, 3).

128 Musician: “Nahaa, man, I want some money.”332

“The Interview,” Fantasy’s introduction to Bruce, articulates several characteristic qualities of Bruce humor, as it draws on jazz and entertainment references, mobilizes

Bruce’s impersonations in a verbal vignette, and signals Bruce’s alliance with drugs and hustling. The subversive character of this joke seems almost imperceptible from a contemporary perspective, but contextualizing this joke in its historical moment sheds some light on its moral and political work. The mass media industry codes in the 1950s specifically demanded that drugs and criminals not be idealized in any way, that wrong- doing and sin were forbidden, that media should be wholesome, in good-taste, and that it should uplift or expand the horizons of its audience. Bruce transgressed those ideals, presenting the hustler junkie as the protagonist of the joke and positioning the good- natured, mass-media friendly Welk as the object of ridicule. In this way, the joke reflects one of Bruce’s most common practices, and one of his most significant cultural interventions—the tendency to invert or complicate traditional objects of humor. In

Bruce’s joke, the source of laughter is Welk’s naivety and trusting nature, while the junkie musician, having scammed Welk into giving him some money and a job, comes out the victor. This inversion of objects of humor (instead of laughing at the “criminal,” you laugh at the “victim”) was common in Bruce’s comedy. In inverting or complicating objects of humor, Bruce subtly challenged the moral codes of his day, and Fantasy’s record produced a media object whose moral content defied film and broadcasting codes.

332 Lenny Bruce, “The Interview,” Interviews of Our Times, Fantasy, 7001, 1958, LP. Transcribing this dialogue (and many other Bruce jokes) into print in an effort to communicate Bruce’s humor feels largely like a futile task since much of the humor comes how Bruce embodies his characters. Furthermore, listening to his references out of context means that the humor is likely lost for newer listeners.

129 Other tracks on this first album are less invested in moral inversions, and instead showcase

Lenny Bruce’s ludicrous imagination: there is “Djinni in the candy store” about an old

Jewish shopkeeper finding a genie in a bottle; “Enchanting Transylvania,” Bruce’s take on

Dracula as a traveling “bepopper” musician who struggles to “brrring home a little bread” for his wife and kids. Some jokes present soft satires of cultural genres, like “The March of High Fidelity” which pokes fun at the fetishism of the new national “danger” of “high- fi nuts,” or “Father Flotski’s Triumph,” a satire on prison riot films that includes an openly gay convict who, in the midst of the prison riot, attempts to negotiate for a “gay bar in the

West Wing” (a concept that Gleason called “incredible in those days”).333 Fictionalization and cultural satire, then, were the qualities that linked Bruce’s tracks with Jacobs and

Leafer’s tracks on Interviews of Our Times, the “in-group” record that catered to the specific humor of people in the jazz and hi-fi scenes, and whose social significance came from the alternative humor of West coast satirists. Instead of the comedic monologues and stream-of-consciousness style that the “new wave” of comics were well known for, the jokes on this album are mostly vignettes playing out Bruce’s idiosyncratic and cinematic fantasies. Bruce’s solo albums would further showcase the kinds of social (and personal) indictment, and confessional commentary that he was especially renowned for.

The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce

In 1959, a Time Magazine article entitled “The Sickniks” characterized the new breed of nightclub humor in the following way: “What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide... jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly

333 Gleason, Music in the Air, 212.

130 disturbing hostility toward all the world.”334 The personas and objects of criticism of the new comics came in all different forms. Joan Rivers early on spent time lampooning gender norms and expectations placed on young women when it came to issues like marriage and beauty. Shelley Berman, once described as a “Cheerful Sufferer” says of his act, “My whole act is confession... Every word I say, I’m admitting something.”335 The sense of

Berman’s suffering, Nachman observes, “was tied to his Jewishness: ‘A comic may not be

Jewish, but if he suffers in his comedy, he’s in the Jewish category. Every misfortune carries the same intensity of grief—losing a nickel or losing the girl.’”336 The performance of interior states, confession, personal narratives, and subject position became central to the new style of comedy.

Bruce, however, resented the “sick” label along with claims that his comedy was tasteless and offensive, leading him to frequently expound on the concept of “offensiveness” (and later “obscenity”) in his act. But in 1959, he momentarily attempted to reclaim and capitalize on the term “sick” when Fantasy released his first album, The Sick Humor of

Lenny Bruce. Ralph Gleason wrote the liner notes for this (and many subsequent) albums, once again aligning Bruce with the jazz scene. In his description, Gleason (with a heavy hand) draws comparisons between the artistic legitimacy and liberating spirit of both jazz and Bruce’s humor as he writes:

Bruce’s whole orientation is that of the jazz musician and knowing this is

fundamental to understanding and appreciating Bruce’s humor. Like the jazz

334 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 68. 335 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 296-301. 336 Nachman, Seriously Funny, 301.

131 musician’s view, Bruce’s comedy is a dissent from a world gone mad. To him

nothing is sacred except the ultimate truths of love and beauty and moral

goodness—all equating honesty. And like a jazz musician he expects to see

these things about him in the world in a pure form. He takes people literally

and what they say literally and by the use of his searing imagination and

tongue of Fire, he contrasts what they say with what they do. And he does this

with the sardonic shoulder-shrug of the jazz man. He is colossally

irreverent—like a jazz musician. His stock in trade is to violate all the taboos

out loud and to say things on stage (and on this LP) which would get your

nose bashed in at a party… It’s ribald. Yes, and even sometimes rough. But

it’s real... He’s a verbal Hieronymus Bosh [sic] in whose monologue there is

the same urgency as in a Charlie Parker chorus and the same sardonic vitality

in his comments as in Lester Young’s reflections on a syrupy pop tune. The

jazzman may be anti-verbal, as Kenneth Rexroth says, if so, he has Lenny

Bruce to speak for him with power.

By Ralph J. Gleason—Editor of JAZZ337

Like the jokes on Interviews, The Sick Humor also features a number of verbally cinematic scenes, but what’s new with this album is that more sensitive issues are tackled and the potential to offend is clear right away.

337 Ralph Gleason’s liner notes from the Lenny Bruce LP The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce Fantasy, 7003, Jan. 1959, LP.

132 The first joke, “Non Skeddo Flies Again” is a scene based on the events surrounding a man named John Graham who blew up a plane with 40 people in it, including his mother (he was allegedly after her insurance money). Bruce says, “For this, the state sent him to the gas chamber, proving… actually… that the American people are losing their sense of humor.” He goes on. “If you just think about it, anybody who blows up a plane with 40 people… can’t be all bad.” He plays out the scene between John and his mother, who drops her off for the flight saying, “Listen ma, you have a pleasant trip. And I’ll see you around…

If you believe.” Like in the first album, much of the joke plays out an imaginary dialogue between two incompetent (one of them drunk) pilots who try to figure out how to avoid being blamed for the fact that people are “falling out of the plane.” The difference, of course, comes in the fact that his ludicrous scene was built on real events.

Immediately, the track demonstrates why so many viewed Bruce’s humor to be offensive, as Bruce took a horrific contemporary event (Graham was executed in 1957) and makes light of it without any regard to the innocent people affected. Bruce was often considered a “surgeon with a scalpel for false values,” but on the recorded version of this joke, there is no great social revelation (the way there are with many other jokes). There is absurdity and some taboo-breaking, but not a developed social or political commentary. Bruce creates an absurd situation – a dialogue between entirely incompetent pilots who do not know what an airplane wing is called – and heightens the absurdity of the situation using

Graham’s mass murder to furnish the content of the joke. He once said, “I see things in a ludicrous sense, and I report that kind of scene.”338 It is not difficult to see why people

338 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 59.

133 would think this joke is in poor taste, particularly since only months had separated the execution of Graham and Bruce’s public performances of this joke. But the placement of this joke as the first track on the “Sick” album is meaningful. The use of the verbal vignette connects this album to what had come before in “Interviews,” but it also opens the audience to the fact that this album is different in that it takes up sensitive contemporary affairs in a way many people will find offensive. If the use of the words Sick Humor did not ward off the apprehensive listener, there’s a good chance that the first track would.

The second track, “The Kid In the Well,” gives a better sense of why commentators hailed

Bruce as a satirist who wanted his audiences to learn to be offended by the “right” things.

He begins,

You really feel like doctors are really good. And I do feel that way,

everybody’s got that image that the doctor is nice, ya know. And it is the

truth… [pause]

What bugs me is… now, this is what I call over-emotionalism. There’s a kid

who’s stuck in a well and the headlines screamed for six days “Child Trapped

in Well: Nation Awaits in Vigil.” In the meanwhile, you can go into any

cosmopolitan city and still see in the Classifieds, “Orientals May Buy Here,”

“Negroes May Buy Here,” and one schmuck gets stuck in a well and

everybody stays up for a week. Oh by the way, they got this kid out of the

well, and the doctors sent a bill. Everybody flipped, ya know.” [He puts on

134 an incensed voice] “Is that doctor kiddin’? That fruit. What a rat”… it brought

so much heat on the AMA…

The joke goes on to play out an imaginary scene in which the doctor who saved the child from the well is incensed by the fact that he hasn’t been paid for his services, while another doctor attempts to console him by reminding that, “next year, we’ll come up with a new disease and that’s it… think long range now.” Bruce cuts to another scene: “‘We’ve got some of the board guys here. Tell us, what have you got this summer? Can you come up with a new disease this year?’ ‘Well, we’ve been working hard, we’re thinking of switching

‘The Grip.’” And the board goes on to figure out how to profit off the new disease.

Immediately into the joke, Bruce presents a trademark attack on figures (doctors) and values (sympathetic concern for others) that are held in high esteem. His first comment draws attention to what he sees as the peculiarity or hypocrisy of the nation’s widespread sense of empathy which chooses, on the one hand, to claim care for the life of an innocent child, at the same time that it can, on the other hand, be so numb to systemic racism, a racism that is so pronounced and ubiquitous that stores have to specifically indicate when they are not racist (or at least, not racist enough to turn away business). The joke then turns the lens on the respected profession of medicine, exposing profit-seeking doctors as hucksters, as well as attempted to implicate audience members in systemic racism by criticizing the selective empathy that people apply when exhibiting care for others.339

339 Bruce regularly incorporated racial commentary into his act. He once wrote, “The only things that I feel very strongly about--and I’ll attack them through satire--are some principles of American heritage that I’m very proud of, and things that I think we’re losing sight of, such as integration--which I’m very interested in and feel is very important…” (Lenny Bruce quoted in Kitty Bruce’s Almost Unpublished, 17).

135 Following this, there’s an absurd joke called “Hitler and the M.C.A.” which imagines a

Hollywood-styled talent agency seeking out their next dictator. Then “Ike, Sherm, and

Nick” takes up a political bribery scandal. Bruce moves onto a comedic poem laced with

Freudian terms and accompanied by jazz instrumentals entitled “Psychopathia Sexualis” about a man who is in love with a horse. Finally, the album presents what Gleason calls

Bruce’s “most famous joke,”340 “Religions, Inc.” satirizing religion as big business (the first line sets the tone: “And now we go to the headquarters of Religions, Inc., where the

Dodge-Plymouth dealers have just had their annual raffle, and they have just given away a

1958 Catholic Church.”) Richard Zoglin describes the joke as Bruce’s “acid re-creation of a Madison Avenue-style meeting of evangelical leaders, [which] was a brave piece of commentary, a swipe at commercialized religion that was years ahead of its time.”341 While this joke today wouldn’t necessarily raise an eyebrow, at the time, the television industry’s

Code of Practices still ruled that “Attacks on religion and religious faiths are not allowed,”342 while the Hays Code ruled “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith.” 343 Note the use of the word “ridicule” in the second instance. These industry codes were specifically concerned with content that would promote irreverence of religion. Religious satire, which is protected by the First Amendment, was not protected in the Hays Code and was not encouraged in broadcasting. The track “Religions, Inc.” then was important as social commentary that commented on the profit-seeking and political machinations of religious institutions, but also for presenting an electronically mediated

340 Gleason, Music in the Air, 207-8. 341 Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008), 12. 342 “Seal of Good Practice,” Television History – The first 75 years, http://www.tvhistory.tv/SEAL-Good- Practice1.JPG. Accessed June 25, 2017. 343 “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code), Arts Reformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html. Accessed January 3, 2017.

136 religious satire that was prohibited by other media institutions. The record presenting religious satire, then, not only provided a moral and discursive counterpoint to film and broadcasting, but further, implicitly carried the logic that media can and should be used for constitutionally protected (even if offensive) speech. If mass media would only capture and circulate a limited range of moral material, niche albums would capture the remainder, opening audiences to a greater plurality of thought, speech, and positions.

The next albums, I am Not a Nut, Elect Me! (1960) and American (1961) are even more bare in their cultural criticisms, with bits like “The Steve Allen Show” in which Bruce praises Allen but criticizes the network for censoring his piece about how Bruce wasn’t allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery because of his tattoos. The censors argued “it’s definitely offensive to the Jewish people,” and upon further reflection, noted it was

“definitely offensive to the Gentile people, too.” On the track “The Tribunal,” Bruce reflects upon the gross disparity in salaries between school teachers and entertainers, and then criticizes the Time magazine article that characterized Bruce as a “sick” comic, saying

“That’s the kind of sick material that I wish Time would have written about. I’m not that much of a moralist. If I were, I’d be donating my salary, then, to school teachers… I’m a hustler, as long as they give, I’ll grab!... But I know that someday there’s going to be a tribunal. We’ll all have to answer, I’m sure of that. I’m just waiting for the day… [pause]

I’m saving some money to give back.” Bruce may have denied being “much of a moralist” since he lived a morally imperfect life, but his focus on moral issues in his comedy positioned him against a host of institutions, individuals, and ideals on moral grounds. His ability to observe inconsistency, hypocrisy, and cruelty made his comedy both interesting

137 and powerful. Bruce’s work, distributed through live performances in nightclubs and records, spoke to and convened the disaffected, presenting an opportunity to collectively share, and laugh over, discontent.

For Jacob Smith, the position of Bruce and his audiences against dominant structures of morality and belief suggest Bruce’s audience made up a counterpublic. Referencing

Michael Warner’s work on counterpublics, 344 Smith writes, “LPs by edgy nightclub comics, with their use of Yiddish slang, profanity, drug references, and verboten political sentiments, invited their listeners to consider themselves to be part of a counterpublic and so must have provided a sense of transgression and fostered a certain niche affinity among record owners.”345 The fact that Lenny Bruce initially rose to fame through the word-of- mouth reviews and the non-commercial recordings circulated within a small cultural community dedicated to jazz, beatnik literature, and avant garde performance in some way supports this idea that Bruce’s listeners were positioned (at least temporarily) in a relation of opposition or difference to the general public. While I agree that audiences and consumers of the “new wave” of comedy represent people united by an ability to laugh at

(what media codes suggested was) the un-laughable, the concept of the counterpublic suggests membership to a group and a field of activity through which members operate as

344 Warner writes: “some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative disposition or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status… [Unlike a subculture,] A counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography but mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like.” Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002), 56. 345 Smith, Spoken Word, 161.

138 active citizens engaged in the process of meaning-making. Bruce’s comedy did not prescribe a set of beliefs or models of action by which his listeners could live. What his comedy, in live spaces and records, allowed for at a collective level was a melting away of common sense and moments to revel in chaos—temporary affective disinvestments in order and propriety that individual audience members may have returned to once the show or album ended. Although Bruce and other comics may not have directly convened counterpublics, they influenced the humor, ideas, discourse, and narrative styles of those who belonged to counterpublics (see my discussion of the Pacifica Network).

Frank Offender: Private words in public places

While a position of difference and the mode of indictment were common among the new wave of standup comics, Collins and Skover suggest that Bruce’s articulation of “private” ideas in his comedy made Bruce especially interesting: Bruce “gave public voice to [the audience’s] most guarded thoughts about religion, prejudice, sex, and violence. He violated taboos with murderous impunity. There was never a safe seat in the house, no place for the detached observer to avoid the shock of recognition.”346 Implicating himself in his social critiques, Lenny Bruce stated “my humor is mostly indictment” but reflexively added “I am part of everything I indict.”347 Bruce suggests that his moral imperfection is shared among even the most respectable, stating:

I spent four battle years in the Mediterranean and saw starving priests, doctors

and judges. I saw ethics erode, again, according to the law of supply and

346 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 18. 347 Ibid.

139 demand. So I am not offended by war in the same way that I am not offended

by rain. Both are ‘motivated’ by need… War spells out my philosophy of ‘No

right or wrong’—just ‘Your right, my wrong’—everything is subjective.348

The point of Bruce’s ridicule, however, was not for the sake of cruelty. Writing for Time,

Richard Corliss observes, “In his satire he aimed up, at the powerful, not down, at the pitiful. He often made himself and his weaknesses the subject of his comedy. His material wasn't mean...” 349 Corliss recalls a 1959 interview for which Paul Krassner asked, “Do you think there's any sadism in your comedy?” to which “Lenny recoiled. ‘What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I—well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a brass buckle.’”350 Emphasizing the general centerlessness from which he engaged in moral attacks, Bruce stated he did “satire for satire’s sake. With the exception of a very few situations, I have no messages… I have no political leanings whatsoever. And when I do a satire, it’ll just be fun for fun’s sake.”351

Something he did fight adamantly for, however, was the ability to be transparent in his reflections on his life: “Let me tell you the truth… The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie someone gave the people long ago…. We’re all hustlers. We’re all as honest as we can afford to be.”352 The ability to use language as it is

348 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 65. 349 Richard Corliss, “A Tribute to Lenny Bruce,” Time, August 10, 2006, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1225432-1,00.html. Accessed January 5, 2017. 350 Corliss, “A Tribute to Lenny Bruce.” 351 Kitty Bruce, The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce, 17. 352 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 19.

140 rather than as it should be was a significant part of reflecting the truth of his way of being and of his life.

In his autobiography, Bruce wrote,

The way I speak, the words with which I relate are more correct in effect than

those of a previous pedantic generation. If I talk about a chick onstage and

say, ‘She was a hooker,’ an uncontemporary person would say, ‘Lenny Bruce,

you are coarse and crude.’ ‘What should I have said?’ ‘If you must be specific,

you should have said ‘prostitute.’’ ‘But wait a minute; shouldn’t the purpose

of a word be to get close to the object the user is describing?’

Bruce’s use of coarse language was not typically in the service of a cheap laugh,353 but instead, a critical device required for his narrative style and performance of realness. In insisting on using the language of a “contemporary” person, Bruce enacted an idea expressed eloquently by George Orwell: “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”354 Collins and Skover suggest that Bruce believed “Social conventions of speech sheltered the lies; vulgarity, by contrast, outed them; it served up life in its raw and raunchy form... ‘He hated hypocrisy,’ Harry Kalven Jr. —one of Lenny’s lawyers—

353 In a conversation with Hugh Heffner, Bruce stated, “I would never satirize the obvious.” “Playboys’ Penthouse 1959 part 2,” YouTube video, from a program televised on October 24, 1959, posted by “Julia PlanetDisco,” September 26, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YozfGIjwaLU&list=PLIpfxzSZmFF96aNhY58aN8- d6xJtuLu7R&index=2. Accessed June 25, 2017.

354 George Orwell, Books v. Cigarettes (London: Penguin, 2008), 25.

141 remarked, ‘he was almost insanely honest.’”355 Frank speech and pointed reflections on the hypocrisy of noble figures and institutions were integral to his work—speaking in this way on the heels of an era that was so guarded about language that “alley cat” was forbidden in film, many saw Bruce as revolutionary. These qualities of his performance are also what made his work political.

In an exchange between Walter Cronkite and Jules Feiffer a few weeks after Lenny’s death,

Cronkite wrote, “I happen to think that the sickness of Lenny Bruce was his compulsion to destroy a great deal which might have been good with a heavy larding of material that, again by my standards, was horrible.”356 This “compulsion to destroy a great deal which might have been good” was at the heart of Bruce’s perceived offensiveness, particularly in relation to a media culture that had been dedicated to bolstering Victorian ideas about “the good.” Over the course of his career, many people did not interpret Bruce’s comedy as socially or culturally valuable, seeing him only as offensive. Gene Knight of the Journal-

American called him “obnoxious [and] arrogant,” while Billboard described Bruce as a

“vulgar, tasteless boor.”357 Patrons frequently walked out of his shows and he was barred from performing in the UK and Australia.

355 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 21. We have to take this claim with a grain of salt. While Bruce’s performances were certainly candid, autobiographical, and confessional, he was not necessarily an entirely forthcoming person. For instance, in 1951, he stole a priest’s clothing and pretended he was a priest, soliciting donations for his fictitious organization, the “Brother Mathias Foundation”—a scam he was arrested for shortly after. “Biography,” The Official Website of Lenny Bruce, http://lennybruce.org/about/. Accessed June 25, 2017. 356 Walter Cronkite letter to Jules Feiffer, addressed September 5, 1966. Housed in the Jules Feiffer papers at the Library of Congress. Displayed as part of the Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture exhibit at the Library of Congress. Ongoing exhibition opened June 11, 2010. 357 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 276.

142 Film and broadcasting had accepted and systematized codes of good practice that were drawn, in large part, by religious and political leaders who were trying to shape media in a way that would move the population toward what it “should” have been spiritually, lifting the American public out of what it actually was. But the nation was developing in more ways than mainstream media reflected. The Hays Code had outlawed depictions of homosexuality (along with even more explicit references to heterosexuality), as well as

“miscegenation,” profanity, sympathy for criminals, drug-use, and ridicule of the clergy and the institution of marriage.

At the same time that the Code was in effect, the Kinsey Reports debunking myths about sexuality were published in 1948 and 1953. Segregation was being challenged with the

Montgomery Bus Boycott occurring in 1955 and 1956, interracial relations were common in the jazz scene, and the beatniks wrote about homosexual encounters and drug-induced spiritual awakenings. Looking at Bruce’s roster of jokes, one might even guess that he had acquired a copy of the Hays Code and wrote all of his jokes in disdain for its principles.

Bruce used the stage to point out the flaws and hypocrisy of Hollywood, religious institutions, the state, and to ridicule common attitudes toward health, sex, and everyday ways of behaving. He insisted on undermining the mores and ideals people held on a pedestal, showing how instead they were riddled with flaws and far from fallible.

The moral ambiguity underlying Bruce’s material provoked strong audience reactions.

Kenneth Tynan358 notes: “I saw him at the Duane four times, with four separate groups of

358 Tynan was an English theater critic for the Observer and the literary manager for the British National Theatre. He has been credited with having helped to “redefine British theatre” in the mid-20th century, and

143 friends. Some found him offensive—a reaction they smartly concealed by calling him boring. Others thought him self-indulgent, because he felt his way into the audience’s confidence by means of exploratory improvisation, instead of plunging straight into rehearsed routines. Among my guests, he was not universally liked…” 359 Most performances were met with the protests of at least a few offended customers.360

Despite the negative reviews, Tynan reflects that by the end of Bruce’s show in London,

“there was little room for doubt that he was the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language our inhibited island had ever hired to beguile its citizens.”361 Bruce’s explicit speech and candor on the subjects of pornography and drugs, along with his improvisational style and irreverent humor led Tynan and his colleagues to conclude that

“We were dealing with something formerly unknown in Britain: an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private.”362 Noting the purposefulness of this outspokenness, Tynan concludes that Bruce “is extremely funny… But he is seldom funny without an ulterior motive. You squirm as you smile… Bruce is the sharpest denter of taboos at present active in show business. Alone among those who work the clubs, he is a true iconoclast.” This

is known for criticizing the traditions of “minor thrillers and country-house comedies” and for encouraging works that touched on human pain and social issues. Michael Billington, “Obituary: Kenneth Tynan,” The Guardian, Monday, September 24, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/arts/critic/feature/0,,567652,00.html. Accessed January 5, 2017

His column in the Observer from 1954-1963, “became an indispensable part of the theatre’s renewed urge to address social issues.” Michael Billington, “T is for Kenneth Tynan,” The Guardian, April 25, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/25/modern-drama-kenneth-tynan. Accessed January 5, 2017. 359 Kenneth Tynan, “Foreword,” in Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An autobiography, viii. 360 Tynan, “Foreword,” x. 361 Tynan, “Foreword,” ix. 362 Tynan, “Foreword,” ix-x.

144 iconoclasm was in part aimed at “forc[ing] us to redefine what we mean by ‘being shocked’... we feel a twinge of recognition and personal implication.” Finally, he states,

“Where righteous indignation is concerned, we have clearly got our priorities mixed up.

The point about Bruce is that he wants us to be shocked, but by the right things; not by four-letter words, which violate only convention, but by want and deprivation, which violate human dignity.”363

The Politics of Offense

An example of this attempt to move audiences into being shocked by the right things comes through in Bruce’s criticisms of so-called “clean” comedy. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “clean” comedy was not free or empty of morality, but instead reflected moral codes that were so widely accepted that they seemed invisible. For those who lamented the gradual decline of clean comedy, Bruce observed the offensiveness of a classically “clean” comic, Henny Youngman:

He involved himself with a nightly psychodrama named Sally, or sometimes

Laura. She possessed features not sexually but economically stimulating. Mr.

Youngman’s Uglivac cross-filed and classified diabolic deformities

definitively. ‘Her nose was so big that every time she sneezed...’ ‘She was so

bowlegged that every time...’ ‘One leg was shorter than the other...’ and Mr.

Youngman’s mutant reaped financial harvest for him. Other comedians

followed suit with Cockeyed Jennies, et al., until the Ugly Girl routines

363 Tynan, “Foreword,” vii-viii.

145 became classics. I assume this fondness for atrophy gave the night-club patron

a sense of well-being.

And whatever happened to Jerry Lewis? His neorealistic impression of the

Japanese male captured all the subtleties of the Japanese physiognomy. The

buck-teeth malocclusion was caricatured to surrealistic proportions until the

teeth matched the blades that extended from Ben-Hur’s chariot.364

Clean comedy may have avoided four-letter words or disguised sexual references through innuendo, but by today’s standards, much of it would be considered offensive. In the late

1940s, “ugly women” jokes and racist jokes were par for the course in comedy. Amos N

Andy, originally a radio show from 1928 that starred white actors performing in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, was popular in the early 1950s and still syndicated up until 1966. 365 Generally, humor that “aimed down” was widely accepted. Bruce also highlighted the “sickness” of mainstream humor by calling out Time magazine: “I was labeled a ‘sicknik’ by Time magazines, whose editorial policy still finds humor in a person’s physical shortcomings: ‘Shelley Berman has a face like a hastily sculptured hamburger.’ The healthy comic would never offend… unless you happen to be fat, bald, skinny, deaf or blind. The proxy vote from purgatory has not yet been counted.”366

364 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 125-6. 365 The radio program was adapted for television and aired between 1951-1953 with black actors. While it was an important step for bringing African American actors and life in Harlem to mainstream television, the program was still based in racist assumptions and representations. For more on the debate regarding the significance of the show for racial representation, see Donna Bowman et al, “Amos ‘N’ Andy was the rare representation of black culture on 1950s TV—but at what cost?” A.V. Club, August 7, 2013, http://www.avclub.com/article/iamos-n-andy-iwas-the-rare-representation-of-black-101275. Accessed June 25, 2017. 366 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 126.

146 “Clean” humor was not devoid of moral content, but rather reflected moral standards that were so widely accepted they did not stand out to general audiences as unusual or noteworthy. When Bruce recognized the ways that more common forms of humor in his time were used in support, or stemmed out, of sexism, racism, and ableism, he was identifying affective investments—common ways of feeling that were structured by psychologies of superiority which prompted entire classes of people to believe they can and should deride their inferiors. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that, “affect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology, for it offers the possibility of a ‘psychology of belief’ which would explain how and why ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes, effective, and always to varying degrees... It is the affective investment which enables ideological relations to be internalized and, consequently, naturalized.” 367 To experience joy out of a joke based on deriding women, for instance, may not just reveal an ideological acceptance of patriarchy, but also an emotional investment in patriarchy as well. To be unmoved emotionally by an “ugly girl” joke, then, might signal affective resistance to the possibly sexist assumptions and orientations that require the joke to

“work.”

Calling attention to the sense of cruelty at the root of popular culture’s forms of humor,

Bruce criticized not just Henny Youngman, Jerry Lewis, and Time magazine for their

“sick” uses of humor, but he also denaturalized the ideological relations that made it possible for “healthy” audiences to derive joy from “atrophy,” from the shapes of bodies, from the gross caricaturization of races. The new wave of comedy helped to initiate a shift

367 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 82-3.

147 in what people laughed about, and in this way afforded or revealed differing psychologies of belief, allowing people to feel what they believed to be true, but that had otherwise been

(as Feiffer put it) unrepresented in culture. In some of the more obviously satirical pieces, the idea was to undermine those who abused power. But in other cases, the point of laughter was a release of repression, an articulation of mayhem, impropriety, and anti-social sentiment that functions to relieve internal tensions. 368 Bruce’s comedy reflected an unspoken dissatisfaction and feeling of incompatibility percolating in a segment of the

American population, including many of the nation’s women, religious figures, and youth.

Examining some of his fan letters illustrates a range of reactions Americans had to Bruce and his work.

On May 21st, 1963, Dolores Donnett of Whittier, California wrote to Bruce, noting: “It was refreshing to hear someone speak out honestly and against the myriads of hypocrites we have everywhere among us. I hope you will win your litigation369 and that you will not be harassed further.”370 Reverend Sidney Lanier expressed similar sentiments in New York

City, writing: “First I emphatically do not believe your act is obscene in intent... Clearly

368 An advertisement in the New York Times entitled “‘Sick’ humor is the Healthiest” articulates the positive valuation of the new wave of humor: “Individual man today is in a pressure chamber with the gauge continually on the rise… The often conflicting drives to be secure and be successful, to conform and to express oneself build the internal tensions… the pressure gauge rises and man needs safety valves or he will explode. Underground jokes arise with a content of cruelty whose popularity can only prove how widespread is the suppressed desire to commit mayhem… We seek others to strike out for us and a Mort Sahl and a Lenny Bruce arise to express our underground anger and help dissolve it in the acid of their wit… Such wit, with its physical mayhem, its impropriety, its outrageous exaggeration has been labelled ‘sick.’ Yet the way it brings unconscious, anti-social feelings rising to the surface to explode into relieving laughter may make it the most wholesome and healthy our age can offer. Each man, in his relations with mate, child, in-law, boss, bureaucrat, landlord, policeman or whomever, daily experiences feelings he feels he must hide.” The idea being that sick comedy brings the hidden into the open. Display Ad 336: “‘Sick’ humor is the Healthiest,” New York Times, August 27, 1961. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 369 Discussed below. 370 Fan letter from Dolores Donnett to Lenny Bruce dated May 21, 1963, located in “Fan Letters to Lenny Bruce Circa 1960-63,” Folder 8, in the Lenny Bruce Archives at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

148 your intent is not to excite sexual feelings or to demean but to shock us awake to the realities of racial hatred and invested absurdities about sex and birth and death... to move toward sanity and compassion. It is clear that you are intensely angry at our hypocrisies

(yours as well as mine) and at the highly subsidized mealy mouthism that passes as wisdom. You may show this letter to anyone you wish if it can be of help. Please call me when you come back from Chicago.”371

One fan letter to Bruce states:

Dear Mr. Bruce

I am one of your greatest admirers and have heard most of your albums. I

write some things of my own but I’m in 10th grade and have a spot in a show

at school and need something new. Please, if you get time send me some

material.

Yours Truly,

Tom Cox

P.S. Make it good and sick. (I don’t care what its about.)372

371 Fan letter from Rev. Sidney Lanier to Lenny Bruce dated January 13, 1963, located in “Fan Letters to Lenny Bruce Circa 1960-63,” Folder 8, in the Lenny Bruce Archives at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

372 Fan letter from Tom [the writing is somewhat illegible, the name may be Pam] Cox to Lenny Bruce dated April 13, 1960, located in “Fan Letters to Lenny Bruce Circa 1960-63,” Folder 8, in the Lenny Bruce Archives at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

149 Tom’s goading to “make it good and sick” was not limited to this young admirer, but was echoed in the actions of Bruce’s adult audiences and supporters who championed his comedy and spent their well-earned dollars to see him in the club or purchase his records.

Bruce’s fans were co-conspirators, invested in what Bruce thought, said, or did. Although

Bruce was liked and supported by a cross-section of comedy fans, from young American teens to religious figures to notable English theatre critics, he was still largely seen as too troublesome for mainstream media.

Mitigating Televisual Harm: Caution and Censorship on the Steve Allen Show

As Bruce became a popular entertainer in the entertainment industry, the inevitable question of how he might appear on television arose. Bob Hope was a Bruce fan who attended many of his nightclub performance, but when Bruce asked to be on Hope’s show,

Hope rejected him, saying “Lenny, you’re for educational TV.”373 Pat Weaver, who created

Your Show of Shows and many other NBC programs, and who held many prominent TV industry positions including president and chair of NBC from 1949-1956, once saw a

Lenny Bruce TV pilot and said “He’s brilliant but TV is not ready for him at this time.”374

Ed Sullivan did consider bringing Bruce onto his show, but would only do so if he received an exact copy of the script Bruce would use on the show, which Bruce is said to have refused.375

373 Quote from Richard Zoglin in an interview by Bruce Handy, “How Bob Hope—Yes, That Bob Hope— Made the World Safe for David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Will Ferrell, and Jonah Hill,” Vanity Fair, November 14, 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/11/bob-hope-richard-zoglin-interview. Accessed June 25, 2017. 374 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 225. 375 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 16.

150 Steve Allen, however, fought his own staff to bring Bruce onto the Steve Allen Show, going so far as to tell them that if Bruce was turned down, there would no longer be a Steve Allen

Show.376 The network executives reluctantly complied, on the basis that Bruce submit a script, that they be able to censor material, and that Bruce meet with the Standards and

Practices department beforehand. On April 5, 1959,377 Allen introduced Bruce live to the television-watching public with opening words that attempted to mitigate trouble. He stated:

We get a great deal of mail from our viewers commenting on our sketches,

indicating their likes and dislikes, and whether you realize it or not, there is

just about no joke or sketch, particularly of a satirical sort, that will not

offend somebody… Here is how we are going to face the problem--we have

decided that once a month we will book a comedian who will offend

everybody… Then we’ll get it all over with, see? A man who will disturb a

great many social groups--I’m serious--his satirical comments refer to many

things not ordinarily discussed on television; it serves you right. That way

the NBC mail department will know in advance that complaints are coming

in, they hire a few extra girls, and they get the answers ready—“We’re very

sorry, we didn’t mean a thing”--and the whole thing is handled with neatness

and dispatch. So, ladies and gentlemen, here is the very shocking comedian,

376 Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 226. 377 A brief summary of the episode can be found on The Paley Center’s website: “Steve Allen Show, The {Lenny Bruce, The Three Stooges} (TV),” The Paley Center for Media, https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=Lenny+Bruce&p=1&item=T81:0830. Accessed June 25, 2017.

151 the most shocking comedian of our time, a young man who is skyrocketing

to fame, Lenny Bruce!378

For a moment, Allen broke the frame of his show as entertainment, making clear the institutional machinations that function to correct the problems of content. This transparency allowed Allen to put a pause on the typical process by which television offends and audiences respond in outrage, as his opening lines attempted to cover his audiences with a kind of moral anaesthetic in order that they might receive the potentially uncomfortable but culturally important comedy of Lenny Bruce.

Dropping his voice an octave to harness the tenor of a staid newscaster, Bruce opened his set with a nod to the recent marriage between Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher with the line, “Will Elizabeth Taylor become bar mitzvahed?” After a bit of audience laughter, he cut in with the comment, “No, I promised continuity I’d behave myself,” a statement that implicitly recognizes the power of jokes (about inter-ethnic marriage) to offend. He then went on to address Allen’s prefatory comments about the growing charges around Bruce’s controversial humor. He first highlighted the hypocrisy of those who charged him with

“bad taste,” stating these are the same people who eat at restaurants that reserve the right to refuse service to customers (based, he implies, on race). He went on to amuse the audience with a bit about how he started “being offensive” early on in life as a schoolboy, when, at “seven or eight years old, I’d really get juiced”:

378 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 227.

152 ‘Offend.’ There’s a funny term. There’s semantics. There are words that

offend me. Let’s see. ‘Governor Faubus,’379 ‘segregation’ offend me, night-

time television offends me. [He pauses]. Some night-time television. The

shows that exploit homosexuality, narcotics, and prostitution under the

guise of helping the societal problem...

After this straightforward cultural and political critique, he moved on to an absurd cinematic bit in which he reimagined the moment at which a child discovered the narcotizing effects of airplane glue [“I’m the Louis Pasteur of junkiedom!”]. Moving on, he criticized motion pictures that “exploit race relations without ever saying anything,” which he followed with a satirical vignette of an imagined, prototypical “brotherhood” film scene. In the final bit, he drew on his real life struggles in his marriage to Harlow and, with

Allen playing the piano, Bruce sang a touching song interspersed with humorous tidbits entitled “All Alone,” an inner monologue of a divorcee struggling to validate his post- marriage life by becoming rich and successful.

In spite of his break from the discursive norms set by TV’s regulatory code, and in spite of the potential offensiveness of his comments on drugs, drinking as a child, his depiction of divorce, and his criticisms of the entertainment industry and the state, Bruce’s appearance on the Allen show was well received. In fact, the episode was enough of a success that he was invited on to the program for a second appearance on May 10, 1959.380 In 1964, at the

379 Orval Faubus was a Democratic politician who served as Governor of Arkansas (1955-1967) and became infamous when he defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling when he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from attending Little Rock’s Central High School. 380 Episode description available here: “Steve Allen Show, The {Lenny Bruce} (TV), The Paley Center for Media, https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=Lenny+Bruce&p=1&item=T:39418. Accessed June 25, 2017.

153 tail-end of his many obscenity trials and narcotics arrests, he was invited onto the show for a third appearance, 381 however, the spot was cancelled by sponsors who thought the segment offensive.

While Allen and his producers accepted Bruce’s material for the third program,

Westinghouse, the program sponsor, cancelled Bruce’s appearance. Bruce’s correspondence with Westinghouse’s attorney John Steen sheds light on what happened.

At the time, Bruce was undergoing an obscenity trial in New York City, and Westinghouse did not want him to discuss the trials on television, stating: "The Steve Allen Show and those persons responsible for producing it would be held to answer for a criminal action contempt of court." This problem would have been easily remedied by censoring Bruce’s discussion of the trials, but there also seemed to have been some additional objections over his “Lone Ranger” bit. Bruce seemed to strike Westinghouse as generally offensive. Steen wrote, “It was my responsibility to review the program prior to broadcast. In light of my

381 March 4, 1964. The Paley Centre for Media summarizes the appearance here: “A clip taken from one episode in this series of comedy/variety programs hosted by Steve Allen. Allen opens the clip by speaking at length about the controversy surrounding his next guest, comedian Lenny Bruce. Allen insists that, although Bruce uses coarse language at times, his jokes are in no way "dirty." Nevertheless, Allen states, Bruce's jokes are bound to offend a significant portion of the audience. After another warning, Allen pleads with viewers who are easily offended to leave the room for ten minutes. "Go have a beer in the backyard or kiss the kids," he suggests. "But don't write me postcards about how you didn't like what you saw. You've been warned." Allen then introduces Bruce, who ambles on stage and jokes that his only other television appearances have been on newsreels. The comedian goes on to tell a number of multi-layered jokes with religious themes. He also riffs on topics ranging from the offensiveness of the word "snot" to whether it is possible for a person to be truly selfless. After this monologue, Allen interviews Bruce. The host begins by expressing his belief that all types of people tell dirty jokes, suggesting that critics of Bruce must therefore be hypocrites. In response, Bruce insists that what concerns him is people's misinterpretation of the Constitution and the First Amendment rather than the question of whether a lot of people tell dirty jokes. "Numbers don't prove morality," he shrugs. Although Allen questions Bruce at length about his new album, "The Ballad of Dirty Lenny," Bruce concentrates on dissecting the legal charges that have been leveled against him. Commercials deleted.” “Steve Allen Show, The {Banned Lenny Bruce Clip} {The Glaser Foundation First Amendment Collection} (TV),” The Paley Center for Media, https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=Lenny+Bruce&p=1&item=T:40262. Accessed June 25, 2017.

154 experience in this field, it was my judgment that this program did not conform with our corporate standards, industry standards as expressed in the NAB code, or with the standards as established by the FCC and that, therefore, the broadcast of the program would not be in the public interest.” Here Westinghouse, a private corporation, exercised control over televised content based on their considerations of the public interest, demonstrating the power of private interests in determining the moral and political character of mass mediated television and limiting the public’s ability to access ideas. Further, the decision impinged on Bruce’s individual freedoms. Bruce’s plan had been to promote a new album The Ballad of Dirty Lenny on the episode, so Westinghouse’s decision hurt Bruce’s career, since, by this point, he was bankrupted by his various trials and from having been informally blacklisted in the nightclub circuit. Furthermore, Steve Allen was going to state on the program that Bruce was not guilty of obscenity, robbing Bruce of potential support for his cause. 382 Bruce’s suitability for television, then, was first limited, and eventually prohibited, by a narrow and predetermined notion of the “public interest.”

Playboy’s Penthouse and the Promise of Narrowcast TV

Bruce had a difficult time finding opportunities to perform openly on mainstream television, but he could speak more candidly on narrowcast television. In October 1959,

Hugh Hefner featured Bruce in the inaugural episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, a Chicago- based syndicated television show that aired between 1959 and 1961. Like variety shows from this era, Playboy’s Penthouse was filmed in a studio and featured an array of entertainers and interviews, but several features differentiated the program from other

382 Correspondence with John Steen (attorney) regarding Steve Allen Show 1964. Letter from John Steen attorney of Westinghouse to Lenny Bruce, dated March 19, 1964. BOX 16, folder 15, Lenny Bruce Archives. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

155 variety shows of the time. Unlike primetime programs that sought to entertain as large and undifferentiated an audience as possible, Playboy’s Penthouse’s main purpose was to promote the Playboy lifestyle, and catered to an idea of sophisticated, consumer-driven, urban, masculinity. Along with having incorporated the Playboy brand in the name of the show, the Playboy lifestyle was represented in the show’s set—a lush urban penthouse in which Hefner acted like a party host, who “welcomed viewers into a cocktail party in progress, attended by entertainers and celebrities and adorned by fashionable women.”383

Thompson notes that the party atmosphere was deliberately cultivated to put the guests at ease: “Guests drank full-power cocktails, hung out around the bar, or chatted on the couches in front of the fireplace.”384 With guests like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Nat

King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Dizzy Gillespie, the program also stood out from other programs for the way it integrated black and white party-goers, an innovation which caused difficulty for nationwide syndication. The show would not be picked up in, as Hefner noted, the “still-segregated South.” 385 While the program borrowed some standard TV conventions (the variety format) and shared some institutional realities with other television shows (sponsorship, broadcasting codes), Hefner’s program had a narrower reach than primetime network television—Playboy’s Penthouse was syndicated primarily to urban centers,386 and was on during the late 11:30pm slot on Saturday nights.387 This

383 Elizabeth Fraterrigo, “The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy’s Urban Lifestyle,” Journal of Urban History Vol. 34, 5 (2008): 761. 384 Ethan Thompson, “The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze: Masculinity and taste in Playboy’s Penthouse,” Television and New Media Vol. 9, 4 (July 2008): 285. 385 Thompson, “The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze,” 291. 386 One ad from 1960 indicates the program was broadcast in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Spokane, Baltimore, Kansas City, Fort Worth, Cleveland, and St. Louis (Thompson, “The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze,” 291). 387 Scheduling adult material late at night on television is similar to what later happens with freeform radio and that will happen with the FCC’s indecency ruling, both discussed below.

156 structure helped further direct Playboy’s Penthouse toward cultural “insiders” who shared a sensibility, and because of this, Bruce spoke more candidly than he could on primetime television.

In conversation with Hefner, Bruce casually broke minor TV conventions as he reflexively revealed his surprise at the fact that there’s was not a “typical fake party” on TV but instead had a “good party feeling to it.” He went on to tease his benefactor Hefner and gently ridiculed the show’s own luxury, “penthouse” premise, ironically stating, “Your viewer, suppose he can’t afford a sports car, a sports coat. Well I’ve been thinking about that... And

I’m glad you’ve got some guts. You’re not interested in people who don’t have any money.

[To the camera] You people out there are just going to have to wait ‘till your own magazine comes along.” Hefner awkwardly laughed and moved on to the question of Bruce’s thoughts on being labeled a “sick comic.” While Bruce spoke of the “sick” label as a rhetorical device used by lazy writers, his nose, serendipitously, started running. He asked for a handkerchief and wondered if he was allowed to blow his nose on television, saying

“What’s the code say?” Without expecting a real answer to the question, he then turned away from the camera and blew his nose, 388 before going on to the more substantial material of the episode.

Like in his live performances and recordings, Bruce recalled his experiences being censored by the continuity department of the Steve Allen Show. Turning to the audience, he stated, “I think that anybody who writes into anybody are whacks, nuts. Any of you people out of your skull out there who write in stations. Because I know anyone who’s got

388 This gesture was the source of negative press reviews and some audience complaints (Thompson, “The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze,” 292).

157 a function—married women with children are too busy, guys who work—so it has to be some far out wacko sitting in a furnished room with a TV set that Good Will gave him… meanwhile he’s choking pigeons... Oh, I’ve gone off on a tangent…” He went on to discuss his views on integration: “From a moral aspect, if you’re not an out-and-out integrationist, you’re an atheist because Christ and Moses were teachers, and if you keep anybody out of school for five minutes, you’re against any Christ-like concept. So, you’re an atheist.”

Along with the more spontaneous-seeming moments of conversation and self-explication,

Bruce did casually perform (sitting with drink in hand, as if he were telling jokes to friends in a home) a few of his classic bits (the “Kid in the Well” “Jewish cemetery” bits). This episode, then, did provide the audience with a kind of get-to-know-the-performer moment that you would find on a typical variety program, as well as some structured comic material, but the Playboy’s Penthouse frame and program structure allowed Bruce to bring himself and more challenging material onto the show in a way that distanced this program from typical broadcast variety shows. Penthouse presented “sick” or offensive humor widely barred from television; extended televisual discourse on what the “sick” category meant and how it was used; showed the limits of network television which disallowed Bruce from recalling a true episode from his life; and revealed problems with how network TV’s continuity departments functioned to flatten televisual material to appease audiences. In these ways, the episode revealed its cultural position in the in-between space of mass and niche culture, as it carried content aimed at a relatively narrow audience over the mass medium of television, and momentarily challenged the moral infrastructure of television by presenting home viewers with the harsh and impolite comedy of indictment that circulated behind the closed doors of the nation’s nightclubs.

158 While it was generally possible for comics to move more smoothly from the nightclub to the mass media of film and broadcasting, Bruce’s moral roots in the nightclub and jazz scenes made his remediation over television oppositional, sometimes awkward, or otherwise problematic. While Bruce found a degree of freedom performing live, through records, or by appearing on narrowcast television, the rules guiding the mass media industries structured how the American public and state authorities came to interpret and judge his work.

159 Chapter Four: Remediation In and Out of the Courtroom

This chapter examines remediation in the courtroom and the ways that the movement of content through the moral system of the court impacted how Lenny Bruce’s performances were received by judges and juries. In the Lenny Bruce trials, his bits were often communicated not through live recreations of his performances (a technically simple enough feat), but rather, brought to courtrooms through messy tape recordings and through the imperfect recollections of police officers testifying against Bruce. The decontextualization and distortion of Bruce’s work in the courtrooms contributed to inaccurate understandings of his work and significance, resulting in the criminal convictions that destroyed his career. The remediation of Bruce’s comedy, within the moral apparatus of the law, functioned to transform his speech from personal expression and entertainment to an object of legal analysis that was poorly construed through unreliable media (cops and broken tapes).

While the imperfect movement of Bruce’s comedic work into the court largely injured his career, testimonies in his defense contributed in some cases to his exoneration. For instance, when Ralph Gleason read his and other praiseworthy Bruce reviews in court, he amplified already existing opinions held by notable cultural authorities from the community. Testimony, both for and against Bruce, functioned to remediate already existing moral valuations of Bruce’s work, carrying conflicting community values from live performance scenes into the domain of law. In this way, remediation functioned to influence both formal and informal public discourse on obscenity, free speech, and the limits of expression in the 1960s.

160 Along with illustrating the legal and moral work of remediation in the courtroom, Bruce’s obscenity trials also offer an opportunity to understand the breadth of effort required to shift legal understandings around obscenity. Here, we see a network of cultural and media players come together to challenge the moral constraints imposed on American culture in the 1950s, a network that includes nightclub operators, television personalities, record company executives, and community radio broadcasters. Looking at the everyday work of, and challenges posed by, this network of largely countercultural figures shows what it took to reanimate suppressed moralities and assert First Amendment rights in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Police as Arbiters of Culture

In the same year that Bruce made his debut TV appearances as a “sick” comic, he began attracting the attention of the state. Ben Shapiro, owner of Club Renaissance in LA, was threatened in 1959 by the LAPD who warned him that if he allowed Bruce to perform at the club, “there would be much trouble.” Collins and Skover explain that after allowing

Bruce to perform, “Shapiro began receiving suspicious official notices from the Health

Department, Building and Safety Department, and even the Fire Department; the club needed ‘extended improvements immediately.’ Such costly demands could shut the place down... and they did.”389 Similarly, in 1960, a columnist complained about Bruce to the police, after which the police attended his show with a tape recorder to record Bruce’s use of “obscenities.” Having received word beforehand, Bruce performed without the use of

389 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 94.

161 off-color language, but the experience left him frustrated. After the show, Bruce complained, “It wasn’t natural… I wanted to talk to the audience like I do to my family and friends. It wasn’t honest. I don’t care for myself, but the club could lose its license if I turned on the heat.” 390 This conflict between the sincerity of his performance and protecting himself and others heightened over the coming years. The question of Bruce’s offensiveness grew from one of taste to an overtly social and legal problem in the context of shifting legal definitions of obscenity.

Between 1961 and 1965, Lenny Bruce was arrested eight times for using obscene words in his performances, and prosecuted six times across San Francisco, LA, Chicago, and New

York City. Additionally, Bruce’s offenses impacted a handful of nightclub operators, who were hassled or charged in relation to Bruce’s obscene performances. Importantly, his arrests occurred at a historic moment at which point there was no solid consensus over what obscenity actually was.

American obscenity law in the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century judged obscenity using the “Hicklin test” which stated “whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” In 1957, a new test for obscenity arose in United States v. Roth – a 1957 Supreme Court case that replaced the

Hicklin Test of obscenity with a new mode of judging offensive works, and which allowed for the publication of previously banned books. Justice William Brennan was influenced

390 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 276-7.

162 by the work of the American Law Institute, who presented a new way of determining obscenity, leading to a shift from thinking about how the work affects children to thinking about how the work, as a whole, affects adults.391 The Hicklin test relied on “the effect of an isolated excerpt” of a work “upon particularly susceptible persons.” Heins explains,

“Drawing from the ALI’s fortuitously released Model Penal Code, Brennan announced that the true test is ‘whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest,” where prurient referred to “having itching, morbid, or lascivious longings.”392 This ruling was important and useful for shifting the standards of obscenity away from measuring the nation’s cultures in relation to the intellect of children. Hicklin centered on standards relevant to adults in the community, but it opened up new conceptual problems regarding the “average person,” and “contemporary community standards.” These problematic criteria structuring the test of obscenity plagued Bruce for the rest of his career, and Bruce’s work became almost a case study around which the nation deliberated over the concept of

“obscenity.”393

Bruce’s troubles began two weeks after he was arrested for narcotics possession in

Philadelphia in the autumn of 1961, when he was arrested for using obscene words during

391 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 61-62. 392 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 64. 393 Ronald Ross was a young Deputy District Attorney in LA in the early 1960s. When Bruce was charged for the second time with obscenity for his performance at the Troubadour, the 30-year-old Ross was assigned to be the prosecutor for the second People v. Bruce trial (the first trial is discussed below). Ross’ reflection on the case demonstrates how unclear ideas around obscenity were at the time: “nobody really knew what obscenity was in those days. You had to read the Supreme Court cases, I think it was the Roth decision, to decide whether or not something was obscene. And then once you had read that definition, you were still up in the air. So nobody really knew what obscenity was. And I thought, ‘well this is going to be an interesting case—we’ll find out what the community thinks about obscenity.’” “Ronald Ross,” Track 20, audio CD insert in The Trials of Lenny Bruce: the fall and rise of an American icon (Naperville, Il.: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002).

163 a performance at the legendary Jazz Workshop394 in North Beach, San Francisco. After roughly eight years of using off-color language and speaking to sexual content in his act

(an entirely customary thing for comics to do in nightclubs), it was in the same permissive, bohemian neighbourhood that initiated Bruce’s rise to fame that he was first arrested for obscenity. The context of his arrest is important, since it illustrates that his arrest did not happen in a cultural-legal vacuum—his arrest was one rupture in an ongoing neighbourhood struggle over ethical culture. The context of Bruce’s arrest also highlights his alignment with a number of other cultural and legal figures who were working to secure

First Amendment protections in the face of state suppression.

The diversity and experimentation percolating in North Beach over the 1950s became an increasing concern for the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) who had set out to clean up the “filth” of the neighbourhood. In 1957, officers from the Juvenile Division of the SFPD arrested Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao over the distribution of

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because of its alleged unsuitability for the public.395 The Ferlingetti trial,396 presided over in municipal court by Judge Clayton Horn, was the first major case that applied the newly established test for obscenity in Roth v. U.S.397 The People of the

State of California vs. Lawrence Ferlinghetti found Ferlinghetti innocent based on, among other things, the fact that the work had redeeming social importance and it did not incite

394 A big North beach club that had hosted performers like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 47). 395 Captain William Hanrahan of the SFPD announced to reporters, “anything not suitable for publication in newspapers shouldn’t be published at all.” This arrest was intended to be the first of many arrests aimed at cleaning up “filth” from the city’s bookstores (Joel Black, “Ferlinghetti on Trial: The Howl court case and juvenile delinquency,” Boom: A Journal of California Vol. 2, 4 (Winter 2012): 28. 396 Murao’s case had been dismissed earlier when the prosecutor failed to prove Murao knew the material was obscene (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 45). 397 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 42.

164 lascivious or lustful thoughts to the point that they posed a clear danger of antisocial or immoral action.398 The municipal Judge Horn stated,

[L]ife is not encased in one formula whereby everyone acts the same or

conforms to a particular pattern... Would there be any freedom of the press

or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid and innocuous

euphemism? An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed

to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words.399

Albert Bendich, a lawyer in the “Howl” obscenity case who later represented Lenny Bruce, noted, “For all the free-thinking that had come to the Bay Area, the struggle for freedom was by no measure won.”400

Just months after Lenny Bruce’s legendary Carnegie Hall performance, he was arrested for obscenity on October 4, 1961 for using the word “cocksucker” and the expression “to come” (with a sexual connotation) on stage.401 A San Francisco policeman named James

Ryan had been instructed by his superior, Sgt. James Solden, to attend the performance to see if anything of a “lewd nature” was occurring.402 Upon the arrest, Sergeant Solden (who arrived at the club after the initial arrest) stated, “We’ve tried to elevate this street. I’m

398 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 46. 399 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 45. 400 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 37. 401 These were misdemeanour charges for violating Municipal Police Code Sections 176 and 205 (the “Unlawful presentation of an ‘obscene, indecent, immoral, or impure’ performance”) and California Penal Code Section 311.6 (knowingly speaking ‘lewd or obscene’ words ‘in any public place’)” (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 51-3). 402 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 49-51.

165 offended because you [Lenny] broke the law. I mean it sincerely. I mean it. I can’t see any right, any way you can break this word down, our society is not geared to it.”403 Along with expressing the unsuitability of Bruce’s expression in “society,” one of the sergeants allegedly said “I don’t want my wife to hear things like that!” while arresting Bruce.404 The crude language that Bruce had been using in his performances for years was suddenly interpreted as a criminal offense.

Selective Hearing and Truncated Notes

The first of several trials named People v. Bruce took place before Judge Albert Axelrod in municipal court on November 17, 1961. The remediation of Bruce’s act from the club into the courtroom was central to the case since the ruling definition of obscenity at the time required an understanding of the work as a whole. The representation of Bruce’s act in the court, however, was roughshod, fragmented, and decontextualized. The District

Attorney Schafer’s strategy was to determine the show’s obscenity based on the testimonies of two witnesses, the police officers that had arrested Bruce—James Ryan and

James Solden. Under the instruction of their superior to see if anything of a “lewd nature” was going on in Bruce’s act, the officers listened to Bruce’s act with a kind of aural tunnel vision, seeking out lewd statements without regard for the act as a whole. In the courtroom,

Officer Ryan was unable to recall much of what Bruce said,405 but Ryan did state that it

403 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 51. 404 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 330. 405 At one point when Ryan was asked to recall what had been said during the early part of the show, Ryan responded with the statement “One reference was to a toilet, I believe… and the other something to do with butterflies. I don’t recall too clearly now.” Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman Lenny Bruce!!, 337.

166 was when he heard Bruce use the words “I’m coming” that he determined the act was obscene:

“Between the two of us, we have probably witnessed more than the average,

I’d say, entertainment shows... neither one had ever heard such an

expression used before, so we felt that it warranted arrest.”

“Did you have in mind then the language that was used in the Municipal

Code Police Section 176, such as ‘indecent, immoral, impure, bawdy’--

those words?”

“Yes.”

“It is your testimony, then, Officer, that because you never heard this before

that you felt it was obscene?”

“I didn’t say I’d never heard it before. I never heard it used in a show of any

kind before.”

Is that the sole test that you applied?”

“The fact that I never had seen it used on television or movie theaters or in

any place where people normally assemble for entertainment.” 406

The Bruce case directly intersects with the broader cultural environment of the time. These potentially well-intending officers 407 derived their notions of “community standards”

406 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 338. 407 John Stuart Mill’s reflection on the persecutors of Socrates is applicable to the police in this case: “These were, to all appearance, not bad men—not worse than men commonly are, but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very kind of men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of passing through life blameless and respected.” Mill, On Liberty, 24.

167 directly from their understanding of television and film. What the officers failed to consider was the relative discursive narrowness that had been promulgated by the television and film industries (and their moral codes in particular), and the possibility that live performance spaces attended solely by paying adults should be judged by a different standard. Operating on a fixed and totalizing notion of cultural acceptability, the officers conflated what was permissible in mass media with what should be permissible in society more generally. The moral and discursive norms set up by the film and television industries in the 1950s, then, created the logic behind this first obscenity arrest. Had film proceeded with the bawdy and licentious humor that had dominated the motion picture industry in the first half of the 1930s, the officers and others may not have considered Bruce’s performance even remotely interesting as a legal problem.

The absurdity of the situation was that the police’s attempt to “clean up” society through the suppression of language multiplied and enhanced the use of dirty language.408 During the trials, the police, witnesses, and lawyers on both sides used the “offensive” words repeatedly, turning them over and over, one court after the other, for years. Outside of the court room, audiences familiar with the news of Bruce’s obscenity arrests goaded him on,

408 This irony is reminiscent of one identified by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 wherein he demonstrates the ways that the attempted Victorian “repression” of sexual discourse led to its opposite—the explosion of discourse about sexuality in several fields: “At the level of discourses and their domains, however, practically the opposite occurred. There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward… the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, 18.

168 booing cops who attended performances to arrest Bruce, and yelling out from the audience

“Do ‘Tits and Ass’!!”409

After the testimonies of the officers, Bruce’s lawyer, Seymour Fried410 referred to the Roth ruling, arguing that a work’s legality cannot be determined by the utterance of a vulgar word, but rather had to be considered as a whole to determine if the material was obscene. 411 Judge Axelrod disagreed, stating Fried’s argument might be relevant for judging a book, but Bruce’s live performance was different. Axelrod continued, “I think that the way any word used or spoken during that performance which has an obscene meaning within that definition, that there is a violation.”412 Although Axelrod betrayed his position early on in the hearing, the defense continued to make their case. Reel-to-reel recordings of the performance were brought in before the court to provide a sense of the integrity of the performance, but technical difficulties frustrated Axelrod who interrupted, stating, “if the Supreme Court doesn’t think it is obscene, then I don’t know.”413 Refuting

Fried’s Roth-based objections and references to the Supreme Court, Axelrod stated, “I don’t need any points and authorities to tell me that this language which was used and which was quoted by the officer and the context in which it was used is obscene. Now, if the Supreme Court takes a different view, that is up to them. But to me, it is obscene and I certainly wouldn’t let my grandchildren sit in and listen to a show like this. Now, that is my viewpoint.”414 The Roth judgement, which had thrown out the relevance of children in

409 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 114. 410 Fried had previously represented Bruce in business matters and during Bruce’s divorce, and was not experienced as a criminal litigator (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 52). 411 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 54. 412 Ibid. 413 Ibid. 414 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 55.

169 determining obscenity, had no impact on Axelrod who determined obscenity not in relation to pertinent legal definitions, but to his personal and familial sensibility.

His protectionist logic was also clear in his final statements:

I have had enough experience sitting in this court in this particular

department to know what is obscene or not obscene… This is what is known

as the Women’s Court,415 and I think I am pretty much of an expert of what

is obscene and not—at least according to San Francisco standards. In my

opinion, this is obscene language, no matter how it was used. The decision

of the court is that he’s guilty based upon the evidence. I’m finding him

guilty.416

The comments of the arresting officers and of Axelrod demonstrate the logic identified in

Marjorie Heins’ Not in Front of the Children, which suggests that calls for censorship are often invoked as a means of ensuring the safety and well-being of children and women.417

In spite of the fact that children had not been in Bruce’s audience and that women were among the paying audience members who elected to attend Bruce’s performance, a notion

415 Helen J. Self explains: “In some cities, including New York and San Francisco, women’s courts had been established that tried, among other things, what were referred to as ‘moral offences.’ In San Francisco the Director of Public Health was empowered to detain any person arrested for a sex offence [e.g. prostitution] and subject her to a medical examination.” Helen J. Self, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law (Portland, Or.: Routledge, 2003), 89 416 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 342. 417 In this work, Heins asks: what “is the actual basis for the harm-to-minors assumption?” and further, is censorship “really the best way to prepare youngsters for adult life in a democratic society?” Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 10-12.

170 of the innocence of women and children was invoked by Axelrod to justify ruling Bruce’s performance obscene.

The trial verdict was put on hold when the judge granted a thirty-day stay so that Fried could arrange to have Bruce’s performance tape transcribed and submitted to the court.418

In this time, Bruce went down to City Lights Book Store to talk with Ferlinghetti, who recommended Albert Bendich to Bruce’s case.419 Bendich motioned for a new jury-based trial and the case was reassigned to Judge Clayton Horn who had acquitted Ferlinghetti years before.420

Audience Testimonies and the Reworking of “Community Standards”

The success of the second San Francisco trial largely depended upon: 1) the de- legitimization of the officers’ testimonies; 2) witness testimonies that provided a deeper sense of the community’s “standards” and how audiences interpreted Bruce’s act; and 3)

Judge Horn’s careful instructions to the jury on how to apply obscenity law.

The second trial began on March 1962, and for this, the prosecution again relied solely on the testimonies of the arresting officers to make the case of Bruce’s obscenity. Like in the

Axelrod trial, Officer Ryan was unable to precisely relay Bruce’s work as a whole to the jury, instead uttering the same decontextualized words relayed in the first trial. Bendich

418 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 56. 419 Bendich was one of Ferlinghetti’s lawyers in the 1957 Howl case, a former staff counsel for the ACLU in northern California, and a University of California law professor at the time (Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 345). 420 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 60.

171 took apart the prosecution’s case while cross-examining Officer Ryan, disproving that the act was obscene by: 1) establishing what the “community standard” for clubs in North

Beach actually were; 2) demonstrating Bruce’s performance did not appeal to prurient interest; and 3) by illustrating the common use of vulgar words.421 On the first point,

Bendich re-established the character of “the community” by talking about other establishments in North Beach, including strip clubs (that hosted amateur nights open to the public) and Finocchio’s (which famously featured drag shows). Bendich then demonstrated how Bruce’s performance did not appeal to prurient interest since it did not sexually stimulate Officer Ryan and established that the offending words were commonplace—Ryan admitted to the frequent use of the word “cocksucker” in police stations.422 Finally, Bendich demonstrated how the performance did not actually offend its audience, asking the officer “And no one in the audience made any complaint to you, though you were in uniform standing in the club?” “No one, no.”423

After dismantling the logic of the prosecutor, Bendich presented his opening statement:

I am going to prove through the testimony of several witnesses who will

take the stand before you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Mr. Bruce

gave a performance… based on the themes of social criticism… based upon

the technique of satire which is common in the heritage of English letters

and, as a matter of fact, in the heritage of world literature… related

421 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 64. 422 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 65. 423 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 139.

172 intimately to the kind of social satire to be found in the works of such great

authors as Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift.424

To make his case, the defense called on an impressive array of witnesses who testified to the social and cultural significance of Lenny Bruce’s work. Among the group was a professor of speech at Berkeley, Dr. Don Geiger, a former deputy DA of San Mateo

County, and an assistant professor of English at Berkeley.425 The first to the stand was the well-reputed Ralph Gleason who was deeply acquainted with the local arts and culture scene and who’d written favorably about Bruce on many occasions. The voice of Gleason, along with the many cultural critics and writers who would testify for Bruce over the years, was important for countering the kind of mainstream cultural sensibility that framed

Bruce’s material as not only offensive, but criminal. The police who testified against Bruce represented the cultural ideals of, as Officer Ryan noted, film and broadcasting. Gleason and others, however, balanced the scales, presenting a deeper sense of what was occurring in live performance spaces and demonstrating how Bruce’s act fit within the cultural communities in which he performed. Furthermore, critics and writers presented arguments in favor of Bruce’s material, providing arguments for the importance of Bruce’s word choices, and demonstrating the social value of his comedy.

When asked to give the themes of Bruce’s performance, Gleason stated,

The witness: The theme of the performance on the night in question was a

424 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 141. 425 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 352.

173 social criticism of stereotypes and of the hypocrisy of contemporary

society… He attempted to demonstrate to the audience a proposition that’s

familiar to students of semantics, which is that words have been given, in

our society, almost a magic meaning that has no relation to the facts, and I

think that he tried in the course of this show that evening to demonstrate that

there is no harm inherent in words themselves.

Q: … How important, if at all, was the theme of semantics with reference

to the entire show given on the evening in question?

A: In my opinion, it was very important—vital to it.426

Gleason further read other praiseworthy articles, like Arthur Gelb’s New York Times article which stated—“there are probably a good many adults who will find him offensive, less perhaps for his Anglo-Saxon phrases than for his vitriolic attacks on such subjects as facile religion, the medical profession, the law, pseudo-liberalism and Jack Parr… Although he seems at times to be doing his utmost to antagonize his audience, Mr. Bruce displays such a patent air of morality beneath the brashness that his lapses in taste are often forgivable…”

Nat Hentoff’s piece in the Catholic publication Commonweal claimed “coursing through everything he does… is a serious search for values that are more than security blankets.”427

Kenneth and Mary Brown (a teacher and housewife) testified that the show did not appeal to their prurient interests, and an assistant professor of English from U.C. Berkeley, Robert

Tracy, situated Bruce in a lineage of constitutionally protected satirists, reading excerpts

426 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 142-3. 427 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 143-5.

174 from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Joyce’s Ulysses to demonstrate the use of indecent language in works of “redeeming social importance.”428 Clarence Knight, an assistant DA at Tulare County California and a deputy DA in San Mateo where he evaluated “all pornography cases that were referred to the district attorney’s office” said that the cocksucker joke was the funniest thing Bruce said that night.429 Performing arts publicist

Grover Sales helped to elaborate on the high literary style of Bruce’s performance,430 while

Louis Gottlieb described the “beneficial” impacts of Bruce’s comedy. Asked if he found anything funny about the word cocksucker, Gottlieb responded,

I do not (see anything funny in that word), but as Mr. Bruce presents his

performances he creates a world in which normal dimensions… are

transmuted into a grotesque panorama of contemporary society, into which

he places slices of life, phonographically accurate statements that come out

of the show-business world… and sometimes the juxtaposition of the

generally fantastic frame of reference that he is able to create and the

startling intrusion of slices of life in terms of language that is used in these

kinds of areas, has extremely comic effect.431

428 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 70. 429 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 151. 430 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 70. Further, Sales spoke to the issue of audience recourse in the matter of being offended. Wollenberg to Grover Sales: “‘In other words… you’d give Mr. Bruce a license to say anything he wants, because he’s in show business?” “It is not my place to give Bruce a license… I paid two-and-a-half to get in the Jazz Workshop, and the only way I could register my protest, if he offends my sensibilities, is to walk out of the Jazz Workshop without hearing him through. And I assume that anyone else that paid two-fifty has a similar right” (Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 353). 431 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 147-8.

175 When asked to clarify his meaning of “phonographically accurate statements,” Gottlieb noted, “I mean reproducing the actual speech verbatim with the same intonation and same attitudes and everything else that would be characteristic of, let’s say, a talent agent of some kind.”432 He argued that to replace “actual speech verbatim” with more “genteel words” meant the bit “wouldn’t be phonographically accurate. It would lose its real feel; there would be almost no point.”433

These testimonies demonstrate the contributions of media and cultural workers in the protection of First Amendment rights. Gleason, who was partially responsible for generating the initial publicity for Bruce, carried his and other expert arguments from news articles into the courtroom, building the discourse of Bruce’s defense. Academics lent further intellectual and historical justification for Bruce’s work, while others testified to the contemporary value of Bruce’s comedy and the significance of vernacular speech in the performance. Although the trial was called The People v. Bruce, the prosecution did not involve representatives of the community testifying against Bruce,434 while a host of members from the public came to Bruce’s aid.

Finally, the jury had a chance to hear Bruce’s own testimony and a recording of the Jazz

432 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 148. 433 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 148. 434 Martin Garbus makes reference to this “misnomer” while discussing his book Ready for the Defense in which he states: “In most of the cases in the book, I represented defendants. The tradition of the courtroom is that my adversary, the prosecutor, would say, “Ready for the People” and I would say “Ready for the Defense.” And I believe that the people that I represented more truly stood for the people. It’s kind of a misnomer, it’s a formality, if you will, in the courtroom, that I think is misleading. I was trying to say “Ready for the Defense” is really being ready for the people.” Martin Garbus interviewed by Mary Bess, “Ready for the defense,” Pacifica Radio Archives, PRA Archive # BC0903, Broadcast on KPFK Los Angeles, July 28, 1971.

176 Workshop performance.435 The testimony mostly consisted of Bruce clarifying what he’d actually said during his performance and correcting what had been misreported by others during the trial,436 leaving the recording to do much of the work of presenting Bruce’s act to the court. Before playing the tape, Bendich asked the judge to allow the people of the court to “respond naturally… it would be asking more than is humanly possible of the persons in this courtroom not to respond humanly, which is to say, by way of laughter,” but Horn rejected this request:

this is not a theater and it is not a show, and I am not going to allow any

such thing… I am now going to admonish the spectators that you are not to

treat this as a performance. This is not for your entertainment. There’s a

very serious question involved here, the right of the People and the right of

the defendant. And I admonish you that you are to control yourselves with

regard to any emotions that you may feel during… the reproduction of this

tape.437

435 Bruce explains that a tape recording of that particular show at the Jazz Workshop was made: “I listened to it, and when I came to the first word that San Francisco felt was taboo or a derogatory phrase, I stopped; then I went back about ten minutes before I even started to relate to that word, letting it resolve itself; I did this with the three specific things I was charged with, put them together and the resulting tape was played in court… this tape I made to question a father’s concept of God who made the child’s body but qualified the creativity by stopping it above the kneecaps and resuming it above the Adam’s apple, thereby giving lewd connotations to mother’s breast that fed us and father’s groin that bred us.” Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 154-160. * Transcribed from the show tape “Oh, I like you, and if sometimes I take poetic license with you and you are offended—now this is just with semantics, dirty words. Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed—I speak English—that’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else... I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem” (Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 155). 436 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 73. 437 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 74.

177 If the meaning of a text is in part made by the paratext that surround it,438 the intended meaning of Bruce’s performance, when presented in court, was maimed by the paratextual elements of the trial: the nightclub replaced by a courtroom, the audience replaced by judges, lawyers, and a jury, and the feeling of frivolity and desire for entertainment replaced by the weight of a potential crime. The intended affective goals of Bruce’s performance were dissolved in Horn’s admonition to the courtroom to remain silent upon hearing the recording. In spite of the fact that obscenity trials at the time required works to be considered as a whole, Bruce’s act, remediated in the courtroom with Horn’s instructions, meant that his work was presented only in part.

The tape was played to a largely silent courtroom, and the lawyers offered up their closing statements. In spite of Horn’s unfortunate instruction to the jury to control their emotional responses to the recording, he was also instrumental to the jury ruling in favor of Bruce.

Judge Horn played what Collins and Skover note was a “critical role” in the final stage of the trial when he took 30 minutes to instruct the jury on the relevant law and how it should be applied.439 This included the points that: for the work to be considered obscene, it must

438 Gerard Genette and Marie Maclean distinguish two parts of a literary work that give it its meaning—the text and the paratext. A text is “a more or less lengthy sequence of verbal utterances more or less containing meaning” which appears in relation to a number of other, perhaps seemingly minor productions: “like an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” that “surround” the text “and prolong it, precisely in order to present it…” This is the “paratext of the work”: “the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally to the public… a threshold, or--the term Borges used about a preface--with a “vestibule” which offers to anyone and everyone the possibility either of entering or of turning back…” Gerard Genette and Marie Maclean, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History Vol. 22 (2) (Spring 1991): 261. The connection between law and paratext is inspired by Collins and Skover’s work on “Paratexts” (1992) in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 44, no. 1.

439 Horn stated: The defendant is charged with violating Section 311.6 of the Penal Code of the State of California, which provides: Every person who knowingly sings or speaks any obscene song, ballad, or other words in any public place is guilty of a misdemeanor.

178 have a tendency to “deprave or corrupt the average adult by tending to create a clear and present danger of antisocial behavior”; that “The law does not prohibit the realistic portrayal by an artist of his subject matter, and the law may not require the author to put refined language into the mouths of primitive people”; that “The use of blasphemy, foul or coarse language, and vulgar behavior does not in and of itself constitute obscenity”; and

“A performance cannot be considered utterly without redeeming social importance if it has literary, artistic, or aesthetic merit, or if it contains ideas, regardless of whether they are unorthodox, controversial, or hateful, of redeeming social importance.” Under these instructions, the jury declared that Bruce was not guilty, but one juror did admit “We hate this verdict… but under the instructions there was nothing we could do but give the ‘not guilty’ verdict.” 440 Although Bruce was vindicated in this case, controversy over his material escalated over the coming years, bringing him to professional and financial ruin.

‘Obscene’ means to the average person, applying contemporary standards, the predominant appeal of the matter, taken as a whole, is to prurient interest; that is, a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion which goes substantially beyond the customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters and is matter which is utterly without redeeming social importance. The words ‘average person’ mean the average adult person and have no relation to minors. This is not a question of what you would or would not have children see, hear or read, because that is beyond the scope of the law in this case and is not to be discussed or considered by you. ‘Sex’ and ‘obscenity’ are not synonymous. In order to make the portrayal of sex obscene, it is necessary that such portrayal come within the definition given to you, and the portrayal must be such that its dominant tendency is to deprave or corrupt the average adult by tending to create a clear and present danger of antisocial behavior. The law does not prohibit the realistic portrayal by an artist of his subject matter, and the law may not require the author to put refined language into the mouths of primitive people. The speech of the performer must be considered in relation to its setting and the theme or themes of his production. The use of blasphemy, foul or coarse language, and vulgar behavior does not in and of itself constitute obscenity, although the use of such words may be considered in arriving at a decision concerning the whole production. To determine whether the performance of the defendant falls within the condemnation of the statute, an evaluation must be made as to whether the performance as a whole had as its dominant theme an appeal to prurient interest. Various factors should be borne in mind when applying this yardstick. These factors include the theme or theme of the performance, the degree of sincerity of purpose evident in it, whether it has artistic merit… (Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 161-2). 440 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 77.

179

After the San Francisco trial, Bruce travelled to the UK (where he was received with mixed reviews), and then went back to the U.S. where Hugh Hefner invited Bruce to serialize

Bruce’s autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, as chapters in Playboy magazine. 441 He then went on tour in Canada where Bruce again encountered the disapproval and informal censorship of the state. When he stopped in Vancouver to perform at Isy’s Supper Club, Vancouver Sun writer Jack Wasserman wrote a negative review of one of Bruce’s performances, prompting Chief Licensing Inspector Milton

Harrell, his assistant Ernest Akerly, and two morality squad detectives to threaten club owner Isy Walters with a suspended license if Bruce’s shows were not cancelled.442 When

Bruce offered to clean up his act, the licensing officer Harrell declined the offer.443 A small article in Variety reported the events, and in spite of the fact that the episode took place in

Canada, it effectively put all American clubs in the industry on notice. Goldman notes the significance of the license-suspension threat, which states that revoking an operator’s licence was “a much graver threat than any obscenity indictment. Obscenity is a misdemeanour [with a light penalty]... Suspension of an operator’s license, on the other hand, means instant death to his business, with no clear line of appeal or assurance of restoration. The Variety article ended by questioning the propriety of placing in a single, admittedly ill-qualified individual’s hands the right to act as an arbiter of public morality…”444 Horn’s Bruce and Brennan’s Roth rulings notwithstanding, state authorities

441 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 363. 442 David Spaner, Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), 35. 443 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 367-9. 444 Ibid.

180 found a way to continue censoring Bruce through the informal censorship technique of license suspension. Along with being effectively banned in Canada, in 1962 Bruce was scheduled to appear on Australian TV but was banned in advance. Then, in 1963, he was barred entry to England for the negative views he had expressed on the British Home

Secretary.445 Bruce’s offensiveness crossed borders, and so too did states’ disapproval.

Lenny Bruce, In Substance

In October 1962, Bruce was arrested again, by four plainclothes policemen (two of whom had picked Lenny up on a drug bust shortly before), on two misdemeanour counts of speaking obscene words in public—this time for two performances at the Troubadour in

West Hollywood, prompting the second People v. Bruce trial in Beverley Hills. Only a few months later in December 1962, Bruce and club owner Alan Ribback (whose case was later dismissed without trial) were arrested on obscenity charges in the middle of his performance after about a week of shows at The Gate of Horn in Chicago. During this trial too, Bruce was faced with what was becoming a recurring problem—“police testimony based on truncated portions of Lenny’s act taken out of context.”446 Bruce describes the recurring problem in the following bit:

It’s been a comedy of errors. Here’s how it happened. I do my act at,

perhaps, 11 o’clock at night. Little do I know that at 11am the next morning

before the grand jury somewhere, there’s another guy doing my act, who’s

445 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 417. 446 Nat Hentoff, narration for Track 31, audio CD insert in The Trials of Lenny Bruce: the fall and rise of an American icon (Naperville, Il.: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002).

181 introduced as Lenny Bruce, in substance.447 “Here he is, Lenny Bruce, in

substance.” A peace officer, who was trained to recognize clear and present

danger, not make believe, does the act. The grand jury watches his work and

go, “that stinks.” But I get busted. And the irony is I have to go to court and

defend his act.448

If the meanings of works by comics are in part made by the personae of the comics themselves, the courts’ decisions to privilege police recreations of Bruce’s act over Bruce’s own performances (either in person or recorded) meant that the courts were not receiving

Bruce’s work as a whole. In taking the faulty, incomplete, and decontextualized testimony of police offers as the “substance” or essence of Lenny Bruce’s act, the courts failed to meet the requirements of the reigning obscenity test.

Although Bruce was officially arrested for obscenity, there is ample evidence to suggest that one of Bruce’s main offenses was speaking against religion. Goldman notes that at the time of Bruce’s arrest in Chicago, the population of Chicago was 3.5 million, and over 2 million inhabitants identified as Catholic, with a higher proportion of Chicago cops identifying as Catholic, and with 47 out of 50 jurors impanelled identifying as Catholic.449

One Variety article observed this early on, noting “the prosecutor is at least equally

447 One law dictionary’s entry for “Substance” defines it as: Essence; the material or necessary component of something.

A matter of substance, as distinguished from a matter of form, with respect to pleadings, affidavits, indictments, and other legal instruments, entails the essential sufficiency, validity, or merits of the instrument, as opposed to its method or style. West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. 2008, The Gale Group, http://legal- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/substance. Accessed November 17, 2016. 448 Lenny Bruce, Track 31 “A Comedy of Errors,” audio CD insert in The Trials of Lenny Bruce. 449 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 399.

182 concerned with Bruce’s indictments of organized religion as he is with the more obvious sexual content of the comic’s act. It’s possible that Bruce’s comments on the Catholic

Church have hit sensitive nerves in Chicago’s Catholic-oriented administration and police department...”450 Further evidence supports this conflation of blasphemy with obscenity.

Noting the informal remarks made by the police, Goldman writes, “The first unmistakable evidence appeared during the week following the bust when the captain of the Vice Squad, which had made the arrest, walked into the Gate of Horn and the following dialogue ensued: ‘...I’m Captain McDermott. I want to tell you that if this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here… he mocks the Pope--and

I’m speaking as a Catholic--I’m here to tell you our license is in danger.’”451 Finally, Bruce notes, “On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to go and do likewise. I could never conjure up a more bizarre satire than the reality of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, each with a spot of ash on his forehead.”452 The conflation between religious blasphemy and obscenity was clear as the DA summarized Bruce’s offenses in his closing trial statements: “[Bruce] made reference to the pope; he made reference to the bishops, the nuns, and priests. He made various references to different acts which all people, I assume, I know, consider sacred--a sacred part of marriage.”453

450 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 122. 451 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 398-9. 452 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 186. 453 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 170.

183 During a performance in February of 1963, after explaining to the audience that “If I say the things you want me to say, those gentlemen back there are going to bust me,” the audience responded by booing and goading Bruce to perform uncensored. 454 The encouragement of fans and audiences to use impolite language was a problem for Bruce.

He had risen to fame in part because of the defiance of his open candor, and people regularly expressed to him or in the press that they revelled in his alleged “sickness.” His supporters who demanded the impolite aspect of his comedy were in part behind his

“obscene” utterances, but Bruce was the only figure held accountable for it. Bruce went on with his act and was again arrested for obscenity, even though, as Herb Cohen stated,

“Nobody but the officers thought his act or words were obscene.”455 The Troubadour and

Unicorn trials were consolidated and for this, the jury deadlocked, leading to Bruce’s eventual acquittal.456 He was less lucky in Chicago where he was found guilty and meted out the maximum penalty for Chicago’s obscenity statute, a sentence of one year in jail and a fine of $1000.457 Furthermore, the Gate of Horn’s liquor license was suspended in 1963, making the threat of license suspension a reality for club owners who hosted Bruce.458

454 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 115. 455 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 116. 456 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 182. 457 (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 462). Using the police report, Collins and Skover observe three important problems with the case: “a comparison between the report and a tape recording of what actually was said revealed obvious police misstatements. (Playboy had taped the performance.) Lenny long had complained about having to defend an act that he never had performed. Second, the report lifted Lenny’s ‘dirty words’ out of the full context of his bits. By doing so, it did not even recognize the need to consider The Gate of Horn performance as a whole. Finally, the report cited Lenny’s animosity and mockery of religion as criminal. The police essentially used the Illinois obscenity statute to arrest Lenny for blasphemy- -an ‘offense’ not included within the statute” (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 149). 458 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 149-50.

184 Not going down without a fight, Bruce hired the respected University of Chicago law professor Harry Kalven Jr. who had been critical of Brennan’s Roth ruling,459 and Kalven’s two friends and respected colleagues, William Robert Ming Jr., and Maurice Rosenfeld.460

Together, Bruce’s lawyers made an appeal based on a handful of procedural grounds, and also asserted that Bruce’s performance was not obscene since his performance as a whole presented social commentary and was not aimed at producing an erotic effect.461 In the meantime, Bruce was waiting for the outcome of what would be a precedent-setting

Supreme Court Case, Jacobellis v. State of Ohio which centered around the movie The

Lovers. On June 22, 1964, the court ruled the film was not obscene due to its social importance. This judgment affirmed that the previous test of obscenity established in ACLU v. Chicago, which determined obscenity by weighing obscene portions of the work against the affirmative values presented through the work, was no longer constitutionally acceptable for determining obscenity.462 The case established that any material having “any social importance is constitutionally protected,” 463 leading the appellate judges the following autumn to begrudgingly reverse Bruce’s guilty ruling in Chicago under the precedent set by Jacobellis.464

459 Harry Kalven Jr. wrote “The Metaphysics of the Law of Obscenity” which: 1) questions the way that the Roth finding divides speech into categories of protected or obscene/unprotected speech; 2) questions traditional free speech formulas; and 3) provides ways Roth might be reinterpreted (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 175-6). 460 Ming Jr. was the first black professor at the University of Chicago Law School, an advisor to Thurgood Marshall, and was an expert on court procedure. Rosenfeld had authored an amicus brief for Roth v. United States in which he favoured a more expansive interpretation of the First Amendment. He also represented Hugh Hefner’s Playboy cases (Collins Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 176-7). 461 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 179-80. 462 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 188-9. 463 Ibid. 464 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 300.

185 With Bruce prosecuted in cities across the U.S. and banned across nations, many clubs would not risk booking him. The cash-strapped Trolley-Ho in LA, however, did hire him for a stretch of shows in 1964. Six teams of police were assigned to attend his shows every night between February 22 to March 13, 1964, for which they were tasked with “duly gathering every ‘cocksucker’ or ‘tits’ reference that issued from Lenny’s lips. Pens and notepads were typically used, though on three occasions, attempts were made to tape the show.”465 He was again arrested for obscenity, and the Trolley-Ho’s entertainment and dance licenses were threatened for allowing Bruce to perform. Between 1961 through

1964, Bruce was arrested so many times that when Variety mentioned he was playing a show at the Off-Broadway in San Francisco, he stated, “Variety deemed it newsworthy enough to report that I wasn’t arrested during that engagement.”466 To make matters worse,

Bruce lost his cabaret card as a result of a narcotics conviction, meaning he could not play at venues that served alcohol.467

Obscene in New York

The now bankrupt and largely blacklisted Bruce was invited to perform at Howard

Solomon’s small coffee house in Greenwich Village, the Café Au Go Go. Because the Café did not serve hard alcohol, Solomon was not threatened by the revocation of his liquor license.468 There, in April 1964, Bruce was arrested for obscenity along with café owners

465 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 185. 466 Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 231. 467 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 445. 468 Solomon notes: “at that particular time, when I was opening the Café au Go Go, the city of New York was very against opening new clubs that they could not effectively control. And their only means of control was to have establishments that served liquor so that they could license them under the blanket law that liquor licenses require… I wanted to open a theater, cabaret, one that would not serve any hard liquor… I was interested in having a cafe/theater atmosphere. And at that time, the city licensing division said that we tend to cause teenagers to linger, in that we didn’t serve liquor, thereby they would have no control over places

186 Howard and Elly Solomon. In addition to having committed the usual offense of uttering off-color words, Bruce had also made a joke concerning Jackie Kennedy (who he described as having had “hauled ass to save her ass” when her husband was shot), and regarding

Eleanor Roosevelt’s “tits.” Bruce was surprised to be arrested in such a culturally permissive city, but his arrests were part of a greater project to clean up New York City.

A battle against obscenity and pornography in the 1960s began when a Jesuit priest, named

Father Morton A. Hill of the Upper East Side’s St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic

Church, decided to do something about parents’ complaints about a group of sixth-grade boys in a parish elementary school who had been circulating pornographic material. 469

Like Anthony Comstock and William Hays before him, Hill initiated a neighbourhood anti- pornography effort that snowballed into a powerful interfaith coalition (a Lutheran minister, Greek Orthodox reverend, and a rabbi were involved). In the early 1960s, signs of sexual liberation were blanketing Times Square as porn shops, strip clubs, and bath houses popped up in the area, prompting religious authorities to work with state authorities to initiate a decency-campaign between 1963 and 1964. The NYPD launched the anti- pornography crusade Operation Yorkville with the aim of cleaning up “smut” centers.

During the crusade, they arrested 154 porn sellers, which led to eighty-three convictions.470

Café owner Solomon, however, felt beyond the purview of these raids. He stated, “I just felt that there would be no way that we could ever get arrested for presenting an artist of

that could stay open beyond 1 o’clock. I found myself in the midst of a tug of war with the city, but I had to fight because I had already had almost a hundred thousand dollars invested and I wasn’t about to lose it.” Seven Years Underground: A 60’s Tale. DVD. Directed by Jason Solomon. New York: Full Circle Films, 2011. 469 James Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2010), 151. 470 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 194.

187 his calibre. I had been to nightclubs before and I had seen Joey Ross and Frank Sinatra, and I’d worked as a theatrical agent, and they had used the language of the streets. ‘Shit’ or you know scatological references, they’d say. I didn’t in any way think that this man could be prosecuted or persecuted for this. So my instinct was to fight the battle.”471

Unfortunately, Bruce and Solomon were arrested by plainclothes policeman who tape recorded the show, obtained a bench warrant for the arrest, and arrested the two on April

3, 1964 (on April 4th, while out on bail, Bruce was not arrested again when he performed an altered version of the act, spelling out the offensive words instead of saying them outright). 472 Writer and supporter Nat Hentoff recommended Bruce hire the lawyer

Ephraim London who had argued nine cases before the US Supreme Court and litigated over 250 obscenity cases across 15 states.473 London accepted the case, noting that he knew of no previous case in the state where a performer had been charged with obscenity on the basis of words alone.474

The trials commenced June 16, 1964 before three magistrates: Judges James R. Creel,

Kenneth M. Phipps, and Judge John M. Murtgah presiding. On the side of the prosecution was Richard Kuh who framed the trial in relation to current events: “I think that it is in Mr.

Bruce’s interest, and certainly in the interest of the people in this community where a

World’s Fair opens next week, that whether or not this is an indecent show be promptly

471 Seven Years Underground: A 60’s Tale. 472 “Lenny Bruce Freed in Bail on Charge of Indecency,” New York Times, April 5, 1964. author unnamed. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 473 Including for the works Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and the films The Miracle and The Lovers (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 207). 474 Thomas Buckley, “Lenny Bruce and 2 Cafe Owners Go on Trial in Obscenity Case,” New York Times, June 17, 1964. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

188 adjudicated…”475 Kuh’s plan for proving Bruce’s performance was obscene in substance was to expound on the definition of “obscenity” as it pertained not just to the erotic but also to the “filthy and disgusting,” and to argue that Bruce’s performance should be understood as a collection of bits instead of a whole work. Kuh’s logic was that the social value of some of Bruce’s jokes did not protect the whole performance since, unlike a film or book in which all parts are integral to the whole, a comedic performance is based on the collection of disparate units. A satire about corruption in the medical profession may have social value, but the contents of that joke have nothing to do with the contents of a joke like “Las Vegas tits and ass.” The latter, to Kuh’s mind, could be taken out of the performance without negatively affecting the performance’s integrity as a whole.

Again, the DA called the officers to the stand and Inspector Ruhe imperfectly recalled

Bruce’s act, working from his notebook filled with isolated words and phrases as his way of recreating Lenny Bruce’s performance.476 An additional detail offered by one of the officers who’d arrested Bruce also added to the prosecution’s case. The officer claimed that Bruce had done a “masturbatory gesture” [which he proceeded to demonstrate for the court]477 in the act.478 Along with the officers, Kuh made the unprecedented move of calling on a number of witnesses to testify for the prosecution, including Revered Potter

475 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 211. 476 Bruce writes, “When I returned to New York, it turned out that the police didn’t have complete tapes of the shows I was arrested for, so they actually had a guy in court imitating my act—a License Department Inspector who was formerly a CIA agent in Vietnam—and in his courtroom impersonation of me, he was saying things that I had never said in my life, on stage or off.” Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 194. 477 This was only one of the many absurdities of the trial. The officers performed the very “obscenities” that Bruce had been charged with, but through the paratext of the court, their gestures and utterances were deemed legitimate rather than obscene. Like a kind of alchemy, the courtroom transformed the ontology of dirty words and gestures. News reporters were calling it “court as theater,” the trial as “supper arts festival,” or “theater of the absurd” (Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 463). 478 Bruce claimed that the officer misinterpreted the gesture—that Bruce had in fact mimed a religious benediction.

189 who compared Bruce’s audiences to those in “the back wards of the Rochester State

Hospital, in the mental hospital, where persons for the most part do get up on stumps and speak in this kind of random, irrational way and primarily employ filthy and vulgar words and play on them for the sake of playing on them”479 [Murtagh struck this comparison from the record]. There was also sociologist Ernest Van den Haag who argued Bruce’s comments were without social value because they were obvious and platitudinous. He also argued the violation of public decorum through dirty language isn’t liberating but a threat to the social order—if we allow some slips, we’ll allow many kinds.480 In addition to bringing in expert witnesses, on June 17, 1964, the prosecution also sought to demonstrate the obscenity of the performance by playing the police’s tape recordings of the Café Au

Go Go performance, but the poor quality made Bruce “sound as if he were performing under a large damp blanket” (hi-fidelity tapes made by those at the cafe were played the day after).481

Similarly to the other cases, the defense called on a number of expert witnesses, including two ministers, psychiatric witnesses, academics, media experts, and critics who testified that Bruce’s performance was not sexually arousing, did not offend local community standards, and further articulated the ways that Bruce’s humor was of social importance.482

Goldman writes that their star witness, Broadway columnist and What’s My Line panellist

Dorothy Kilgallen, was “Cool, prim and absolutely unflappable, Miss Kilgallen seemed to

479 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 477. 480 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 478. 481 “Bruce Trial Hears Recording of Show,” New York Times. June 18, 1964. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 482 Doug Linder, “The Trials of Lenny Bruce,” Famous Trials website, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bruce/bruceaccount.html. Accessed January 6, 2017.

190 embody precisely those values of conventional morality and feminine sensitivity that the district attorney was trying to protect by banning Bruce. If she approved of Lenny, if she found nothing objectionable or dirty or crazy in his act, what was the trial all about?”483

She compared Bruce’s word use to that of James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and

Broadway playwrights, and praised Bruce saying, “I think that he is a very brilliant man and that he has great social awareness: that basically, he’s an extremely moral man and is trying to improve the world and trying to make his audiences think.”484

Along with defending him in the court, many prominent figures from the cultural community came to his defense publicly. Allen Ginsberg, who had been concerned with the broader crackdown on artists (particularly within the Beat community) in New York

City, was the major instigator of the cause. Ginsberg formed the “Emergency Committee against the Harassment of Lenny Bruce,” which created a petition that protested the prosecution of the comic. In a June 14, 1964 article for the New York Times entitled “100

Fight Arrest of Lenny Bruce: Arts Leaders Protest, Citing Violation of Free Speech,”

Ginsberg indicated that Bruce’s arrest was “part of a pattern of harassment of the avant- garde,” citing the closure of coffee-houses where poets read, and the conviction of Jonas

Mekas, the cinema theorist and filmmaker, on charges of exhibiting an obscene movie,

“Flaming Creatures.” The petition stated:

We the undersigned are agreed that the recent arrests of night-club

entertainer Lenny Bruce by the New York police department on charges of

483 Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 474. 484 Ibid.

191 indecent performances constitutes a violation of civil liberties as guaranteed

by the First and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution.

Lenny Bruce is a popular and controversial performer in the field of social

satire in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain. Although Bruce makes

use of the vernacular in his night-club performances, he does so within the

context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his

listeners. It is up to the audience to determine what is offensive to them; it

is not a function of the police department of New York or any other city to

decide what adult private citizens may or may not hear.

Whether we regard Bruce as a moral spokesman or simply as an entertainer,

we believe he should be allowed to perform free from censorship or

harassment.485

Along with the many poets and academics who signed were Bob Dylan, Dick Gregory,

Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal,

Barney Rossett, and several other prominent personalities. While the prosecution in the

Bruce trial had formed a strong case, many notable names in entertainment and culture

(many of whom had been charged with being offensive in their own careers) came out in this moment to support Bruce and lend their cultural authority and/or popular appeal to his tarnished reputation. In this moment, Ginsberg and friends moved the Bruce trial from the

485 “Petition Protesting the Arrest of Lenny Bruce,” Famous Trials website, originally published June 13, 1964, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bruce/brucepetition.html. Accessed June 25, 2017.

192 inhospitable courtroom to the realm of public opinion, framing the narrative not as one of criminal offense but as one involving the constitutional violation of a significant social satirist belonging to a great tradition of iconic American humorists.

On November 4, 1964, Bruce stood alone before the judges (he had dismissed lawyers

London and Garbus prior to the ruling) attempting to explain some of the features of his act. Desperate to present himself and his act properly, he begged:

Please let me testify… Let me tell you what the show is about… Don’t finish

me off in show business. Don’t lock up these six thousand words. That’s

what you’re doing … taking away my words, locking them up. These plays

can never be said again. You are finishing me up in show business.486

His request to testify was denied. The judges then ruled in a 2-1 decision that Bruce’s act was “obscene, indecent, immoral and impure within the meaning of the law” and that it was “patently offensive to the average person in the community, as judged by present day standards.” Murtagh’s opinion, which went unpublished in law journals because it breached editorial policy,487 stated: “words such as ‘ass,’ ‘balls,’ ‘cock-sucker,’ ‘cunt,’

486 Linder, “The Trials of Lenny Bruce.” 487 The New York Law Journal explained their decision in this way: “The majority opinion, of necessity, cited in detail the language used by Bruce in his night-club act, and also described gestures and routines which the majority found to be obscene and indecent. The Law Journal decided against publication, even edited, on the grounds that deletions would destroy the opinion, and without the deletions publication was impossible within the Law Journal standards” (cited in Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, 195). Collins and Skover write of this decision, “What the majority had written was law, albeit court-law. Hence, the editors’ refusal to publish People v. Bruce was, in effect, a refusal to publish a statement of the law” (Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 296). Bruce responded to this news saying, “Why don’t they bust Murtagh?” (Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!!, 497).

193 ‘fuck,’ ‘mother-fucker,’ ‘piss,’ ‘screw,’ ‘shit,’ and ‘tits’ were used about one hundred times in utter obscenity. The monologues also contained anecdotes and reflections that were similarly obscene.”488 Further the performance lacked “redeeming social importance.”489

Judge J. Randall Creel dissented on the grounds that the obscenity laws were too vague and required the attention of a Federal constitutional convention.490 In a 17-page opinion,

Creel wrote “in a total absence of any guideposts or other directives from higher courts, I fear we have proceeded not unlike an explorer plunged into a vast uncharted virgin area in pursuit of a mirage or some fabled lost golden city.”491 On December 16, Lenny Bruce was sentenced to four months in the Rikers Island workhouse, but remained free on bond during his appeal.

In this time, although Bruce remained largely concerned with legal matters, he managed to produce two significant works. In 1965, the now notorious Phil Spector released the uncensored album Lenny Bruce is Out Again. Collins and Skover write, “As fate had it,

488 “People V. Bruce (Criminal Trial Court of the City of New York, Nov. 4, 1964),” Famous Trials website, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bruce/brucecourtdecisions.html#BRUCE. Accessed June 25, 2017. 489 Jack Roth, “Lenny Bruce Act is Ruled Obscene,” New York Times. Nov. 5, 1964. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 490 Ibid. 491 Ibid.

In the 1970s during Miller v. California, Justice Brennan, who produced the obscenity test and penned seven obscenity opinions between 1957 and 1966, would essentially concur with Creel’s sentiments. Heins writes:

Justice Brennan, for sixteen years the main architect of obscenity law, now led the dissenters. He had finally concluded that obscenity laws were unworkable: no definition supplied by legislatures or judges could cure the vagueness and subjectivity of such concepts as prurient interest, patent offensiveness, and serious value, which necessarily vary ‘with the experience, outlook, and even idiosyncrasies of the person defining them. Although we have assumed that obscenity does exist, and that we ‘know it when [we] see it,’ Brennan wrote, ‘we are manifestly unable to describe it in advance except by reference to concepts so elusive that they fail to distinguish clearly between protected and unprotected speech.’ He later told a reporter: ‘I put sixteen years into that damn obscenity thing…. I tried and tried, and I waffled back and forth, and I finally gave up. If you can’t define it, you can’t prosecute people for it.’ (Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 86).

194 neither Spector nor Bruce was ever prosecuted, though the LP was distributed nationwide and in cities such as New York where Lenny had recently been convicted for mouthing indecent words. Incredibly, pressing vinyl had done virtually as much--perhaps more--for the culture of freedom than decades of court battles and Supreme Court precedents.

Another corner in the history of free speech had been rounded, though few seemed to notice.”492 Additionally, Bruce teamed up with John Magnuson, an educational filmmaker from San Francisco, to film Bruce at the Basin Street West in San Francisco for the purpose of creating a photographic record of Bruce’s nightclub act that could potentially be submitted to any future courts. Rather than a straightforward comedy act, the performance largely centered around a “devastating recapitulation of his New York obscenity trial.”493

Indeed, much of Bruce’s time during his trials and afterward was devoted to pouring over obscenity law and what had occurred in the courtrooms.

The film can be understood as comprised of remediated layers—his initial live performance

(for which he was considered obscene) was remediated by the obscenity trial; the obscenity trial was then remediated in live performance; and the live performance was captured by film. In this sense, then, remediation was caught up in the moral and legal contestations over the notion of obscenity. Remediating his live performance through film was not a simple matter of pouring content from one medium into another, but rather it functioned to provide Bruce the opportunity to testify on his behalf that he was not granted in the New

York obscenity trial, It also allowed him to frame and present the story in his chosen medium (performance) and produced a higher quality and more representative recording

492 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 335. 493 Vincent Canby for the New York Times, quoted in Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 358.

195 that could be used if he had been arrested again. And, through the use of the film medium, it extended his story in space and time, giving viewers an opportunity to see and hear for themselves what his performances were like. The Lenny Bruce Performance Film added a post-trial, performative, and first-hand reflection on the obscenity trial to the public record, giving his contemporaries and ours access to the ideas and narrative necessary to understand Bruce’s experiences being tried for obscenity. Unfortunately, the film would not be submitted to any courts as evidence in his lifetime.

Lenny Bruce died before history would inevitably exonerate him – which it eventually did, both formally in the shape of his prosecutor’s remorse and in the 2003 posthumous pardon for his 1964 conviction, and informally as history would remember him as a free speech crusader. While Bruce did not get see the tides of history turn, the stand-up comics who followed after him have directly benefitted from the battles Bruce fought and his unwavering commitment to free speech in comedy.

Posthumous Reinterpretations

On August 3, 1966, Bruce died of a morphine overdose at his home in Hollywood, an event that was heavily covered by the press who crassly took photos of the death scene. In the wake of his death, many involved in his persecution admitted or demonstrated their wrongdoing in the affairs. One of the New York prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney

Vincent Cuccia, stated, “I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. It's the only thing

I did in Hogan's office that I'm really ashamed of. We all knew what we were doing. We

196 used the law to kill him.”494 Although Richard Kuh did not provide such an explicit mea culpa, in a 1968 article, Kuh issued a new opinion on obscenity in an article in which he argued that the definition of obscenity should be confined to the “display or sale of live or photographed sex in action.”495 Collins and Skover aptly sum up the prosecution thusly:

“James Madison’s great contribution to the Constitution was trumped in Bruce’s lifetime by mere misdemeanour statutes—laws misused, or misapplied, or misconstrued, or mistakenly invoked, or whatever, to convict America’s foremost comic critic.”496

After Bruce’s death, a host of works about and tributes to Bruce were released, including the aforementioned Magnuson film (1967), an uncensored Broadway play by Julian Barry entitled Lenny (1971), the 1974 film starring Dustin Hoffman (also entitled Lenny), several records (including one entitled “Why Did Lenny Bruce Die?” and his Carnegie Hall,

Berkeley, and Curran Theater concerts), several books, and Bob Dylan’s ballad “Lenny

Bruce.” For Collins and Skover, Bruce’s death marked “a turning-point in America’s free speech history… the moment when words alone—any performance words spoken in comedy clubs—ceased to be targets of prosecution. More than any legal precedents, the possibility of endless harassment culminating in death changed the First Amendment culture… future comedians could say anything into their club mikes without fear of arrest.”497 They write that thanks to Lenny Bruce and the club owners who put themselves on the line to host him (Art Auerbach, Doug Weston, Herb Cohen, Alan Ribback, Jim and

Dan Duffin, Howard and Ella Solomon), “Comedy clubs—those free speech zones—have

494 Linder, “The Trials of Lenny Bruce.” 495 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 362. 496 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 405. 497 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 431.

197 made it possible to say what cannot be said in most other public spaces and to hear what cannot be heard on radio or on network television.”498 Bruce’s contributions to free speech culture were not limited to comedy clubs, however, but also intersected with broadcasting as well, both in the ways his work and case were remediated by radio stations dedicated to free speech, and in the ways his comedy influenced other performers; namely, George

Carlin whose work was at the center of an important broadcasting battle.

What I’ve attempted to demonstrate here is the way that discursive norms around ideas of obscene and indecent speech have been shaped over time by the struggle between media regulation and cultural resistance. The emergence of mass media forms in the early part of the 20th century posed moral problems to a cross-section of the American public— problems which were addressed largely by interfaith and parent-based coalitions who banned together to demand that radio, television, and film be regulated in accordance with their religious, social, political, sexual, and racial ideals. The attempted moral cleansing of mass mediated culture, however, not only created a category of “clean” culture by the

1950s, but was further productive of a dynamic “dirty” or “sick” culture, including the new wave/“sick” stand-up comedy of the 1950s and early 1960s. By catering to like-minded audiences, first in niche performance spaces, then through niche recordings, and finally in narrowcast TV and radio, performers like Lenny Bruce challenged the unconstitutional censorship of culture and established, in law and through cultural norms, not only the right to criticize, challenge, and offend, but also the social value of what might be widely regarded as offensive speech.

498 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 431-2.

198 Chapter Five: How Listener-Sponsored Radio Bridged the Discursive Gap Between the Live and the Mass Mediated

Lenny Bruce’s First Amendment battles belonged to a long continuum of contestations over speech and subjectivity in the entertainment industry that had existed at least since

Mae West’s troubles with William Hays and her subsequent exile from mass media. Along with the unfortunate legal circumstances surrounding Bruce’s death, the deeply tragic thing about the end of Bruce’s life was that it happened precisely as the moment that the free speech tide was turning in America. Bruce fought his battles concomitantly with the Civil

Rights and Free Speech Movements, which were transforming the political, discursive, aesthetic, and ethical ideals of a generation of young Americans. Furthermore, electronically mediated culture—which had set the terms that allowed people to interpret

Bruce’s work as “obscene”—was changing in America. More specifically, clusters of listener-sponsored radio stations, like the Pacifica Network and the KRAB nebula, worked tirelessly to supplement the discursive narrowness that had existed in radio broadcasting since the late 1930s. In the process, their work intersected with the work of controversial or vilified artists, performers, writers, and entertainers. Satirist Paul Krassner notes that the

Pacifica Network and Lenny Bruce were on “the same proverbial page” with respect to their shared commitments to the freedom of speech.499 Bruce “was friendly, curious, and witty. In the process, he entertained, influenced, and inspired the folks on the radio staffs.”500

Lenny Bruce was someone that people at listener-sponsored radio liked, supported, and played. Additionally, several DJs shared a comic sensibility with Bruce: performing

499 Paul Krassner, e-mail interview with author, December 2, 2016. 500 Krassner, interview.

199 irreverence, indulging in frank and sometimes offensive speech, and incorporating autobiographical narratives and idiosyncratic ways of thinking into their programs. After

Bruce’s untimely death, the folks at Pacifica made strides in the struggle for free expression as they integrated minority views and unorthodox expressions on their stations, and as DJs daily incorporated their unfiltered speech into mediated public discourse.

Examining the history of listener-supported radio and paying close attention to moments of invention, reinvention, and contestation, this chapter demonstrates the moral, political, and aesthetic opening of broadcasting over the late 1940s into the 1970s. A critical thread of this story is the delineation of the relationship between the live and the mediated, and the movement of ideas, individuals, discourse, and ideals across these fields. The fight for free speech in live performance spaces and during live events was amplified, commented upon, worked through, and mirrored in the work of those in small-scale, listener-supported broadcasting.

Listener-supported non-profit radio, like the new wave of comedy, started off as a small endeavor spearheaded by like-minded people. Responding to the discursive and ideological narrowness of commercial broadcasting, listener-supported radio provided outlets for geographically circumscribed audiences who came to the stations for the myriad voices and perspectives that they presented, and which were otherwise unavailable in mainstream media. The limited audibility of listener-supported radio, like the limited visibility of live performance spaces, was a necessary condition for the flourishing of the broadcasting experiment. Because the FM spectrum was less accessible than AM to most American listeners at the midpoint of the 20th century, listener-supported networks like Pacifica and

200 later KRAB were able to experiment with content and form in a way that directly defied mass media norms. Regularly and intentionally making a point to broadcast material that was missing from for-profit broadcasting, those involved in free speech or free forum radio broadened broadcast expression, asserted the rights of individuals with unorthodox ideas to contribute to public discourse, and developed alternative institutional models to the commercial media model that had dominated American broadcasting up until that point.

Importantly, many of the early Pacifica broadcasts were remediations of live performances or live events. Additionally, performances recorded in the studios were sometimes attempts to recreate performances that had been experienced in live venues. The remediation of the live performance was an important part of what gave early listener-sponsored radio its vitality and significance in American broadcasting, but it was also often at the heart of radio broadcasting’s controversies. As members of American communities and the FCC became increasingly aware of listener-sponsored radio, they became concerned with the unpredictable offensive speech presented over the radio, often uttered as part of a live performance, live broadcast, or during a live event.

I argue that, just as live performance spaces amplified the ethical value of Lenny Bruce’s speech,501 so too did the live context of radio content present a socio-moral problem for listener-sponsored radio stations, which carried affectively-laden and provocative language uttered during live events or performances into what was meant to be the moral sanctuary of the American home. In combatting regulatory measures to remove obscene speech (and obscene offenders) from the radio, listener-sponsored radio broadcasters were not simply

501 i.e. Live performance spaces in part supplied Bruce with the words, forms or styles of comedic narration, and lifeworld or experiences that came to be seen as obscene in his performances.

201 reaffirming their right to protect free speech over the airwaves, but were also fighting for the right of media professionals to honestly represent the dynamic, offensive, living world in its messiness, impropriety, and verbal volatility.

The Pacifica Network, and many of the listener-sponsored stations that came after it, succeeded in many instances to protect free expression over the radio. However, their ability to protect offensive expression over the airwaves was not absolute. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Bruce’s fight was carried on and transformed by the work of stand-up comic George Carlin and the Pacifica Network, whose joint First Amendment battle with the FCC, on the one hand, legitimized the free speech rights of countercultural comics, but on the other hand, confined that speech to the late-night hours. When the

Supreme Court deemed Carlin’s work not obscene but “indecent,” they formalized temporal channeling as a means of maintaining separate moral spaces in broadcasting— the daytime hours were made to serve wholesome ideals of familial domesticity, while the late evening hours were reserved for adult listeners.

Here, as in previous chapters, media institutions are shown to be critical sites for opening up novel forms and modes of expression which are then seen as a moral threat. Perceptions of media-induced harm prompt concerned community members to frame the offending expressions as obscene and indecent, making the offenders subject to constitutional battles.

Unlike the censorship of Mae West in film during the Breen era (discussed in Chapter

Two), and the censorship of Lenny Bruce in live performance throughout the 1960s

(discussed in Chapters Three and Four), the collective efforts of those working in listener- sponsored radio from the late 1940s through to the 1970s ultimately secured the right of

202 performers to use offensive language in socially meaningful texts over the airwaves, albeit in a temporally limited way.

Early Appeals for Free Expression on the Radio

It was not inevitable that radio would one day become a vessel of standardized cultural content that catered to the tastes of a vaguely defined majority. The Communications Act of 1934 stated that the Federal Communications Commission was not to “interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communication,” 502 and in these early days, commercial networks similarly echoed this discourse. In 1935, for instance, NBC declared that they had “Striven to give free expression to the thought of the country and to the various civic organizations which develop and formulate that thought.” 503 As several historians have shown, 504 a series of decisions in the 1920s and 1930s empowered commercial players in the radio industry over non-commercial groups (including educational, religious, and political groups), leading to the commercial radio industry’s aversion to risk-taking and offensive material on the air by the 1930s and 40s.505 This didn’t mean that there were no innovations in commercial broadcasting, but that obviously challenging and controversial or unpopular material was generally avoided.506

502 Communications Act of 1934, https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf. Accessed May 29, 2017. 503 National Broadcasting Company, Broadcasting to All Homes (New York, NY: National Broadcasting Company, Inc., 1935), 45. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001618364. Accessed May 29, 2017. 504 Susan Douglas (2004); Robert McChesney (1990); Ralph Engelman (1996). 505 “The networks and their advertisers did not want many varied, regional, or subcultural listening publics. They wanted a ‘mass’ audience, and they used popular music and comedy to forge it.” Douglas, Listening In, 82. 506 On the FCC’s privileging of commercial interests in meeting public interest, Chris Koch writes: “The result has been an immensely powerful broadcasting industry with an income of billions of dollars a year, offering watered-down entertainment, cautious and uncontroversial public affairs programs and incessant commercials-pitches to buy overpriced, unnecessary commodities. Broadcasting has become the advertiser’s key medium, and advertising is the essential ingredient in an economy increasingly dependent on personal consumption.” Newton Minow, a former Chairman of the FCC, once described all this as ‘a vast wasteland.’”

203 The emerging popularity of television in the 1950s led the broadcasting networks to pour much of their talent and resources into television, leaving radio stations to figure out news ways of programming.507 Commercial radio looked to specializing in music genres (like rock and roll) as a means of establishing an audience, while a handful of other radio professionals, disillusioned by the constraints of commercial radio, began conceptualizing a totally different kind of broadcasting culture. While the idea of constraint is frequently associated with an inability to act, the next section demonstrates how technological, socio- cultural, and temporal constraints were productive for countercultural experimentation in radio that would arise over the 1950s and 60s. The idea that no one was listening was imperative to a gradual discursive opening in mid-20th century American radio—first with the FM dial, and then with the after-midnight timeslots.

The Pacifica Network and FM Experimentation

The pacifist and poet Lewis Hill was a key figure in the transformation of radio in the mid-

1950s. As a student at Stanford University, Hill became acquainted with Quaker teachings on pacifism, 508 and in his commitment to non-violence, registered as a conscientious objector in 1941 when he was drafted for WWII. During Hill’s time at a compulsory work camp in Coleville, California, he began dreaming up the idea of a radio station that would

Chris Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968,” Chris Koch Media (blog), originally published in 1968. https://chriskochmedia.com/pacifica-radio/on-pacifica-1968-article-by-chris-koch/. Accessed May 29, 2017. 507 Douglas writes: “Hundreds of stations disaffiliated from the networks, finding their audiences and their advertising revenues in local markets… Stations also became more specialized, developing distinct personalities and catering to specific market segments… What would eventually be called narrowcasting began as stations targeted teens, or Christians, or country and western fans, or African Americans with particular music and focused advertising, all presented by distinctive announcers. And radio listening, especially in the home, became a less communal and a more individualized activity.” Douglas, Listening In, 225. 508 John Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow,” KPFA: The Lengthening Shadow, originally published in 1992, http://www.whitings-writings.com/lengthening_shadow.htm. Accessed May 29, 2017.

204 air pacifist perspectives, which he believed were sorely missing from commercial radio.509

Shortly after, he moved to Washington D.C. where he worked with the ACLU and as a newscaster on a commercial radio station. In 1943 Hill left the station when he “refused to misrepresent the facts.”510 Hill then moved to San Francisco in 1946 with a desire to form a non-commercial511 radio station guided by the twin principles of pacifism and civil liberty.512 Lasar describes the relationship between pacifism and the First Amendment, stating that “The station would promote free discussion in the hopes that such dialogue would identify the roots of conflict and ameliorate them, creating a ‘lasting understanding’ between individuals and nations.”513

Convening a group of pacifists (including Joy Hill, Roy Finch, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard

Moore, E. John Lewis, and Eleanor McKinney previously with NBC), Hill began taking steps toward building commercial-free radio. In 1946, more than two decades before the emergence of its successors NPR and PBS, the Pacifica Foundation was incorporated with the hope that radio might finally carry out its potential to present a breadth of voices and opinions that would work toward cultural, social, and political improvements.

509 Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow.” 510 “The Pacifica Foundation – History,” Pacifica Foundation, www.pacifica.org/about_history. Accessed May 30, 2017. 511 Hill once claimed, “The purpose of commercial radio is to induce mass sales… For mass sales there must be a mass norm, and the activity must be conducted as nearly as possible without risk of departure from the norm… By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry reduces the risk of failure (abnormality) and assures itself a standard product of mass consumption.” Hill believed that removing commercial interests from radio and changing its economic structure would produce a condition for greater freedom in broadcasting, and while he was inspired by the quality of programming available through BBC’s Third Programme, but he did not wish to import state-run radio to America. Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An alternative history of radio in America (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001), 49-50. 512 Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow.” 513 Matthew Lasar, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), 517.

205 Initially, Hill applied for a spot on the AM band in Richmond, California with the aim of catering to an ethnically diverse working-class audience, 514 but the FCC rejected the application on the grounds that “the proposed frequency overlapped with the signals of powerful NBC and CBS stations in the area.”515 In the 1940s, most Americans did not have a radio that could receive FM signals, so granting Pacifica an FM channel posed no threat to commercial interests. Hill then applied for a station on the non-commercial segment of the FM spectrum in Berkeley, California, where their audience would be drawn from the nearby University of California community, namely, those with the means of owning (the less-common) FM receivers.516 At the time, so few people had FM reception that the

Foundation encouraged local manufacturers and stores to make FM units available in the area for a cheaper price, and went so far as to distribute its own FM model directly to listeners of KPFA.517 Beat poet and co-founder of the iconic City Lights Booksellers and

Publishers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, says he became aware of KPFA around 1952 when

KPFA had a promotion where “they gave away wonderful FM radios if you joined up. So

I joined up and I got a very good radio set which I had up until very recently…”518

514 Marc J. Stern, “The Battle for Pacifica,” The Journal of Popular Culture 38, no.6 (2005): 1074. 515 Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A political history (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1996), 48-49. While FM radio had been available since the 1930s with Edward Howard Armstrong’s improvements to frequency modulation, corporate (RCA’s) investment in AM radio and the development of the emerging medium of television hindered the development of FM radio up until the 1950s (see Douglas, Listening In, 257-263). 516 As Chris Koch explains, even though FM audience was limited in 1949 (there were only around ten thousand FM sets in Pacifica’s first broadcast area), “everyone predicted that FM would be the next mass- communications wave.” Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.” 517 Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America, 50. 518 John Whiting, “Conversations Coast to Coast | Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maria Gallardin,” My KPFA – A historical footnote, recorded on October 24, 1994, http://www.kpfahistory.info/conv_home.html. Accessed August 4, 2016.

206 While it was not their first choice, the Pacifica Foundation’s application for a spot on the

FM spectrum ended up being a critical factor in the development of the network’s audience and character. A listener base comprised of middle- to upper-class intellectuals and culturally hungry citizens from the Bay area meant that the network could program in line with the tastes and ideals of the region. Dunaway notes “Pacifica’s first programming was culturally rooted in the Beat movement in San Francisco. From the beginning, Pacifica’s listeners differed significantly from commercial radio’s listeners: The former were more highly educated, committed to radical causes, and interested in the avant-garde.”519 Like for Mort Sahl at the hungry i and Lenny Bruce at Ann’s 440 just a few years later, the Bay area cultivated a dynamic, hospitable and appreciative audience for the group of experimental radio pacifists. The relative wealth and left-ideological leanings of Bay-area residents were necessary economic and political conditions for the listener-sponsored experiment to take place.

Additionally, FM radio was exempt from ratings feedback. Whiting writes, “The Nielsen ratings, with their little boxes attached to consoles in a few living rooms, were already up and running for AM radio, but FM was still only a gleam in an ad man's eye. Lew Hill could ignore with impunity the size of KPFA's audiences because there was, mercifully, no way of measuring them.”520 The relative inaccessibility of FM radio and the fact that

FM stations escaped the commercial surveillance of the Nielsen rating system gave KPFA the freedom to experiment with programming and provide content that simply did not exist

519 David K. Dunaway, “Pacifica Radio and Community Broadcasting,” Journal of Radio Studies Vol. 12 (2) (November 2005): 244. 520 John Whiting, “Pacifica In Vincula: The life and death of great American radio,” My KPFA – An historical footnote, created 1996, www.kpfahistory.info/hist/pacifica_in_vincula.htm. Accessed January 6, 2017.

207 on the AM band. Engelman suggests, “If FM radio had not been in its infancy, it is unlikely that Hill's experiment would have taken root.”521

In 1949, the Pacifica Foundation’s station KPFA-FM went on the air in Berkeley

California, and their network expanded over the years, building sister stations KPFK in LA

(1959), WBAI in New York City (1960),522 KPFT in Houston (1970), and WPFW in

Washington, DC (1977).523 Although the stations have been unified in their economic structure and opposition to mainstream broadcasting, the Pacifica stations never attained a stable identity. As Walker notes, Hill’s vision of non-commercial radio changed over time and depending on who he was describing it to, at times characterizing the station as

“populist or elitist, communitarian or individualist, specifically pacifist or ideologically open-ended. Hill told one story to the anarchists and pacifists who helped build KPFA, another to the FCC that licensed it, another to the Ford Foundation when the cash-poor station turned to it for financial aid.”524 Furthermore, the aims of its staff and character of broadcasters varied significantly over the years—for instance, in the very early days, KPFA

521 Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America, 48. 522 Louis Schweitzer donated his commercial station to Pacifica in 1960. “Schweitzer had been interested in radio for some time, and he had tried to make WBAI commercially profitable while broadcasting intelligent programs. The tension between the programming and commercial requirements, however, continually frustrated him. Either he could run the station at a loss and maintain excellent programs—something which he could not tolerate as a good businessman, or increase the number of commercials and sacrifice some of the programs-which his humanitarian instincts rejected. He told Winkler that during one of New York’s newspaper strikes he realized that “When we were most successful commercially, that was not what I wanted at all … I saw that if the station ever succeeded, it would be a failure.” Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.” 523 Dunaway, “Pacifica Radio and Community Broadcasting,” 245. 524 Walker, Rebels on the Air, 49. Chris Koch further notes the internal inconsistencies of the organization and highlights some of the practical realities that degraded the idealist vision: “Pacifica is not really an underground communications medium. Rather, it is a compromise between an institution of counter culture and of the Establishment. Although it has been used as a vehicle by the radical movement, its financial support comes largely from the upper-middle classes. Although it regularly broadcasts revolutionary agitation and propaganda, it must also seek out the arguments of the extreme right. Pacifica has attacked the most powerful government agencies in the United States; it has also cowered before one of the weakest. It has preached brotherly understanding while itself being torn apart by feuds so bitter that staff members have seriously accused each other of being witches and mailed live scorpions to their colleagues.” Chris Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.”

208 aimed to showcase primarily highbrow cultural content, while shortly after it became well known for its in-depth public affairs programming, while still later in the 1960s it carried strong countercultural content, and finally in the late 1970s, a move toward “community” radio meant content developed in relation to identity politics. Pacifica did, however, pioneer several concrete innovations in radio broadcasting, providing an alternative model to traditional broadcasting in terms of internal structure, funding, programming, and relationship to the audience.525 The alternative institutional structure of the station allowed for a wider range of expression and the possibility of programming against popular taste and demands.

As illustrated in Chapter One, commercial radio had stifled political and aesthetic extremes in broadcasting. KPFA sought to liberate content by creating a listener-sponsored model526 that would allow the station to take risks in their programming and “give the genuine artist and thinker a possible, even a desirable, place to work.”527 Elsa Knight Thompson, trained by the BBC in wartime London, was recruited in 1957, bringing her expertise in public affairs to the network. Excellence in cultural and political programming was not only personally desired by those involved in the station, but also an economic necessity—to ensure the continued support of listeners, the staff had to create outstanding programs that

525 Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America, 45. 526 After considering a number of different financing models, Koch explains, “Hill finally adopted Gandhi’s idea that all public institutions should be supported voluntarily by those who benefit from them. Such a voluntary association established a vital relationship between the broadcaster and the listener, whereby the listener could express his involvement directly—or withdraw it if the broadcaster became unresponsive to his needs. On the other hand he did not want Pacifica to be an exclusive system like a pay TV, in which the signal is scrambled and only available to subscribers, because that would limit its educational power and restrict it to the already committed. Pacifica had to be available to the entire community, supported by those who recognized its community importance.”526 Chris Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.” 527 Lewis Hill quoted in Walker, Rebels on the Air, 50.

209 would persuade listeners to donate their hard-earned resources.528 Along with financially supporting the station, listeners also actively contributed to the daily maintenance and work of the station. Listeners became volunteers who aided with everything from cleaning to fundraising to mailouts to engineering, further strengthening the bonds between Pacifica and the local community and keeping operation costs down.529

KPFA also innovated on programming in the way they presented a diversity of perspectives and tapped into the talents of the local community. Their first folio (program guide for subscribers) illustrates their diversity of programming. The folio states:

In its first six weeks on the air KPFA’s programs were almost 50 per cent

‘live’—not recorded or transcribed, but produced and broadcast directly

from the studios. The station has a goal of at least two-thirds ‘live’

programming, to provide a genuinely active center of broadcasting… [we

do not imply] that recorded or transcribed programs are necessarily bad…

But nothing can supplant the significance of the radio station’s direct use of

the cultural resources around it. It is an unfortunate fact that radio

management in general has the sole object of purchasing listeners as cheaply

as possible. Recorded and ‘packaged’ programs, the cheapest available,

have become the basis of all independent broadcasting in America. For this

reason if none other the station that fills the greatest part of its schedule with

‘live’ performances is likely to be the most constructive and best on the air,

528 Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow.” 529 Joy Hill quoted in “Pacifica is 25,” produced by Larry Josephson, Internet Archive, April 15, 1974, https://archive.org/details/AM_1974_04_15. Accessed November 20, 2016.

210 even if some of its performers are inexperienced… As the project grows it

aims to be more and more a direct agent for the amazing cultural

concentration of the San Francisco region. This aim will be proved in the

amount of ‘live’ programs the station presents. For there is no way to

broadcast for a great community except to put it on the air.530

Drawing substantially on local talent, programs showcased local musicians, folk music, edifying discussions about music, interviews with musicians, original dramatic productions, excerpted performances from the plays of Shakespeare and BBC dramas, children’s programming, and reviews of local cultural events. Public affairs programs spoke to community concerns: episode covered topics such as “Do We Need Low-cost

Public Housing?” and “Is the Atomic Age Destroying Our Civil Liberties?” This breadth of programming demonstrates how KPFA filled a gap in the media environment and contributed to the political knowledge of the Bay area.

Supplementing the Spectrum

If nothing else, a steadfast dedication to the First Amendment united those involved in

Pacifica, evident in the fact that the First Amendment Scholar Alexander Miekeljohn was an early influence of the network and helped Pacifica draft its constitution. In a famous speech given in 1955 before a congressional committee at the height of McCarthyism,

Miekeljohn echoed John Stuart Mill’s idea that society is at a loss when unorthodox opinions are suppressed:

530 “On Being ‘Live,’” KPFA Folio Vol. 1, no. 1, (June 1949), Berkeley, CA, Internet Archive, ia800808.us.archive.org/4/items/kpfafolio1n1paci/kpfafolio1n1paci.pdf; 1, 8.

211 ... in our popular discussions unwise ideas must have a hearing as well as

wise ones, dangerous ideas as well as safe, un-American as well as

American... To be afraid of ideas, of any idea, is to be unfit for self-

government. Any such suppression of ideas about the common good the

First Amendment condemns with its absolute disapproval. The freedom of

ideas shall not be abridged.531

This desire to hear wise and dangerous, un-American and American ideas in the pursuit of self-governance was echoed in an early KPFA Folio commentary, which states:

Every public issue has more than two sides. And somewhere among the

many shades of opinion is to be found an approach that represents the best

possible solution. Sound public policy can be developed only when we have

the freedom to hear all these ideas presented in the presence of their

opposing ideas. Only in this way are issues sharpened, weaknesses revealed,

propaganda exposed. KPFA is endeavouring to make just this type of

approach to public affairs. Through the use of differing program formats, by

raising the “embarrassing” issues, by enlisting the cooperation of able

speakers of all shades of opinion, and, above all, by giving public affairs

favourable listening hours—by all these means, KPFA is endeavouring to

531 John Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow.”

212 become the source of the area’s most continuous and incisive examination

of public affairs.532

In KPFA’s early days, their programmers vowed to showcase ideas from across the ideological spectrum, giving space to those who held opinions anywhere from the far left to the extreme right.

The early desire to present “all shades of opinion” to the public, however, shifted over the years. In the 1960s, the station came to see the “problem of balance” for radio outlets—the difficulty of adequately addressing all sides of an issue in a single broadcast. The network then sought to achieve the ideal of balance by considering the broadcasting spectrum as a whole, and then programming in relation to what was lacking on commercial stations.533

This meant that the stations would be dedicated to programming a “high proportion of unpopular views.”534 Before an investigation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1963, Hollock Hoffman stated:

In my opinion, Pacifica should lean toward programs that present either

opinions or information not available elsewhere... I think Pacifica serves the

ideal of balance if it spends little time reinforcing popular beliefs... I feel

Pacifica should be on the lookout for information that is hard for people to

get from other sources... I believe Pacifica should regard its audiences as

composed of mature, intelligent, and responsible adults, who can be trusted

532 KPFA Folio Vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1949), Berkeley, CA, My Heritage, https://www.myheritage.com/research/record-90100-534091005/kpfa-folio-vol-1-no-3-july-1949-berkeley- california#fullscreen. Accessed January 6, 2017. 533 Lasar, Pacifica Radio, 531-2. 534 Hollock Hoffman, quoted in Lasar, Pacifica Radio, 532.

213 to make up their own minds... I do not believe Pacifica should tell its

audience what to think about the content of its programs...535

This was the point at which Pacifica Radio could be considered supplementary (or what we might today called “alternative”) radio. Lasar writes that this approach “opened up the political space to examine in print and on the air the plethora of issues that had been off limits in the 1950s: sexuality, race relations, drugs, non-traditional lifestyles, and, most important of all, critiques of the national security state.”536 The need for a media station to amplify such alternative content was particularly necessary given the extraordinary changes to social and cultural life that were coming to a head under the conservativism of the 1950s, and given that so few outlets would actually cover life on the ground.

Free Speech at Berkeley

In developing the supplementary or alternative ethos, the network developed a platform for a host of perspectives within the American public; individuals and groups who were variously interested in pacifism, Communism, civil rights, gender equality, sexual freedom, avant-garde aesthetics, and other subjects that had been considered too risky for mainstream media. Free speech radio was developing alongside (or rather, was intimately intertwined with) the free speech ethos created by the moral, economic, and political censorship of the 1940s and 50s. In his work on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) galvanized at the University of Berkeley, Robert Cohen notes that the campus in the 1950s was characterized by political tensions and censorship stemming from the university’s instigation of an anti-Communist loyalty oath that drove faculty members away from

535 John Whiting, “The Lengthening Shadow.” 536 Lasar, Pacifica Radio, 539.

214 campus in 1949 and the early 1950s.537 Over the 1950s, Cohen writes, there were liberal and radical faculty who attempted to recover political freedom on campus, but it was during the 1960s when students mobilized that the culture of suppression began to shift as students protested against the San Francisco hearings of the House of Un-American Activities

(HUAC).538

On October 1, 1964, just months after Bruce was arrested for an obscene performance in

New York and a little over one month before he was found guilty of obscenity for that performance, student activists rose in support of free speech when they defied the

University of Berkeley’s prohibition against political advocacy on university property.

Jack Weinberg, leader of the Berkeley chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), had been arrested that day for refusing to show his identification to the campus police, and the moment galvanized student supporters to surround the police car he’d been picked up in on Sproul Plaza, blocking the campus police from carrying out their arrest, and culminating in a 32-hour standoff between protestors and police. Robert Cohen writes,

“Here was a moment when a mass movement held off the emissaries of state violence and accomplished this non-violently, using as its only weapon the solidarity of people willing to ‘put their bodies on the line’ to stop the arrest of a civil rights activist.”539

The sense of community and solidarity that was expressed as students stood with Jack

Weinberg articulated not just a commitment to the First Amendment, but more broadly to

537 Robert Cohen, “The Many Meanings of the FSM: In lieu of an introduction,” The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); 11. 538 Cohen, “The Many Meanings of the FSM,” 11-12. 539 Cohen, “The Many Meanings of the FSM, 6.

215 social equality. Noting the intersecting struggles of the Civil Rights and the Free Speech movements, Cohen writes:

The moral power of the Civil Rights Movement was heavily invested in the

cause of free speech at Berkeley, since it was that movement whose campus

arm would have been severely disabled if the restrictions on advocacy had

stood. Supporting the FSM was a way that Berkeley students could connect

with the work of civil rights organizers in the South, who were viewed as

heroes risking their lives for freedom. Student mobilization around free

speech was also connected to concerns about due process, as FSM leaders

seemed to many students to have been unfairly singled out for punishment

and in a way that boded ill for the free speech rights of other students...

There was a synergy between the causes of free speech, civil rights, and due

process that, as they all came together, gave them an exponential power.540

For orator of the Free Speech Movement Mario Savio, the Civil Rights movement represented more than social justice. For the young Savio, whose ties to formalized religion weakened over his time studying philosophy at Berkeley, the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements palpably articulated “goodness” itself.

In a speech reflecting on his time in the movements, Savio presented his vision of what it meant to be a child of the 1950s. He explained that his serious religious upbringing moved

540 Cohen, “The Many Meanings of the FSM,” 7.

216 him to perceive world events—the threat of nuclear war, the Holocaust, and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement—through an intensely spiritual lens:

I was someone who took good and evil exceptionally seriously. I had two

aunts who were nuns. I could have been a priest. And, suddenly, there’s the

Civil Rights Movement. And since I’m breaking away from the Church, I

see the Civil Rights Movement in religious terms. [In the] Civil Rights

Movement there were all those ministers; it was just absolutely rife with

ministers, bristling with ministers. And so, to me, this was an example of

God working in the world. Allying myself in whatever way I could with that

movement was an alternative to the Church because I couldn’t actually

believe those [biblical] stories… I couldn’t bring myself to believe the

religion I was born into on a factual basis. But the spirit of ‘do good’ and

‘resist evil’ was an important part of my religious upbringing. I saw [that]

present in the Civil Rights Movement—and I wanted to ally myself with

that. I believe that thousands of people from different religious points of

view who no longer believed in their religions literally still kept with them

that germ of truth, part of which is do good and resist evil. And for them the

Civil Rights Movement was the thing they were waiting for—a real

counterbalance to the evil that they had seen or imagined, to the bombs

exploding and [telling people], ‘This is just normal; we have to protect

ourselves from the Communists and so we create a weapon that could

destroy the world.’ And everyone knows it. And they said it. Here finally

217 was, in counterpoint to palpable evil, something that was palpably

good…541

Before the Free Speech Movement began, Savio was part of the Civil Rights demonstrations, beginning with his participation in militant demonstrations that demanded equal employment for Black citizens, and then joining the interracial coalition in

Mississippi that encouraged Black people to vote during Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Upon returning to Berkeley, he became president of a Civil Rights organization, the

University Friends of SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee].542 Soon after, the university instituted a policy prohibiting political advocacy on university property. He explains: “No more distribution of leaflets, no more collecting of money, no more doing all of the things that had gotten me to go to the demonstration where I was first arrested and ultimately to Mississippi to endanger these people [by encouraging them to register to vote]. And to me to was a very clear question, ‘Am I a Judas?’ I’m going to betray the people whom I endangered now that I’m back home? Forget all about that… And all the other students seemed to feel the same way.”543 It was in a commitment to support the Civil

Rights Movement, and in the face of the censorship of that movement, that the Free Speech

Movement was forged.

Social Movement Media: Amplifying the ‘60s

Writing four years after the demonstration at Sproul Plaza, producer Chris Koch stated:

541 Mario Savio, “Thirty Years Later,” The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); 61-2. 542 Savio, “Thirty Years Later,” 66. 543 Savio, “Thirty Years Later,” 66-7.

218 Pacifica’s single unequivocal stand must be on the First Amendment. It

must not allow itself to be distracted, or threatened, or weaned in any way

from freedom of speech. Because consciousness is so important, whenever

tensions within the United States reach crisis proportions, consciousness

will be controlled. Pacifica must stand in the way of that control. By

insisting on freedom of speech in culture and politics, Pacifica can make the

First Amendment a radical tool.544

Pacifica had, for years, presented daring broadcasts. Over the 1950s, Pacifica aired viewpoints against the Korean War, controversial discussions about marijuana, and criticisms of McCarthyism. Their commitment to innovative literature was also clear in

1957, when Kenneth Rexroth broadcast an edited recording of Allan Ginsburg’s “Howl”

(which the FCC later criticized as “in bad taste”). As the 1960s progressed, the network aired sentiments against the Vietnam War, and in 1964, three of their reporters were murdered while covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South.545 Pacifica’s tendency to cover controversial material led to undesired attention from state authorities. In the same years that political expression was chilled on the Berkeley campus, between 1960-63 the

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security

Subcommittee (SISS) investigated Pacifica for “subversion” (due to airing writers such as

Bertolt Brecht and W.E.B. DuBois).546

544 Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.” 545 “The Pacifica Foundation – History,” Pacifica Foundation. 546 Ibid.

219 Looking at Pacifica’s program guides and listening to their archives provides an understanding of why their programming was considered politically, morally, or culturally subversive. This is especially clear when one considers broadcasting and film norms from the time (see Chapter One). Some listings from Pacifica’s 1960s offerings include:

• “The Lesbians” broadcast (1963) – discussion among nine lesbians about their lives

• “Interview with a Texas Working Girl” (1964) – personal narrative of a woman in

the sex industry

• “Free Speech Movement: Sounds and Songs of the Demonstrations” (1965) –

includes documentary footage of 6000 person sit-ins, speeches including one by

Mario Savio, student arrests

• “Acid and Sociology” (1966) – discussion about hallucinogenic and psychedelic

drugs

• “John Cage and Morton Feldman in conversation, Radio Happening I of V” (1966)

• Interviews with Andy Warhol (1967) and Roy Lichtenstein (1968)

• Martin Luther King archives (1968)

• “Conversation with Kathleen Cleaver,” a prominent member of the Black Panther

Party (1968)

• “Homosexual Meeting Places” (1968)

• “Interview with a hustler” – interview with male prostitute (1968)

• “Mae West discussing Freud” (1968)

• “New trends in sex morality” (1968)

220 • Human rights interview (1968) 547

Ideas that had been circulating outside of mainstream media (in lecture halls, cultural scenes, and among political, intellectual, and ideological outcasts or dissidents) were given space on a public medium. This was significant especially, as Whiting notes, because:

… in those days, the major newscasters just weren’t interested. This was not

their territory... But there was KPFA, out there with their microphones and

their tape recorders, rushing this stuff back to the studios and armies of

people on aged Ampexes cutting it up and putting it on the air, virtually as

soon as the splice had gone onto the tape. These were those moments in

which KPFA suddenly had everyone in town riveted to their radio sets. And

it was always these moments of crisis… crisis of the community when the

listenership went up, the subscriptions went up, when people realized ‘This

is our lifelines to what’s happening in Berkeley and in the Bay area.’548

KPFA broadcaster William Mandel demonstrates Pacifica’s commitment to dissident expressions in the face of adversity in the following anecdote about his broadcast regarding

JFK’s declaration that Cuba’s nuclear missiles required an attack by the USA. Mandel reflects:

547 Open Your Ears and Say Aaahh! KPFK Folio 90.7 FM (April 1968), Los Angeles, CA, Internet Archive https://ia802605.us.archive.org/10/items/aprifolio68kpfkrich/aprifolio68kpfkrich.pdf. Accessed January 6, 2017. 548 “John Whiting remembers KPFA Pt. 2,” YouTube video, recorded in 1994, uploaded online by John Whiting September 29, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-r5rL4oF4&spfreload=1. Accessed January 6, 2017.

221 I called Trevor Thomas who was then the station manager and also at that

moment the head of Pacifica. I did something I had never done before and

the station never asked me to do. I said, “Trevor, I’m going to accuse the

President of the United States of endangering the existence of humanity in

my show this evening with his blockade of Cuba. Do you want me to read

you the script?” He said, “No.” And to me, that was the finest single

demonstration of adherence to principle in all the years of KPFA.549

Despite the network’s comparatively limited resources, they remained committed to the

First Amendment in the face of various attempts to destroy the network, including when the KKK bombed its Houston station KPFT twice in 1970, or as the FBI, local police and

Congress threatened Pacifica with censorship on multiple occasions.550 This commitment to high quality and controversial programming secured Pacifica’s bond with its listenership and garnered it critical acclaim. In 1958, KPFA won the prestigious George Foster Peabody

Award for Public Service.

As Pacifica gained prominence on the national scene for its quality programming, it faded out of notoriety. Speaking about a controversial broadcast in which former FBI agent Jack

Levine exposed the corruption of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI,551 Chris Koch writes,

549 “Pacifica Radio at 60: A Sanctuary of Dissent,” Vimeo video, aired during Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now on April 15, 2009, uploaded online by “Pacifica Expanded,” https://vimeo.com/44687708. Accessed January 6, 2017. 550 Koch, “On Pacifica – 1968.” 551 The program outed the FBI, who had been investigating liberal or left wing groups like the NAACP, CORE, and the ACLU. Chris Koch describes the moment for the institution: “The notion of criticizing the FBI was completely beyond the pale, no one had ever done that before. And nobody would take Jack’s story. We interviewed jack for 2 or 3 hours. As we approached broadcast, unbelievable pressure came down upon us. All the staff was called, people were followed at home, FBI agents appeared at peoples’ doorways. There

222 By 1963, however, when the Senate investigation began, the Foundation

had become a fairly secure part of the American scene, and it could no

longer count on relative obscurity to protect itself. The Levine broadcast

made clear that when Pacifica raised a sufficiently important issue

dramatically enough, the nation would have to listen. Its three stations, in

three major population centers (the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles,

and New York City), had a base of thirty thousand subscribers and an

income of close to three-quarters of a million dollars. We had a prime-time

audience of one to two million people.

Moving away from small-scale broadcasts to a wider audience, Pacifica brought unorthodox programming to Americans far and wide, dismantling a moral and discursive shield that had separated mass audiences from the dynamism of their communities and niche cultural spaces.

Contesting Censorship by Interrogating Notions of “Obscenity”

The only principle that even vaguely gave the FCC power to regulate radio content had come from the Communications Act granting the FCC a responsibility to ensure no one uttered “obscene, indecent, and profane” material on the airwaves [discussed in Chapter

One]. With the 1950s and 60s seeing so many obscenity arrests across artistic formats, and with Pacifica adamantly dedicated to the airing of controversial ideas, it is fitting that

Pacifica took up the issues of censorship and obscenity on several occasions. Over the

1960s and 1970s, the Pacifica stations broadcast several programs interrogating the concept

was huge pressure not to go ahead with this broadcast. But we persisted.” “Pacifica Radio at 60: A Sanctuary of Dissent.”

223 of obscenity, including “Censorship and Obscenity,” (1961) a conversation among Bay- area legal experts regarding censorship legislation; “Sex, pornography, and censorship”

(1961); “On Pornography” (1963) a program showcasing presentations for the California

Bar Association regarding legal and social aspects of pornography; “Obscenity in the Fine

Arts” (1965); “The Problems of a Publisher: obscenity and censorship” highlighting the struggles of Barney Rosset552 (1965); “Obscenity: the American hang-up” moderated by

Milton Mayer (1968); and “Obscenity, Pacifica, and the F.C.C.” (1969). Unsurprisingly for a radio station dedicated to free speech, local talent, and high literature, one of KPFA’s early obscenity programs centered on the “Howl” controversy.

Just a year after Allen Ginsberg’s iconic reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, he recorded a slightly edited version of the poem at the KPFA studio, which was then broadcast late in the evening on October 25, 1956 by the writer, intellectual luminary, and broadcaster Kenneth Rexroth.553 It was not until the late winter/early spring of 1957 that state officials began their attempts to censor “Howl,” first with federal customs officials seizing copies from the printer in London, and then by arresting Ferlinghetti and Murao for distributing the poem at the City Lights Bookstore. In the midst of these controversies,

552 Rosset was the owner of the publishing house Grove Press, and publisher of the Evergreen Review magazine. He was behind the fight to publish the uncensored version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which he was granted the right to distribute and publish by the Supreme Court in a landmark ruling for free speech in 1964. 553 Rexroth was considered a “father” to the beat poets, and was an early supporter of Ginsberg’s after being introduced to him through a letter from William Carlos Williams. Furthermore, Rexroth had read an early draft of “Howl” and chided Ginsberg for being too academically theoretical, goading him instead to “do something original,” resulting in the iconic version of “Howl.” Gordon Ball in his introduction to Journals mid-fifties, 1954-1958 (New York City: NY: Harper Collins, 1995), 9. Along with being a respected figure in the literary scene, Rexroth was involved with Pacifica early on—he was at the Pacifica meeting when Hill proposed listener-sponsored FM radio, and was a voice on KPFA for over twenty years, promoting poetry readings, interviewing writers and musicians, organizing speakers series, and in his weekly book review program “Books” which aired from 1951 to 1970.

224 KPFA decided to re-broadcast their “Howl” recording, this time in the context of an intellectual discussion regarding obscenity law.

On June 12, 1957, just a few weeks before Ferlinghetti’s trial set for August 8, KPFA broadcast their program “Panel on Howl,” for which Lewis Hill convened a panel of literary, cultural, and legal experts554 to discuss the poem in relation to literature and obscenity laws. 555 The program began with a bit of context regarding the obscenity controversy, followed by the recording of Ginsberg’s slightly censored reading of the poem, then the panel discussion, after which audience members were invited to phone in with questions and comments. To put the controversy in perspective, George Brunn read applicable obscenity law in California. The group also considered the judgments of a recent

Supreme Court ruling regarding the sale of obscene literature, and then discussed the landmark James Joyce obscenity case from 1934 for which Judge Woolsey ruled that a work had to be considered as a whole in relation to community standards. One listener called in saying that the police did not understand the poem itself and made the arrest based on the words alone, and another listener called in asking about the artistic merits of the

554 Mark Schoorer Prof. of English at the University of California; William Hogan, book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle; Lawrence Ferlinghetti who faced trial for selling the book; George Brunn, an attorney who participated in a study of customs and post office censorship methods for the University of Pennsylvania; and Leroy Merritt, Professor of Librarianship at the University of California and co-chairman of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the California Library Association. 555 Hill stated that KPFA attempted to invite “principle figures on the other side of the case contra Mr. Ferlinghetti, namely Captain Hanrahan of the police department… and Mr. MacPhee of Customs, and Mr. Herald Kinnon” but that “none of them could consent to appear on this program.” Hill admitted that the group had to confront the fact that they agreed “with one another fundamentally upon the issue of censorship. And for that reason, let us hope that our program can confine itself principally to information, rather than mutual congratulation upon our agreement upon the issue.” “Panel on Howl/ moderated by Lewis Hill,” Pacifica Radio Archives, PRA Archive # BB1894, Broadcast on KPFA Berkeley, June 12, 1957.

225 work. By creating the roundtable program, Pacifica provided an intellectual foundation from which a broader listening public could hear, judge, and understand “Howl.”

In this broadcast, then, we see the way that Pacifica extended public discourse on free speech and obscenity, as well as directly supported the free speech rights of those involved in the “Howl” controversy, as KPFA invited listeners to first hear the poem itself,556 and then deliberated upon obscenity laws and rulings, expounded on the literary merits of the work, and further incorporated the comments of the community into the broadcast.

Furthermore, Albert Bendich (who became a regular Pacifica guest throughout the 1960s) and Kenneth Rexroth both directly supported Ferlinghetti in his trial, the first as his lawyer and the second providing expert testimony in the case. In their innovative programs, expert and community discussions, and contributions to legal understanding, the team at Pacifica did the everyday work to push the boundaries of public discourse, expand the community’s knowledge on free speech, and influence the opinions of those deliberating “obscenity” in a local court.

Broadcasting the Obscene Comic

In step with the “Howl” broadcasts, Pacifica similarly aired a number of programs related to Lenny Bruce over the 1960s and into the 1970s. This was particularly notable because

Bruce was such a contentious performer whom many stations would not risk airing. While

Studs Terkel had praised Bruce’s comedy on Chicago’s WMFT in February 1959, Bruce’s increasing notoriety in the early 1960s made him a less desirable performer to put on the

556 The station was transparent about the fact that they had recorded a partially edited version of the poem for broadcast, and Hill asserted he was confident that they were still transmitting “the full essence of what has provoked the San Francisco police department.”

226 air. This is evident in the fact that a veteran disc jockey for Chicago’s WCFL, Dan Sorkin, left the station after working there for 11 years over a dispute with management regarding the station’s demand that he not play Lenny Bruce albums and other material deemed “not in good taste.”557 Commercial stations even in the most vibrant urban centers could not necessarily take a risk on broadcasting Bruce. Listener-sponsored stations, however, could.

Again, the local Bay-area network of cultural figures was behind the early Bruce radio broadcasts. In a letter from Ralph Gleason to Lenny Bruce in 1961, Gleason writes:

KPFA played [your tape] Saturday night. All they did to it was to blank out

the fuckyous and to skip the part about Sol and Max [Weiss] etc. I wanted

them to run it all, but they said the FCC has been giving them a bad time

(apparently they get heat put on them by commercial people now that they

are a three-station network) and they want to avoid it if possible… It was

very successful, got a lot of response. Let's kill that bastard and friendly

little things like that and they burned a cross on the top of the building later

that night in your honor...558

Not only did KPFA play Bruce’s tape, they lent him their technical expertise when their staff recorded his performances. John Whiting of KPFA explains, “Al Bendich was a good

557 “WCFL Fires Sorkin.” Broadcasting, September 2, 1963, http://www.americanradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Business/Magazines/Archive-BC-IDX/63-OCR/1963-09- 02-BC-OCR-Page-0010.pdf#search=%22lenny%20bruce%22. Accessed January 6, 2017. Along with refusing to be censored, Sorkin also defended Bruce in a hearing earlier that year regarding the revocation of the Gate of Horn’s liquor license over Bruce’s act. “Two Take Stand in Night Club Obscenity Case,” Chicago Tribune, originally published January 30, 1963, Chicago Tribune Archive. http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1963/01/30/page/27/article/2-take-stand-in-night-club-obscenity-case. Accessed June 26, 2017. 558 Letter from Ralph Gleason to Lenny Bruce (3-2-61), in “Miscellaneous items from Lenny Bruce to Ralph Gleason and by Ralph J. Gleason 1958-1965,” Folder 3. Lenny Bruce Archives. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

227 friend of KPFA,559 and so we often did the recordings [of Lenny Bruce’s performances].

From these we extracted for broadcast a few routines that would not land us in a courtroom along with their author. Twice I was the one who lugged the Ampex over to the Off

Broadway.” 560 Furthermore, KPFA directly furnished legal understandings of Bruce’s material, as one of their recordings was used by the defence during the San Francisco trial in 1961 for which Bruce was exonerated.561

Along with the many useful tapes that brought Bruce to the residents (and jury members) of San Francisco, the Pacifica stations broadcast several programs about Lenny Bruce both during Bruce’s life and afterward. Between 1963, the height of Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials, and 1972 (a few years after his death), Pacifica produced at least 8 programs562 that were directly or indirectly related to Lenny Bruce, many of which framed Bruce as an important social satirist. For instance, in February of 1963, in the same month that Bruce’s obscenity trials in Hollywood and Chicago were taking place, KPFA recorded a program about Bruce with Albert Goldman,563 an English professor at Columbia university who would later write a biography of Bruce. The radio program, “Lenny Bruce: A Profile”

559 Not only did Bendich represent Ferlinghetti and Bruce in their obscenity trials, he was a regular guest on Pacifica programs discussing civil liberties issues, and represented Elsa Knight Thompson when the station fired her. Michael Tigar, “Al Bendich, Mentor, Lawyer, Friend,” TigarBytes blog, posted January 26, 2015, http://tigarbytes.blogspot.com/2015/01/al-bendich-mentor-lawyer-friend.html. Accessed January 6, 2017. 560 John Whiting, “Come and gone: Thank you, Mr. Masked Man!” My KPFA – A Historical Footnote, no date posted, http://www.kpfahistory.info/dandl/lenny_bruce_home.htm. Accessed January 6, 2017. 561 Ibid. 562 “Lenny Bruce: A Profile” (1963); “Lenny Bruce comes clean” (1963); “Lenny Bruce Memorial” (1966); “Thank God for the Kike/ Ralph Gleason, Albert Bendich, and Alexander Hoffman” (1966); “Jonathan Miller: talk on Lenny Bruce” (1963); “Lenny Bruce: American” (1972); “Ready for the Defense/ Martin Garbus” (1971); “The Conservative Viewpoint/ Richard Kuh” [Bruce’s prosecutor in the NYC trial] (1970); “The Libertarian Viewpoint” (1970). 563 A controversial figure for the ways that his rich and colorful biography of Bruce has been seen as suspect because of Goldman’s editorializing and potential fabrication.

228 presented recordings from Bruce’s act, interspersed with Goldman’s biography and cultural commentary which argued the significance of Bruce.

In this way, the KPFA program not only took a risk by airing a comedian that most other radio stations would not air at the time, but it also countered mainstream (and police) narratives characterizing Bruce as a “sick” and offensive comic. The Goldman broadcast used the humanizing format of the biography to provide a sense of Lenny Bruce’s personal life, and then provided intellectual arguments that asserted his significance as a social satirist. Later that year, KPFA broadcast two more sympathetic programs about Lenny

Bruce, including “Lenny Bruce comes clean” which Pacifica described as a performance in which “the socially conscious comic speaks before a live audience about drugs, the police and his arrests. Bruce speaks openly about his own addictions, being arrested by the

LAPD and the violation of his civil rights.”564 These live performances were important for giving Bruce the opportunity to speak candidly in his chosen medium about his trials

(which he continually felt misrepresented in), and the remediation of this kind of performance over radio allowed for the movement of Bruce’s voice, his comedy, and his grasp of the obscenity controversies to a much broader listening public than that afforded by live performance spaces. When Bruce died in 1966, Pacifica aired a recording of Lenny

Bruce’s memorial as well as a program entitled “Thank God for the Kike” in which three friends (Ralph Gleason, and lawyers Albert Bendich and Alexander Hoffman) reflected on

Bruce’s life.

564 See the catalog entry: “Lenny Bruce comes clean” on Pacifica Radio Archives. http://pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb1120. Accessed June 30, 2017.

229 In these broadcasts, Pacifica extended the otherwise spatially and temporally circumscribed ceremony and discussions that honored Bruce’s life, as the network invited listeners to aurally join a community of Bruce’s supporters and loved ones and reflect on the significance of free and frank speech in comedy. In the Pacifica Network’s remediation of Bruce’s live performances and the events surrounding his life, an intersection of performers, radio producers, lawyers, and intellectuals demonstrated their commitment to the First Amendment, asserted the right to use broadcasting for unorthodox content, and challenged FCC censorship based on vague notions of obscenity and indecency.

Free Reign Over Dispensable Hours

Pacifica’s support for Bruce and the First Amendment extended beyond the scene at KPFA.

The irreverent countercultural programmers of Pacifica’s New York station, WBAI, in the

1960s challenged reigning ideas of discursive propriety, both in the way they supported

Bruce’s work but also in their own programs and performances. One article notes, “For nine years, WBAI was the freaky, underground station, playing monologues by Lenny

Bruce that no other station would touch, [along with] broadcasting partisan, "movement" newscasts, scheduling regular programs for homosexuals, playing music by Richie Havens and the Incredible String Band years before these artists had broken into mass consciousness.”565 In the 1960s, Pacifica’s New York outlet WBAI became a media home

(and instigator) of the counterculture in New York City, initiated in large part by what might be seen as a second generation of Pacifica staff who broke away from the staid

565 “Freeform Radio: The First Twenty Eight Years,” originally published in EYE Magazine in 1969, WMFU website, http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/Early/firstdays.html. Accessed June 30, 2017.

230 professionalism and cultural elitism exemplified by Pacifica’s founders and early broadcasters.

WBAI’s Larry Josephson explains that the station was an important outlet to those who found themselves “disenfranchised by the mass media” as it featured programs that were

“no longer sequential, but random, associative and parallel.”566 WBAI incubated some of the first free-form programs on the radio, a genre described by one commentator as “like jazz: you have the melody, and you improvise on it.”567 Like Bruce, the free-form DJs of

WBAI in the 1960s preferred to speak candidly and casually in a stream-of-consciousness manner, open about their personal lives and opinions, and with their sometimes amicable, stoned, antagonistic, or depressives states on earnest display. Josephson notes that WBAI’s sound in the 1960s had been variously described as that of “boredom,” “aggression—a kind of postured hipness,” “amateurishness,” and finally others thought the station sounded like “humaneness, or love, or naturalness.” Josephson continues, “It’s all of that.

Naturalness, especially. For example, when we’re running behind time, we say so. When we make a mistake, we admit it. We don’t try to come up with our radio-broadcast persona grata intact. When we read news, we try to read it like human beings. I hate WINS. They read everything in the same excited monotone. It isn’t human.”568 Lasar further writes:

566 William Honan. “The New Sound of Radio: All-News, All-Music, All-Ghetto Radio is a Success.” New York Times. Dec. 3, 1967. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 567 Radio Unnameable: A Film. 568 William Honan, “The New Sound of Radio: All-News, All-Music, All-Ghetto Radio is a Success,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 1967. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

231 no taboos inhibited their broadcasts on WBAI… They played black vinyl

records simultaneously, or backwards, sometimes letting the needle repeat

over damaged grooves while talking over the skips. They monologue about

the most personal matters, or made fun of listeners, or fought with one

another on the air. Unlike Pacifica’s founders, they abhorred the center,

positioning themselves instead as alienated men, looking in from the cold

periphery… they took dissent radio as far as it could go.569

Like the new wave comics in the nightclubs before them, the counterculture’s free-form

DJs shed the vocal artifice and poise of traditional radio personalities, presenting more natural and human points-of-view that allowed the new breed of DJs to connect with niche audiences.

At the helm of “live” or “free-form” radio were Bob Fass, Steve Post, and Larry Josephson at WBAI. It is said that Bob Fass instigated the shift one night in 1963 when he kept the station running after his typical evening program. Assuming people wouldn’t listen to the radio long after midnight, the station managers allowed Fass to experiment with the content and aesthetics of material played over the radio—this experimentation in form and substance would be taken up by legions of DJs after him. Just as the Pacifica experiment early on depended on an assumption that the FM band had little value, so too was Fass’ experiment dependant on an idea that the late night hours were of little value in the world of radio. When Fass’ managers asked him who would be listening after midnight, Fass

569 Lasar, Pacifica Radio, 224.

232 responded, “Are you kidding? Do you know how many people work at night? You know how many places in New York make bagels all night long? And somehow, they went for it.”570

Juxtaposing a myriad of sounds during an open stretch of what many considered valueless time, Fass’ program quickly became distinguishable from other radio offerings. Further, his program became intertwined with his personality, life, and community. At the time,

Fass explains, it was not a common practice for a radio show to take calls on the air, but he took random calls all night and allowed callers to talk about anything: “I thought of it as an electronic media community… I would talk to the audience as if they were real.”571

Regarding the character of the program, he states, “I tried to make it as unlike anything else as I could… I wanted to put my culture on the air—the Greenwich Village ‘cul-chah’— politics and exotic people. I’d put anyone on, because the idea was that, if you didn’t like what I was doing, three minutes later I’d be doing something else.”572

What had made KPFA distinct and successful was that it drew on the resources of the local

Bay-area community, covered ongoing political events, and connected listeners to the area’s cultural scenes. Fass similarly helped to make WBAI a node through which

Greenwich Village’s cultures were channelled over the airwaves. Between midnight and dawn, Fass created sound collages,573 spoke candidly about drugs, took random phone calls

570 Radio Unnameable: A Film. 571 Radio Unnameable: A Film. 572 Emphasis mine. Quoted in Marc Fisher, “Voice of the Cabal,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/04/voice-of-the-cabal. Accessed January 7, 2017. 573 Sound collages had been experimented with by Henry Jacobs on his ethnomusicology program and on John Leonard’s late night program NightSounds for which he produced collages of music, poetry, and satire. For more on the latter, see Steven Post, Playing in the FM Band: A Personal Account of Free Radio (New

233 during which people could speak at length, featured live performances by Bob Dylan,

Richie Havens, Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie, and played records and tapes in unpredictable ways guided by stream-of-consciousness associations. 574 His show was appropriately called Radio Unnameable.575 Comedic recordings were among the many audio sources Fass drew upon. One article notes, “He brought in representatives of a phony group called Stamp Out Smut to rail against the profane comedy of Lenny Bruce—and then Fass rolled tape of Bruce’s manic monologues.”576 Along with incorporating Bruce’s irreverent comedy into the show, Bruce was an influence on WBAI personalities.

Steve Post notes that before their generation of countercultural DJs, programming at

Pacifica had been divided up largely into three groups: news and public affairs, drama and literature, and music.577 However, as free-form developed, satire and the humor of the DJ became part of the character of free-form programs. Radio Unnameable, which showcased live culture and New Left politics, became a media home to some of the counterculture’s most humorous personalities. One of Fass’ frequent guests was Hugh Romney, an ex- beatnik stand-up comic who was once managed by Lenny Bruce, and later became a hippy

York, NY: The Viking Press, 1974), 73. Before Fass’s program launched, Chris Albertson did some free- form programming on his late-night Inside at WBAI where “his programs were a spectacular blend of jazz, preproduced satirical pieces, and artfully edited sound montages” (Post, Playing in the FM Band, 75). Post distinguishes these programs from the later programs, saying “Artfully produced collages of music, poetry, satire, and tape montages, both [Leonard and Albertson’s programs] lacked the intimate interaction between broadcaster and audience that so dominated Radio Unnameable” (Post, Playing in the FM Band, 74). 574 Post provides an idea of how Fass’ evenings would proceed: “Fass would arrive only moments before the broadcast, loaded down with shopping bags, briefcases, and cartons filled with records and tapes… Radio Unnameable proceeded from moment to moment, with Fass free-associating one record, tape, or thought to another, generally deciding upon the next record or tape only as the previous one ran out. He would open the microphone and talk about something he had seen, heard, or done, then follow it with a string of recorded material relating either directly or abstractly to that theme. Then, just as spontaneously, he would juxtapose other thoughts and begin a new theme, read a piece of poetry, or produce an unprepared collage” (Post, quoted in Julius Lester’s Foreword to Playing in the FM Band, xiii). 575 The program’s name was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable,” published in English by Grove Press in 1958. Fisher, “Voice of the Cabal.” 576 Fisher, “Voice of the Cabal.” 577 Post, Playing in the FM Band, 72.

234 political activist in a clown’s costume who went by the name Wavy Gravy. 578 Radio

Unnameable was also the principle communications hub for the theatrical, anti- authoritarian, prankster youth group, the Youth International Party (the Yippies), which

Fass initiated alongside Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner. 579 David

Kaufman suggests that the Jewish irreverence of Bruce was a “critical precedent for the

Jewish irreverence of Hoffman, Rubin, Krassner, and the others,”580 noting that these were

“nice Jewish boys gone bad.”581 Krassner, a friend and collaborator of Bruce’s, recalls

“When I met Abbie Hoffman, I told him that he was the first person who made me laugh since Lenny died (the previous year), and Abbie said, ‘Really? He was my god.’”582 This sentiment is echoed in Hoffman’s Yippie manifesto, Woodstock Nation (1970), in which he recounts a (potentially offensive) conversation about suicide that he had with an undertaker, ending it with the dedication, “This story is for you, Lenny, from all the

Yippies.”583 Coming some years after Bruce’s obscenity arrests, the community in and around Radio Unnamable brought their irreverence, Left politics, frank speech, beatnik frustration, and cutting humor to the world of radio.

578 Walker, Rebels on the Air, 73. 579 The Yippies were infamous for their theatrical, politically-themed pranks, which gathered hundreds or sometimes thousands of hippy and New Left youth in coordinated spectacles with anti-establishment messages. Their most contentious moment was during the 1968 DNC Convention at which 8 leaders were charged with criminal conspiracy and inciting a riot. 580 David Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American celebrity and Jewish Identity, (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 139. 581 Ibid. 582 Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 138. 583 “Dedication to Lenny Bruce,” on Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas website, originally written January 1970, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1080/article/227/dedication.to.lenny.bruce. Accessed June 30, 2017.

235 The “sardonic,” “curmudgeonly,” and “mischievous”584 Steve Post, a one-time assistant to

Lenny Bruce,585 credits comedy as being an important part of the character of his free-form program, The Outside.586 Inspired by the free-form work of Bob Fass, Post began a late- night show on Saturday nights in 1965.587 In an effort to distinguish his show from Fass’ show, he began drawing more on his personality and sense of humor. He writes:

I had learned early in life to use humor as both a defense and a tool, to

understand why I could not adjust, as could so many of my contemporaries,

to the demands imposed on me by a set of values that seemed to have no

584 Douglas Martin, “Steve Post, Sardonic Wit on WNYC, is Dead,” The New York Times, August, 5, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/nyregion/steve-post-sardonic-wit-on-wnyc-is-dead-at-70.html. Accessed June 30, 2017. 585 David Hinckley, “New York radio contrarian and WNYC morning host Steve Post dies at age 70,” Daily News, August 5, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/new-york-radio-show-host-steve-post- dies-age-70-article-1.1890789. Accessed June 30, 2017. 586 Post writes: It is difficult to say exactly what the purpose of The Outside was. Not everyone listened on the same level, or for the same reason. Because of the component nature of such a program, the listening audience must be made up of many small audiences’ while there is only one actual transmission, there are many levels of reception. Many, I’m certain, tuned in simply to hear a half hour or more of uninterrupted music, not even momentarily aware that the sequence and selection of music was leading to or from a specific place. Others awaited nothing but the frequent appearances of Marshall Efron, who provided, I believe, some of the finest moments of spontaneous satire ever broadcast over WBAI’s airwaves… Or perhaps they looked to the endless, stoned, nonsensical, free- associative, witty and witless Saturday and Sunday nights verbally spent with Paul Krassner.—Nights we went on taking telephone calls so far into the early-morning hours that each of us had to awaken the other from brief naps taken while on the air, listening to our rambling callers. Some tuned in specifically for the telephone conversations between me and the on-the-air callers. Mostly they were battles of wits: some were funny, or moving, or simply bizarre stories; others became The Outside’s regulars—they became the show, while I simply faded into the background… Several programs were simply outrageous… Perhaps the historical turning point for The Outside came in the spring of 1967. While Fass dwelt upon, and helped create, New York’s counterculture, I was spending more and more time recounting anecdotes and experiences of my frequently traumatized adolescence. Some of the audience complained that I was not fulfilling the obligations of a WBAI broadcaster, but others, early on, understood (even before I did) that I was not simply talking about myself, and that the stories were not ends in themselves but vehicles to draw out and share emotions common in one variation or another to many of my contemporaries. (Post, Playing in the FM Band, 82-3). 587 The Outside’s early days, however, mimicked Fass’ Radio Unnameable so much that people regularly mistook Post for Fass, calling into his program saying, “Hello, Bob?” (Post, Playing in the FM Band, 77).

236 distinct relationship to my own feelings and needs. While I had used comic

devices in everyday life since my earliest childhood (and taken much abuse

from my parents and teachers for it), I had not been able, until this point, to

translate it into a radio program. Recognizing finally the need to move in

my own direction—to establish a relationship with the audience as a single

individual, rather than a faceless mass—the program began to transform

itself into an expression of my own life.”588

While radio DJs had shown personal style in the preceding decades, the expression of the

DJ’s private life, combined with the humor of alienation, confession, angst, or depression, was novel with Post. Post’s introspective comic sensibility was seen as humanizing. Lester writes, Post’s “show was important because it was the only place on radio one could hear live, spontaneous comedy. Steve was not a monologist like Jean Shepherd, re-creating his childhood, but a poor man’s Woody Allen, life’s whipping boy, acutely aware of his limitations, and by verbally playing with them he made us who listened to him more accepting of our own limitations.” 589 Post goes on to explain, “My early fears of

‘overpersonalizing’ the program began to subside, partly as a result of Frank Millspaugh’s reign, and partly because of the influence of Larry Josephson.”590

Millspaugh had come to WBAI after a tumultuous institutional moment, and part of how he handled that moment of chaos was to have a “hands-off policy toward the people on the

588 Emphasis mine. Post, Playing in the FM Band, 80. 589 Lester in Foreword of Post’s Playing in the FM Band, xv. 590 Post, Playing in the FM Band, 80.

237 air.”591 Millspaugh gave Post the freedom to do as he pleased, and Josephson inspired Post to be himself. Years later, Post said of Josephson, “I think what he was doing, to approach the radio as yourself as opposed to a well-modulated voice speaking well-thought-out banalities, was tremendously innovative then.”592

Larry Josephson began his relationship with radio as a young amateur enthusiast who, like legions of young boys and men, early on came to love radio as he experimented with ham radio sets. Josephson pursued a mathematics and linguistics degree at the University of

California, Berkeley, which landed him a computer programming job at IBM. However, bored and lonesome in his cubical, he began volunteering as an engineer at WBAI 99.5 FM around 1964,593 which he knew about from listening to KPFA in Berkeley.594 At a moment of political crisis within the organization, Josephson was offered an on-air position for an early morning slot that no one else seemed to be interested in. In 1966, the 27-year-old began hosting a 7-9 am morning show irreverently called “In the Beginning.” What made the show stand out was Josephson himself, an “anti-morning disc jockey,” 595 whose stream-of-consciousness monologues provided an antithesis to the typically cheerful morning radio DJ. Josephson, who once described himself as “a rebel, a loner, and an asocial member of my generation,”596 struck a chord with a contingent of loyal radio fans

591 Post, Playing in the FM Band, 78. 592 Sean Mitchell, “Radio: Gotham Grump,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-01/entertainment/ca-5289_1_public-radio. Accessed June 30, 2017. 593 Larry Josephson, interview with author, November 13, 2016. 594 Larry Josephson, “An Inconvenient Jew: My life in radio,” performed live by Larry Josephson at the Cornelia Street Café, New York City, January 23, 2012, Adobe Flash audio, http://www.i- jew.net/inconvenientjew/event-description/. Accessed July 2, 2017. 595 Gerald Jonas. “By the Dawn’s Early (Bah!) Light.” New York Times. March 26, 1967. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Pg. 101. 596 Sean Mitchell, “Radio: Gotham Grump.”

238 who more readily identified with Josephson’s cantankerous perspective than anything else available over the radio in the mornings.

Writing for the New York Times, Jack Gould described Josephson “really less a disk jockey than an aural happening, a whackily inspired individual with a relish of the humor of contrast… when he is on the beam there’s more satirical sting to his remarks than will be found on the programs of any number of morning hosts. Undoubtedly, he is an acquired taste… for those who get out of bed on the wrong side and want to feel good about it, Mr.

Josephson is to be recommended in place of instant oatmeal and diet toast.”597 Josephson was a life-long comedy fan, clear in his on-air sensibility, as well as in the work he pursued alongside his morning show. At Pacifica, he produced programs featuring figures like the musical humourist Tom Lehrer, 598 the cartoonist and satirist Jules Feiffer, 599 and the comedy group the Monty Python.600 His other Pacifica radio shows, “Colgate Human

Comedy Hour” (1972-73) and “Bourgeois Liberation” (1979-84), similarly showcased his unique brand of humor. And outside of Pacifica, he spent 33 years as a radio, record, and concert producer for the legendary comedy duo Bob and Ray.601

597 Jack Gould. “Radio: Satirical Relish for Antisocial Breakfasters,” New York Times. November 22, 1966. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers: pg. 83. 598 “Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect/ Tom Lehrer interviewed by Larry Josephson,” on WBAI May 18, 1967, listed on Pacifica Radio Archives website, http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb3274?nns=larry%2Bjosephson. Accessed June 30, 2017. 599 “Jules Feiffer at the School of Visual Arts,” on WBAI March 16, 1972, listed on Pacifica Radio Archives website, http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb5339a?nns=larry%2Bjosephson. Accessed July 2, 2017. 600 “The Monty Python Interview/ interviewed by Larry Josephson,” on WBAI 1975, listed on Pacifica Radio Archives website, http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bc2200?nns=larry%2Bjosephson. Accessed July 2, 2017. 601 Larry Josephson, “Welcome to the Official Bob and Ray Website,” Bob and Ray website, http://bobandray.com. Accessed July 2, 2017.

239 Along with being a life-long comedy fan and satirist, the frank and sometimes combative

Josephson brought his concern with obscenity to radio. Maybe it was his early memory of being kicked out of day camp at the tender age of 6 for using the word “fuck” (not knowing what it meant) that initiated a lifelong interest in obscenity, or maybe it was the WBAI poster hanging on the studio wall reminding staff not to swear on the radio that bugged

Josephson. Whatever the root cause, Josephson interrogated and challenged the concept of obscenity over Pacifica’s airwaves on a number of occasions, and worked to get at the truth of Lenny Bruce’s situation through some of his radio programs. One news article from

1967 illustrates Josephson’s disregard for standards of broadcasting propriety: it states that at 8am, after blowing his nose [this was such an unusual sound in broadcasting at the time that the author felt the need to mention it], Josephson discussed the “uses and abuses of obscenity on the airwaves, defending four-letter words when they are integral to the content of the program.” 602 Along with considering the concept of obscenity in a casual, conversational way on his morning program, Josephson explored the notion more deeply in a two-part series entitled “Pornography, obscenity and the law” in 1970. In one episode,

“The Libertarian Viewpoint,” Josephson heard arguments for free-speech in his interview with civil liberties lawyers Alan Levine, Burt Newhouse, Ephraim London (one of Bruce’s lawyers in the Café Au Go Go trial), and Josh Koplovitz. True to Pacifica’s early commitment to airing all viewpoints, Josephson also presented the opposing perspective on obscenity in “The Conservative Viewpoint,” for which he interviewed Richard Kuh, the prosecutor in Bruce’s Café Au Go Go trial (an episode in which Josephson betrayed his

602 Gerald Jonas. “By the Dawn’s Early (Bah!) Light.” New York Times. March 26, 1967. Accessed at ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Pg. 101.

240 intentions when he asked Kuh, “Why do you think Lenny Bruce died?... Would you care to speculate about any other reason than the direct cause of death?”603).

Over the years, Josephson produced a handful of other radio programs that kept Brue’s story alive, including a conversation with Bruce’s last girlfriend Lotus Weinstock, a conversation with Sherman Block—an officer who arrested Bruce, an interview with

Bruce’s contemporary Mort Sahl and filmmaker Robert Weide,604 and a radio documentary on Lenny Bruce (which included a conversation with Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr) in 1991 for his KCRW show Modern Times. Along with these more personal conversations with those who knew Bruce or were involved in his trials, Josephson also produced a program called “Lenny Bruce: American”605 for which he recorded a conference by the American

Historical Association, in which Frank Kofsky (of Sacramento State College) presented a paper about the social significance of Lenny Bruce,606 followed by a presentation of many

603 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 421. 604 At the time of the interview, Weide produced a documentary on the new wave stand-up comics, and later went on to produce a documentary on Bruce entitled Swear to Tell the Truth. 605 “Lenny Bruce: American/ produced by Larry Josephson,” Pacifica Radio Archives, PRA Archive # BC0766, Broadcast on WBAI New York City, 1972. 606 An example of the way that the program interlaced intellectual arguments with Bruce’s recordings was clear in Kofsky’s discussion of Bruce’s bit about the execution of the Rosenbergs. Kofsky recalls that at the time, the Rosenberg’s had been widely condemned by the anti-communist group the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had largely been led by “middle-class, respectability seeking Jewish intellectuals” who wanted to distance themselves from Jewish Communists. In contrast, Kofsky notes, Bruce displayed sympathy and pity (or, to use Lenny’s use of a Yiddish term, rachmanus) to the Rosenbergs, when he stated, “Goddamn the priests and the rabbis. Goddamn the popes and all their hypocrisy. Goddamn Israel and its bond drives. What influence did they exert to save the lives of the Rosenbergs, guilty or not? The Ten Commandments doesn’t say, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill sometimes.’”

Along with bringing academic arguments about Bruce’s significance as a thinker to the radio-listening public, the broadcast also furthered arguments on the necessity of Bruce’s use of four-letter words (e.g. stating their use lends verisimilitude to Bruce’s verbal vignettes). The broadcasters further threw their support behind the right to use this speech by remediating both Bruce’s recordings in which he used vulgar words, and by remediating the academics who freely used these “offensive” words (that Bruce was arrested for) in the conference. After this performative display, Kofsky further took issue with the definitions structuring the obscenity statutes. Kofsky quotes Bruce who said, “What’s wrong with appealing to the prurient interest?

241 bits from a new Lenny Bruce album. In juxtaposing Bruce’s record with Kofsky’s academic presentation, years after Bruce’s death, Pacifica audiences were once again presented, at length, with the literary and social arguments that justified Bruce’s comedy and approach to language. In remediating Kofsky’s talk and the proceedings of the conference, Josephson also amplified the ways in which Bruce was becoming marked in

American history as a free speech hero.

Pacifica’s fight for free speech on the radio intersected with Lenny Bruce’s. By broadcasting his material and sympathetic programs about him, Pacifica extended Bruce’s reach and countered any mainstream narratives that tried to minimize his contributions to culture or that attempted to malign his character. Additionally, a generation of free-form

DJs (and their guests) were influenced by the “new-school” comics, and brought satire, self-expression, confessional narratives, and offensive speech to the airwaves on a daily or weekly basis, extending Bruce’s challenge to discursive norms in the years after his death.

The kinds of humor, speech, and ideas Bruce was persecuted for in the first half of the

1960s became daily fare on the Pacifica stations by the late 1960s and into the 1970s, which in turn influenced other radio stations similarly seeking to create waves with their programming.

We appeal to the violent interest… I would rather my child see a stag film than the Ten Commandments or King of Kings because I don’t want my kids to learn to kill Christ when he comes back.”

Finally, the broadcast also included a question and answer period, during which audience members took issue with the ideas presented in Kofsky’s paper (e.g. stating that Bruce did not offer any novel political insights, or that he was merely restating the social criticisms of the beatniks in the 1940s or that of Mae West in the 1920s). In broadcasting this conference, Josephson extended Lenny Bruce’s voice posthumously over the radio (something that was difficult to do in Bruce’s lifetime), and displayed the ways in which Bruce’s voice resonated with American scholars intent on questioning the myths of their day and who continued to challenge restrictions over discourse set in place in the decades before.

242 The Free Speech Nebula

A former volunteer for KPFA, Lorenzo Milam, embarked on a mission to create his own set of listener-sponsored radio stations in the early 60s, “something different. Weirder.

Freer.”607 In 1962, he formed KRAB-FM 107.7 in Seattle, Washington, a station that drew on Pacifica’s listener-sponsorship model but that also hoped to “avoid the constraints and left leaning politics of the Pacifica network, KRAB strived to maintain an open forum for the local community.”608 Milam notes that KRAB was intended to be “a kind of radio that values independence, irreverence, and creative, risk-taking, volunteer-based programming.”609 Part of this irreverence and risk-taking came in the form of their Lenny

Bruce broadcasts. Over the 1960s, KRAB played Lenny Bruce records and rebroadcast

Pacifica’s programs about Bruce, including the memorial for Bruce and the conversation between Gleason and Bruce’s lawyers. Like the crowd at Pacifica, those at KRAB were similarly dedicated to free speech (they considered their station even more open than

Pacifica’s, describing KRAB as “free forum” radio), and were fans of Lenny Bruce.

Nicholas Johnson, who went by the name Captain Baltic, was an extensive record collector610 and a long-time Bruce fan who brought Lenny Bruce records to Seattle’s late- night radio-listening public in the 1960s.611 It was specifically when he began hosting a

607 Walker, Rebels on the Air, 68. 608 Sterling, Encyclopedia of Journalism, 335. 609 Walker, Rebels on the Air, 68-9. 610 His massive record collection was so significant, it was taken up in an article by Dave Segal, “How Seattle Radio Legend Nick Johnson’s Record Collection Inspired a New Generation of Jazz Aficionados,” The Stranger, April 1, 2015, http://www.thestranger.com/music/feature/2015/04/01/21984728/how-seattle- radio-legend-nick-johnsons-record-collection-inspired-a-new-generation-of-jazz-aficionados. Accessed January 7, 2017. 611 Johnson’s comments echo a sentiment expressed by many Bruce fans, including Larry Josephson: “I had been listening to Lenny Bruce when I was in high school, since I was a bit of a rebel, and began to understand the messages he was putting forth about society, religion, and cultural bias. Since I was not religious at that

243 late night/early morning free-form program “Bumbling with Baltic—Jazz and other

Eccentricities”612 that he would play Bruce records after 10pm. He explains:

Although the FCC had plenty of policies about what and when you could

broadcast, they were pretty much a reactionary group – that is, they only

enforced their policies if they had political pressure or complaints from

listeners. They did not monitor the air waves of every station every hour.

KRAB had rebroadcast a memorial service for Bruce (from NYC) in

January of 1967, and hadn’t received much response, neither negative nor

positive. But in December of that year they broadcast a speech by Rev.

James Bevel that caused a complaint. That is when their legal troubles

would really begin...

Greg Palmer, as station manager, was forced to lay down some policies to

protect the station’s license. However, at that time the interpretation of the

ruling stated that some “offensive” language and “suggestive” speech could

be aired after 10 or 11 PM (I forget which). I had been regularly airing, on

my late night show, artists such as Lord Buckley, Brother Theodore and

Bruce for some time in short bits that were appropriate for air play (not

time, his views made me feel not alone in the great era of McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.” Josephson, interview with author, November 13, 2016. 612 Of his program, he states: "The late-night show would get pretty far out… It was pretty eclectic. I would play something from the '30s and then I would play Sun Ra or something like that, back-to-back. Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, we mixed it all up. I used to fill up a big box with 250 or 300 records and start playing stuff. 'Oh, this one makes me want to play that one, bang bang bang. Oh, I should throw on some blues after that'." Quoted in Dave Segal, “How Seattle Radio Legend Nick Johnson’s Record Collection Inspired a New Generation of Jazz Aficionados.”

244 everything that Bruce and Co. did was obscene or suggestive)… After a

discussion with Bob Friede (who was my defacto boss and station Music

Director), we decided we could get away with playing Lenny Bruce

recordings on the late night show. I brought in my entire collection of Bruce

and we played basically everything available at that time. We would

periodically announce that we were playing things which some listeners

would find objectionable and suggest they tune out if they so wished. While

many of our audience called in with comments and/or questions, we

received NO COMPLAINTS and the FCC didn’t either.613

KRAB’s careful decisions about when and how to broadcast Lenny Bruce bits, along with the audience’s acceptance of the programs and tacit approval of the content (demonstrated by the fact that they did not make complaints about the Bruce records to the station or

FCC), helped the station avoid FCC scrutiny over their comedy broadcasts. On a night during which Johnson played his entire Bruce record collection, listeners called in with

“mostly appreciative comments on the fact that someone was airing Bruce or the other folks we played, and sometimes people would ask where they could find the recordings, as they were often not easy to find until the 70s and 80s.” One KRAB listener recalls he had never heard of Bruce before KRAB’s all-night marathon, and then recorded KRAB’s episode on a reel-to-reel recorder, re-listening to it this way for a long time before transferring it onto cassette tape.614 Johnson writes, “Bruce represented a challenge to the

613 Nicholas Johnson, e-mail interview with author, October 15, 2016. 614 Comment by YouTube user “Rob Potter” on comment thread for “Lenny Bruce – The Palladium (live)” uploaded by user “a grant”, YouTube, published on June 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo750ByNnc8. Accessed July 2, 2017.

245 morals, the politics and the rules that were left standing from the Victorian era mindset of the 1950s, and KRAB helped demolish them.”615

So even with the language constraints imposed on radio broadcasting for decades up to the

1960s and 1970s, counterculture radio managed to remediate Bruce’s controversial comedy to their audiences, helping to amplify free speech arguments and changing what was normal about comedy culture and mediated discourse. This did not mean that KRAB, and their sister stations (known as the KRAB nebula), were entirely free of FCC scrutiny.

Like Pacifica, KRAB too encountered license renewal problems when the FCC declared a number of their broadcasts obscene.616 However, KRAB fought the charges and their FCC hearing only vindicated their program choices when the hearing examiner, Ernie Nash, declared that “KRAB seeks and most often attains those standards of taste and decency in programming that we should like to see reflected more often in our broadcast media.”617

While official acceptance or approval of frank speech in listener-sponsored radio grew over the 1960s and 70s, offended segments of the listening public continued to hold the FCC and radio stations accountable for their aural offenses.

Public Complaints and the FCC

As had been the case over decades, Pacifica’s commitment to bringing controversial material over the airwaves did not go unnoticed. Susan Braudy’s article “A radio station with real hair, sweat and body odor” for the New York Times in September of 1972

615 Johnson, e-mail interview with author. 616 Walker, Rebels on the Air, 128. 617 Quoted in Walker, Rebels on the Air, 128.

246 illustrates the way Pacifica’s programs were regularly held to account for their offensive programs:

In a desk drawer [station manager Edwin] Goodman has filed more than a

foot of correspondence with the F.C.C., with whom he is in communication

nearly every month because disturbed listeners complain to the Commission

about the station’s militant political rhetoric or its frank sexual language.

“Our correspondence with the F.C.C. is many times that of other radio

stations,” Goodman says. “I regard this as healthy. The F.C.C. is pained.”

WBAI must reapply for its license every two years, and must satisfy the

F.C.C. that the station is not abusing its privilege. “We always try to answer

complaints,” Goodmans says, gesturing toward his huge file, “by showing

that the offending language is not gratuitous, that deleting it would detract

from the program and that it was characteristic of a particular group and

would misrepresent them if it were taken out”...

Goodman shows me a letter from an angry listener complaining to the

F.C.C., about expletives used in WBAI’s broadcasts of Jane Fonda’s “Free

the Army” show and another letter about a consciousness-raising session

during which women talked about masturbation. The WBAI answer to the

second letter includes a tape of the show, explains that consciousness-

raising is a serious social phenomenon abroad in the land and concludes that

247 the station considers it a public service to provide such open discussion,

considering the ignorance of most people about their bodies…618

Responding to audience complaints with explanatory letters was standard fare for broadcasters. These audience complaint letters were so frequent and predictable that

Pacifica lawyer Thomas Schattenfield and his colleagues took to calling the letters sent to

WBAI “the ‘Fuck Complaint of the Week.’”619 The frequency of these complaints, Samaha writes, kept the FCC busy as “the Commission was tallying an increasing number of complaints regarding obscene, indecent, or profane broadcasts in the early 1970s.” 620 The acceleration of complaints about dirty words led the FCC to use a complaint lodged at

Pacifica as a test case to help clarify the standards around broadcasting “indecent” language.

George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”

The test case centered around a performance by a countercultural stand-up comic named

George Carlin. A natural funny man, Carlin’s entertainment career began in 1956 in

Shreveport, Louisiana, where he became a radio DJ at the age of 19. He’d been living with another radio DJ who came home one day with Lenny Bruce’s Interview of Our Times record, and, Carlin recalls, “my life changed. I grew up believing that comedy had certain rules, and Lenny showed that there are no rules.”621 Here, we again see the importance of

618 Susan Braudy, “A radio station with real hair, sweat and body odor,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1972. Retrieved ProQuest Historical Newspapers. pg. SM10 619 James Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words: The life and crimes of George Carlin, (Cambridge, MA: De Capro Press, 2010), 155. 620 Adam Samaha, “The Story of FCC v. Pacifica (and Its Second Life),” First Amendment Stories, eds. Richard Garnett and Andrew Koppelman (New York City, NY: Foundation Press, 2012), 385. 621 George Carlin in Franklyn Ajaye’s Comic Insights (Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press, 2002), 84.

248 DJs as tastemakers, and the significance of the hand-to-hand distribution of rare cultural content for enlarging perspectives and shaping the careers of innovative performers. Carlin explains the significance of the Bruce album, stating “what it did for me was this; it let me know that there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in self-expression.”622

While Carlin did not pursue frank self-expression in comedy immediately after hearing the record, he did echo the work of Lenny Bruce in 1960 when Carlin teamed up with newsman

Jack Burns to form the comedy duo “Burns and Carlin.”623 Of Bruce, Carlin states, “he was so satisfying to watch… I was a young aspiring comedian. He helped Burns and I. A place called the Cosmo Alley. Our first job ever. Our manager Murray Becker knew Lenny from the Navy and I used to do an impression of Lenny in the act. So he brought Lenny in to see the impression but hoping Lenny would like [the rest of our material]. Lenny called GAC the next day, that was a big agency in that day, like William Morris. The president of GAC signed us the next day… we got a telegram. They want to sign us, all fields, based on Lenny

Bruce’s reaction. And that started us, and that started my own career.”624 After working for two years together and reaching mainstream success (they’d appeared on The Tonight Show with Jack Parr and recorded an album together), the duo broke up to pursue solo careers.

In his early days as a solo performer, Carlin’s work was still somewhat character-based: he played a character called the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman, and did impersonations of

622 George Carlin, “My Comedian Hero,” Make ‘em Laugh: The funny business of America, PBS website, January 12, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/makeemlaugh/episodes/my-comedian-hero/george-carlin/?p=88. Accessed July 2, 2017. 623 “Biography,” George Carlin websitegeorgecarlin.com/biography. Accessed July 2, 2017. 624 Sean McCarthy, “George Carlin’s Lenny Bruce impersonation landed him an agent, thanks to Lenny Bruce,” The Comic’s Comic, September 12, 2013, http://thecomicscomic.com/2013/09/12/george-carlins- lenny-bruce-impersonation-landed-him-an-agent-thanks-to-lenny-bruce/. Accessed January 7, 2017.

249 President Kennedy and comics Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. It was during these formative years of Carlin’s stand-up comedy career that Carlin encountered Bruce again, this time in the backseat of a cop car. On December 5, 1962, a 25-year-old Carlin was in the audience of Lenny Bruce’s performance at the Gate of Horn in Chicago when Bruce was arrested for obscenity for saying the words “fuck” and “tits” during the performance. When the police began checking the IDs of all the attendees, Carlin refused to hand over his ID and the police threw him in the cop car with Bruce625 (Bruce’s response to Carlin’s gesture:

“Don’t be a shmuck”626). Carlin writes, “even though it began as a drunken joke, the whole affair had a radicalizing effect on me. It was only reinforced when Lenny was busted at the

[Café au] Go Go.”627 Carlin then began performing regularly in folk clubs and coffee houses, which allowed him to develop more irreverent material than he’d previously performed.628 In spite of these encounters with the hipster and beatnik scenes, during the mid-1960s, Carlin developed enough clean material for mainstream audiences and frequently appeared on television (including on the Merv Griffin show and as a regular guest on the Tonight Show). It was not until the 1970s that he reinvented himself as a comic, growing out his hair and beard and trading his suit for t-shirts and jeans, and moving into countercultural sensibilities and aesthetics.629 His third record, FM & AM (1972), used the

625 Timothy Bella, “The '7 Dirty Words' Turn 40, but They're Still Dirty,” The Atlantic, May 24, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/the-7-dirty-words-turn-40-but-theyre-still- dirty/257374/. Accessed May 5, 2016. 626 McCarthy, “George Carlin’s Lenny Bruce impersonation landed him an agent, thanks to Lenny Bruce.” 627 George Carlin, Last Words (New York City, NY: Free Press, 2009), 107. He further writes, “Lenny was one of the very few comics—perhaps the only one—I sought out and felt comfortable hanging with” (108). 628 “Biography,” George Carlin website. 629 “Biography,” George Carlin website.

250 symbolism of countercultural vs. mainstream radio to mark his transition from straight- laced to countercultural values.630

When Lenny Bruce began performing so-called obscene words over the mid-1950s up until his first obscenity arrest in 1961, he had done so casually and without a specific point, uttering words that were common in performance spaces, with comics, and in the social groups and cultural scenes he was a part of. The use of offensive words had no intended function other than to exist naturally alongside all the other words in his verbal repertoire.

Offended by Bruce’s commentaries on religion, the police, sexuality, drugs, and women, the police and state prosecutors framed his vulgar words as constitutionally unprotected

“obscenity.” Bruce’s dirty words were made into a clear target of attack that would result in the silencing of Bruce’s more nebulous speech offenses that were otherwise protected by the First Amendment. After Bruce was arrested multiple times on obscenity charges for using words that many other performers used, uttering sensitive words became a matter of principle to Bruce—an assertion of his constitutional rights.

Channelling Bruce’s tirades on hypocrisy over language and notions of obscenity, the former radio DJ, lover of language, and Bruce disciple, George Carlin, created a bit called

“Seven Dirty Words” (aka “Filthy Words” or “Seven Words You Can Never Say on

Television”) which specifically aimed to take the power out of the words “shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits” by repeating them ad nauseam (he says, “there are 400,000 words in the English language and there are 7 of them that you can’t say on

630 Adam Samaha, “The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and its Second Life),” University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper, No. 314, August 1, 2010: 7.

251 television. What a ratio that is!” For Carlin, there exist “bad thoughts, bad intentions, but no bad words”631). On May 27, 1972, he performed this bit at the Santa Monica Civic

Auditorium while recording his album Class Clown, and while he did not encounter any trouble for the performance with local police on that particular day, Carlin was arrested on obscenity charges shortly after for performing it live at a festival in Milwaukee in July

1972.632 However, deciding years after the circus of Bruce’s obscenity trials and in a far more liberal context than the early 1960s, the judge in Carlin’s obscenity trial threw out the case. Carlin went on to record a slightly altered version of the bit, “Filthy Words,” for his album Occupation: Foole, and in 1973, WBAI broadcast the bit during a daytime program called Lunch Pail, hosted by Paul Gorman.

The episode was dedicated to considering society’s double standards toward language: earlier on in the episode, Gorman noted the way that the government dropped bombs through its “defense” department, and read excerpts of George Orwell’s writings on language.633 Gorman decided to play the Carlin bit to emphasize the power of words, “the moral consequence of words, and the fear we have of words, and the way words arise from the culture and the way the culture redefines itself through its use of words.”634 At the start of the show, the host warned the audience they might find some of the language offensive and suggested in advance, “If you don’t like this sort of thing, don’t listen.”635 For years,

WBAI had been in the practice of showcasing controversial material and irreverent humor,

631 Samaha, “The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and its Second Life),” University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper, 9. 632 Bella, “The '7 Dirty Words' Turn 40, but They're Still Dirty.” 633 Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words, 148. 634 Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words, 149. 635 Carlin, Last Words, 171.

252 but something that was important about this particular broadcast was that it took place during the daytime. Carlin’s offensive language, then, was not quarantined by the evening hours. This offense may have slipped unnoticed years before when fewer people had FM receivers, but by the early 1970s, FM receivers had become mainstream devices, so the experimental programming that had happened on the FM band was increasingly open to a broader public. By 1972, WBAI alone had around 30,000 voluntary subscribers,636 just a fraction of their larger listenership. Finally, the broadcast took place during an historical moment at which point moral forces were (again) trying to clean up broadcasting.

Defining “Indecency”: Morality in Media, the FCC, and the Law of Nuisance

The figures involved in the Carlin case illustrate a moral through line in the history of obscenity and indecency cases. Among Gorman’s listening audience was a man named

John Douglas, the president of the publishing and education division of CBS, and a member of an interfaith media watchdog group called Morality in Media (MIM).637 Morality in

Media (now known as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation) was, in fact, the name given in 1967 to the high-profile group that had launched Operation Yorkville just a few years earlier, an anti-smut campaign that began in 1962 and that had influenced the political context of Lenny Bruce’s New York obscenity trial. Here, we see Bruce’s comedic progeny up against the moral and ideological descendants of Bruce’s persecutors. Rather than shoring up structures of morality in the circuit of live performance, in this case, Douglas sought to assert the MIM’s vision of discursive morality in radio.

636 Samaha, “The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and its Second Life),” University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper,13. 637 Josh Sanburn, “You Can't Say That on Television: 40 Years of Debating Dirty Words,” Time, June 25, 2012, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2117988,00.html. Accessed January 7 2017.

253

Douglas’ membership in MIM was significant. The FCC relies on third-party complaints for getting a sense of the public’s opinion, and a group such as MIM, which claimed 50,000 members by 1978, could quickly generate a substantial number of complaints.638 MIM was carbon-copied on the complaint to the FCC. Despite the announcer’s warning that the program contained material some audience members might find offensive, Douglas continued to listen to the program that afternoon while in the car with his teenaged son.

Offended by the language, he lodged a complaint with the FCC.639 Douglas’ complaint came at a time when the FCC had been increasingly dealing with the problem of how to regulate violence, sex, and offensive language in broadcasting.640 Larry Josephson, who was WBAI’s manager and a program host at the time, suggests that the FCC had been looking for a “test case” that would determine how the commission should oversee potentially offensive broadcasting. He states, “If we hadn’t taken the case, they would’ve found some other licensee to go after.”641 WBAI argued that the routine was protected under the Supreme Court ruling devised in Miller v. California (1973). The “Miller test”

638 Samaha, “The Story of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (and its Second Life),” University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper, 10. 639 He stated, “Whereas I can perhaps understand an ‘X-rated’ phonograph record’s being sold for private use, I certainly cannot understand the broadcast of [the] same over the air that, supposedly, you control. Any child could have been turning the dial, and tuned in to that garbage. Some time back, I read that “topless” radio stations were fined for suggestive phrases. If you fine for suggestions, should not this station lose its license entirely for such blatant disregard for the public ownership of the airwaves? Can you say this is a responsible radio station that demonstrates a responsibility to the public for its license? I’d like to know, gentlemen, just what you’re going to do about this outrage, and by copy, I’m asking our elected officials the same thing. Incidentally, my young son was with me when I heard the above, and unfortunately, he can corroborate what was heard.” Quoted by Joe Sergi, “Obscenity Case Files: Seven Dirty Words,” CBLDF [Comic Book Legal Defense Fund] website, May 22, 2013, http://cbldf.org/2013/05/obscenity-case-files-george-carlins-seven-dirty-words. Accessed July 2, 2017. 640 See Heins’ discussion of Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, and the pro-drug lyrics of musicians like the Beatles and Bob Dylan (Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 95-6). 641 Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words, 152.

254 for obscenity established that the work had to appeal to prurient interest, that it was patently offensive, and had no redeeming social value. In a statement echoing the Lenny Bruce trials, WBAI argued that the broadcast was socially valuable—Carlin was a significant social satirist in the tradition of Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and Mort Sahl: “George

Carlin often grabs our attention by speaking the unspeakable, by shocking in order to illuminate. Because he is a true artist in his field, we are of the opinion that the inclusion of the material broadcast in a program devoted to an analysis of the use of language in contemporary society was natural and contributed to a further understanding of the subject.” 642

In 1975, the FCC released an order declaring the broadcast “indecent.” Echoing century- old arguments about the harmful effects of language on the integrity of a person’s

(particularly, a child’s) character, the order claimed that even if Carlin’s work did not appeal to “prurient” interest, “Obnoxious gutter language… has the effect of debasing and brutalizing human beings by reducing them to their mere bodily functions, and we believe that such words are indecent within the meaning of the statute and have no place on radio when children are in the audience.” 643 Drawing on only parts of the definition for

“obscenity” established under Miller, the FCC defined broadcasting “indecency” as “the exposure of children to language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs.”644

642 Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words, 152. 643 Sullivan, Seven Dirty Words, 154. 644 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 99.

255

The FCC, charged with acting in the public interest, considered the “intrusive” nature of radio in their deliberations. Their judgment was guided by the fact that:

(1) children have access to radios and in some cases are unsupervised by parents

while listening;

(2) radio receivers are in the home, a place where people's privacy interest is entitled

to extra deference;

(3) un-consenting adults may tune in to a station without any warning that offensive

language is being or will be broadcast; and

(4) there is a scarcity of spectrum space, the use of which the government must

therefore license in the public interest.645

Channeling had been informally self-imposed by radio broadcasters from at least the late

1950s through to the 1960s, but, as the Gorman broadcast illustrates, countercultural material increasingly became desired by more Americans (or at least daytime listeners) over the decade. Broadcasters’ tendency toward self-regulation through channeling seemed to loosen as the years passed, opening daytime hours to “adult” content. The FCC, in their considerations of the possible presence of children in the audience and of un-consenting adults being unduly exposed to offensive content, implicitly created categories of consenting and unconsenting listeners, which they defined in this case by time slots. One might consider all members of the radio audience to be equal parts consenting (they

645 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

256 actively turn on the radio and turn to a channel) and unconsenting (they are subject to the programming decisions of the station and the narrative whims of DJs). The FCC’s argument, however, constructs the daytime listening public as passive and innocent receptors who require the state’s protection from the harm actively perpetuated by broadcasters who air offensive words. The fact that the offensive material was aired at 2pm was a critical factor in defining the social and moral impact of the broadcast and the right of the audience to seek redress for the broadcaster’s infringement.

To avoid charges of censorship, the FCC did not ban offensive words entirely, but instead drew on public nuisance law, a body of law that works to identify and create appropriate boundaries for certain activities: “The law of nuisance does not say, for example, that no one shall maintain a cement plant; it simply says that no one shall maintain a cement plant in an inappropriate place, such as a residential neighborhood.”646 Applied to broadcasting, this meant that indecent language was to be channeled to time slots when the least number of potentially offended listeners would be listening.

While Pacifica had informally channelled controversial content to late night programs in the 1960s, this formal imposition by the FCC would have set a dangerous precedent for the stations. WBAI and Pacifica took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of

Columbia Circuit arguing the decision would have a chilling effect on their future broadcasts. They argued that the Title 18 U.S. Code §1464 regulating “obscene, indecent, or profane language” was unconstitutionally vague, and referred to a number of federal

646 Judge Tamm. 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

257 statutes and federal and state court decisions indicating that “indecent material” must refer to material that appeals to the prurient interests, as opposed to material that is merely coarse, rude, vulgar, profane, or opprobrious. Carlin’s monologue, they argued, did not appeal to prurient interests and had serious literary and political value.647

After almost a year of deliberations, Judges Tamm and Bazelon sided with Pacifica, while

Judge Leventhol dissented. Tamm’s opinion stated “Despite the Commission’s professed intentions, the direct effect of its Order is to inhibit the free and robust exchange of ideas on a wide range of issues and subjects by means of radio and television communications.

In promulgating the Order the Commission has ignored both the statute which forbids it to censor radio communications and its own previous decisions and orders which leave the question of programming content to the discretion of the licensee.”648 In the 2-3 decision, the Appeals court found the FCC’s ruling “overbroad and carries the FCC beyond protection of the public interest into the forbidden realm of censorship.”649 Tamm pointed to the prohibition on censorship of radio communications covered by §326 of the

Communications Act, and further wrote “The effect of channeling is that of censorship and that is beyond the mandate of the FCC.”650 He then pointed to a previous indecency case to show the inconsistency in the FCC’s treatment of Pacifica and to suggest a preferable mode of broadcast regulation.

647 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465 648 Ibid. 649 Ibid. 650 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

258 The case Judge Tamm referred to involved the Jack Straw Memorial Foundation’s KRAB

FM and their broadcast of a recording entitled “Murder at Kent State.” The Kent State incident refers to the conflict between the Ohio National Guard and students demonstrating against the Vietnam War at Kent State University. The Guard fired shots into the crowd, killing four and wounding several others. The incident led Pete Hamill to record “Murder at Kent State University” with the label Flying Dutchman in 1970, a recording of Hamill reading articles he’d written for the New York Post describing the Kent State University incident, and in which he criticized Nixon’s treatment of war protestors and students

(“There are four dead Americans on the campus of Kent State University, gunned down by other Americans…”). The management at KRAB, who broadcast the recording shortly after it was made, were “moved by the consideration that any editing [of obscene words] would adversely affect the emotional impact of the record. It was thought that the record was newsworthy and important, particularly to the university community at the University of Washington, which was a considerable proportion of KRAB’s regular audience.”651

After reviewing the case, the FCC determined that it was up to the licensee to decide whether or not to broadcast obscene or indecent language. The FCC found KRAB had conformed to their own, and the FCC’s, standards regarding suitable broadcasts.652 Further,

Commissioner Ernest Nash applauded KRAB’s “outstanding and meritous” programming, concluding that “while KRAB did broadcast a few programs that included some language offensive to some people, they did not do so with any intent to give offense, to pander, to

651 United States. Federal Communications Commission. FCC Reports, Second Series, Volume 29, May 14, 1971 to June 18, 1971. Washington D.C. UNT Digital Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc306631/. Accessed January 7, 2017. 652 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

259 sensationalize, to shock, or to break down community standards… the licensee of KRAB seeks and most often attains those standards of taste and decency in programming that we should like to see reflected more often in our broadcast media.”653 In considering this previous FCC ruling, the Appeals court reminded the FCC of its own affirmation of the importance of licensees’ judgment in programming material with sensitive language, and drew out the inconsistency at play in making a decision to now ban the same body of words.

Tamm noted, “the Order sweepingly forbids any broadcast of the seven words irrespective of context or however innocent or educational they may be. For instance, the Order would prohibit the broadcast of Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Two Gentlemen of Verona. Certain passages of the Bible are also proscribed from broadcast by the Order. Clearly every use of these seven words cannot be deemed offensive even as to minors. In this regard the

Order is overbroad.”654 Tamm then went on to criticize the FCC’s ill-defined notion of

“children” (“Need a nineteen year old and a seven year old be protected from the same offensive language?”), as well as the characterization of the radio audience as a “captive” audience (“(t)he radio can be turned off”).655

This position refuted the FCC’s assertion that unconsenting listeners needed FCC protection. Government control of objectionable speech, Tamm argued, was acceptable when privacy was invaded in an intolerable manner, but “one can argue an intolerable invasion of privacy would not occur in the broadcast setting. Privacy expectations, even in

653 Ernest Nash, 355. United States. Federal Communications Commission. FCC Reports, Second Series, Volume 29, May 14, 1971 to June 18, 1971. 654 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465. 655 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

260 the home, diminish when listeners choose to gain access to a public medium.”656 Further, the Court highlighted research indicating that children watched television until 1:00 a.m.,657 thus making the FCC’s solution of protecting minors from language through time slots irrelevant.

Chief Judge Bazelon’s concurrence rested less on the prohibition of the FCC to censor radio broadcasts (established in §326 of the Communications Act), but rather concluded that the FCC’s power to reprimand anyone who utters “obscene, indecent or profane language by means of radio communication” had to be narrowly construed to only cover obscene language or that which was unprotected by the First Amendment.658 He criticized the FCC’s poor attempt to define “indecency”: “When scrutinized closely, however, the

Commission’s national standard [for indecency] appears chimerical. The Commission never solicited a jury verdict or expert testimony. Nor did it rely on polls or letters of complaint. The omission simply recorded its conclusion that the words were indecent, thereby creating the suspicion that its national standard is in fact either the composite of the individual Commissioner’s standards or what they suppose are the national standards.”659

Further, Bazelon observed that the FCC disregarded three of four criteria established under

Miller for determining if material was obscene, and pointed to the fact that the FCC’s Order itself would be banned from broadcast, in spite of its social value and its lack of prurient

656 Ibid. 657 Joe Sergi, “Obscenity Case Files.” 658 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 US 726 – Supreme Court 1978. 659 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

261 interest, because the Order rearticulated the offensive words.660 Bazelon then dismantled the FCC’s argument regarding the protection of children, demonstrating how it was based on several assumptions, including ideas that: most parents consider dirty words to be unsuitable for children; parents are frequently unable to control their children’s listening habits; parents are less able to control children’s access to television and radio than to other media like books and newspapers.661 He further argued, “even if valid, those assumptions do not validate the Order since it rests on the premise that the Commission may censor material found by parents to be objectionable for their children”; under this premise, the

FCC would have the power to censor programs involving controversial political or religious beliefs or that address difficult contemporary problems like abortion.662 Bazelon thus concurred with Tamm’s opinion that the FCC’s Order was overbroad and unconstitutional.

Circuit Judge Leventhal dissented, echoing his shared concern with the FCC over the exposure of children to indecent words during daytime hours. The Miller ruling used by the FCC to determine indecency did not just apply to material appealing to prurient interest, but also to the less analyzed area of patently offensive representations or descriptions of

“excretory functions.” For Leventhal, Carlin’s routine clearly exemplified the “excretory indecent” and as such, the FCC had acted in line with the Miller test. 663 Leventhal suggested it was inevitable that young people would be exposed to offensive language, but, like the Commissioners behind the FCC Order, Leventhal believed that “it makes a

660 Ibid. 661 Ibid. 662 Ibid. 663 181 U.S. App. D.C. 132, 2 Media L. Rep. 1465.

262 difference whether [children] hear [vulgar words] in certain places, such as the locker room or gutter, or at certain times, that do not identify general acceptability.”664 He did not see channeling as a total ban on material, arguing, “What is entitled to First Amendment protection is not necessarily entitled to First Amendment protection in all places… Nor is it necessarily entitled to such protection at all times.” Mirroring the well-trodden logic about the importance of protecting children from harmful media, he wrote that youth “are impressionable, and likely to savor and repeat what they hear of the forbidden, without the maturity to distinguish between the different vocabularies and mindsets that every society harbors for different times and places… Even the most earnest advocates of freedom accept the role of government in protecting those who lack capacity.”665 Although Leventhal was the sole dissenter in the case, his opinions were later taken up by the Supreme Court in

FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. Indeed, Marjorie Heins writes, “Leventhal’s dissent was clearly a brief for Supreme Court review, as the FCC’s lawyers understood, and they followed it scrupulously in preparing their petition for certiorari.”666

FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978)

Amicus briefs were written in support of Pacifica by groups like the ACLU, the Association of American Publishers, PEN American Center, and even the Solicitor General’s office, who variously argued that the FCC had extended their powers too far, that there was no basis for the conclusion that indecent words are patently offensive or harmful to minors, and that many parents might disagree with the FCC’s attitude toward vulgar words.667 The

664 Ibid. 665 Ibid. 666 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 102. 667 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 103.

263 Supreme Court case was argued on April 18 and 19, 1978, and on July 3, 1978, the court upheld the FCC’s action in a 5-4 ruling. Heins suggests that the outcome of Pacifica was determined by a personnel change at the FCC—all five justices that joined the majority had been appointed by Presidents Ford or Nixon, while the four dissenters had been appointed earlier.668 John Paul Stevens, who wrote the plurality opinion joined by justices

Rehnquist and Burger, approved the FCC’s definition of “indecency” as a category of speech broader than “obscenity,” and affirmed the FCC’s power to regulate indecent speech in the interest of children.669 Against Pacifica’s argument that Carlin’s performance was not obscene or indecent because it did not appeal to prurient interest, Stevens argued

“The words ‘obscene, indecent, or profane’ are written in the disjunctive, implying that each has a separate meaning. Prurient appeal is an element of the obscene, but the normal definition of ‘indecent’ merely refers to non-conformance with accepted standards of morality.”670 He acknowledged that the vulgar words used in Carlin’s performance may be protected in other contexts, but argued that “the constitutional protection accorded to a communication containing such patently offensive sexual and excretory language need not be the same in every context.”671

Of all the media which present special First Amendment challenges, he argued, broadcasting was the form of communication that has “received the most limited First

Amendment protection.”672 The pervasiveness of broadcasting, its situation in the private

668 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 103-4. 669 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 104. 670 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 US 726 – Supreme Court 1978. 671 Ibid. 672 Ibid.

264 sphere of the home, and the ability of children to access radio, were critical factors that needed to be accounted for in considering how indecent speech might take place on the airwaves.673 Stevens adopted the FCC’s application of the law of nuisance, quoting Justice

Sutherland who once wrote, a “nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place— like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”674 For Stevens, channeling was an effective way of addressing the protection of children while maintaining space for constitutionally protected language. Besides, Judge Powell argued, “Adults who feel the need may purchase tapes and records or go to theaters and nightclubs to hear these words.”675

Among the four dissenters was Justice William J. Brennan Jr. who had penned the obscenity standard in Roth (i.e. the standard that Lenny Bruce’s work was measured by during his trials). In his dissenting opinion (joined by Justice Thurgood Marshall), he acknowledged that the privacy interests of an individual at home were deserving of substantial protections, but he disagreed with the notion that the radio broadcasting of offensive words constituted an essentially intolerable invasion of the home. Recalling the arguments of appellate court Judge Bazelon, Brennan claimed, “Whatever the minimal discomfort suffered by a listener who inadvertently tunes into a program he finds offensive during the brief interval before he can simply extend his arm and switch stations or flick the ‘off’ button, it is surely worth the candle to preserve the broadcaster’s right to send, and the right of those interested to receive, a message entitled to full First Amendment protection.” Further, the decision “permits majoritarian tastes completely to preclude a

673 Ibid. 674 Ibid. 675 Ibid.

265 protected message from entering the homes of a receptive, unoffended minority.”676 He argued that the indecency regime contradicted the Supreme Court case Butler v. Michigan

(1957), which concluded that it was unconstitutional to restrict the public’s reading material to that which was only fit for children.

Brennan further admonished the majority’s failure to clarify the extent to which the FCC could assert the privacy and children-in-the-audience rationales, and accused the opposing justices of “acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”677 He noted that the meanings of words shift according to context (for instance, when they are redefined by individuals from socio-economic groups that differed from the majority justices), and that the Court’s decision would negatively impact broadcasters who do not share the sensibilities of the

Court: “In this context, the Court’s decision may be seen for what, in the broader perspective, it really is: another of the dominant culture’s inevitable efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking.”678

Dissenter Justice Stewart’s comparatively more measured opinion stressed the problem of the majority’s approach to “indecency,” adding that: 1) the term “indecent” had recently been given the same definition as “obscenity” by the Supreme Court; 2) “indecency” had been codified in the Criminal Code of 1948 as part of the chapter entitled “Obscenity,”

676 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 US 726 – Supreme Court 1978. 677 Ibid. 678 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 US 726 – Supreme Court 1978.

266 and; 3) that “There is nothing in the legislative history to suggest that Congress intended that the same word in two closely related sections should have different meanings.”679 If indecency should be treated the same as obscenity, and Carlin’s routine was not obscene,

Justice Steward argued the Court of Appeals’ decision should have been affirmed. Heins writes that the case’s conclusion was “intellectually and constitutionally indefensible” but that it “responded to political and cultural imperatives, at least in the view of five justices.”680 The outcome of the ruling was important because it broadened the authority of the FCC to control programming, and created “indecency” as a new class of non-obscene speech that was constitutionally protected but still subject to government regulation.681

Almost 40 years after Pacifica, radio broadcasting is still subject to the FCC’s regulation of indecency.682 Today, it seems totally arbitrary that, for instance, Larry Josephson’s serialized broadcasts of Ulysses must be programmed in such a way that any indecent words are only broadcast after 10p.m. Although the principle of indecency continues to guide how radio broadcasters schedule content, the concept was also shown to be untenable in the 1990s with the emergence of the Internet.

Almost 20 years later, Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion for the Supreme Court case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) in which he demonstrated something of a change of heart about “indecency” regulation as it pertained to the Internet age. Reno was a case that arose as a result of the federal government’s enactment of the

679 Ibid. 680 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 108. 681 Sergi, “Obscenity Case Files.” 682 Bella, “The '7 Dirty Words' Turn 40, but They're Still Dirty.”

267 Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, which aimed to prevent children from accessing obscene or indecent content online.683 Heins explains, “The CDA made it a crime to send a minor any ‘indecent’ Internet communication or to ‘display in a manner available to minors’ any online expression that ‘in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.’”684 Collins and Skover go further with their characterization of the

Act, arguing that it was “Congress’s attempt to turn Internet service providers into vice cops, investigating cyber-materials for dirty content; if they failed to patrol the Net, Service providers could be criminally prosecuted.”685 The prohibition of “indecent” material on the

Internet was found to be so overly restrictive that it impinged on user’s First Amendment rights. Stevens wrote that the CDA would prohibit serious discussion about birth control practices, homosexuality, prison rape, safe sex, artistic nudes, and “arguably the card catalogue of the Carnegie Library.”686 The Supreme Court thus struck the CDA from the

Telecommunications Act of 1996. This decision was integral to the open expression of minority viewpoints and opinions on the Internet and the broad range of online information we enjoy today.

683 Stevens wrote: “The CDA differs from the various laws and orders upheld in those cases in many ways, including that it does not allow parents to consent to their children's use of restricted materials; is not limited to commercial transactions; fails to provide any definition of "indecent" and omits any requirement that "patently offensive" material lack socially redeeming value; neither limits its broad categorical prohibitions to particular times nor bases them on an evaluation by an agency familiar with the medium's unique characteristics; is punitive; applies to a medium that, unlike radio, receives full First Amendment protection; and cannot be properly analyzed as a form of time, place, and manner regulation because it is a content-based blanket restriction on speech. These precedents, then, do not require the Court to uphold the CDA and are fully consistent with the application of the most stringent review of its provisions.” Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union 521 U.S. 844 (1997). 684 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 6. 685 Collins and Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 437. 686 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 7.

268 This chapter has demonstrated the ways that listener-sponsored radio, beginning in the

1940s and 50s, took advantage of the comparatively limited cultural space within which it was operating to remediate the dissident voices, opinions, aesthetics, and content that commercial radio had become averse to with the rise of networks and the patronage of advertisers and corporate sponsors in the 1930s and 40s. By focusing on local communities and by amplifying dynamic and variegated communities, listener-sponsored radio posed a challenge to the discursive narrowness of commercial radio, which had increasingly avoided risk-taking in programming over the 1930s and 40s. Those who labored for the politically contentious, institutionally uncertain, and (compared to commercial networks) lower paying listener-sponsored radio stations forfeited the comparative security and ease of working in commercial radio to breathe life to the airwaves; connecting listeners with the events, recordings, and programs that reflected ignored, banned, hidden, and out-of- reach individuals or segments of the community who dared to hold and express bold and independent trains of thought, in spite of majoritarian interpretations of their immorality and irreligiosity.

Along with challenging broadcasting censorship by presenting unorthodox content, the members of listener-sponsored radio, particularly the countercultural programmers of the

1960s, added to the unorthodoxy by performing the private self over the public airwaves, speaking candidly and autobiographically over the air, and shedding what they saw as the artifice of traditional radio speech. This presentation of authenticity not only allowed individual DJs and radio personalities to speak without artifice, but also enabled listeners to connect with listener-sponsored radio’s counterpublic, both on the airwaves as listeners

269 called in or joined stations as volunteers, and off the airwaves as listeners formed communities, funded the stations, staged spectacles, and carried the Yippie ethos to the realm of formal demonstration. Finally, by supporting “offensive” performers on the air, by managing the complaints of offended audience members, by combatting the overreaching control of the FCC, and by taking their free speech battles to the Supreme

Court, the individuals involved in listener-sponsored radio asserted the constitutional right of broadcasters to present controversial, unpopular, unorthodox, and offensive material to

American listeners, and the right of listeners to receive (albeit, in a limited way) content that rose above the cultural standards set for children.

While moral and discursive boundaries moved increasingly outward over the 20th century and into the 21st, in large part thanks to the performers and media personalities who battled regulatory regimes, the politics of morality and offense continue to shape discourse and representation today as the networked computer and mobile technologies allow for ever- expanding opportunities of capturing and distributing everyday life. The overabundance of expression made possible by the democratization of communications technologies produces regulatory dilemmas that both reflect and depart from those dilemmas that film and broadcasting posed in the early 20th century.

270 Conclusion: Moral Remediation in the Internet Age

This dissertation has worked to illustrate the ways in which contestations over morality in

American society at the turn of the 20th century entered the domain of media regulation

(specifically related to broadcasting and film). It has done this in order to show how moral- political dynamics grounded the institutional development of mass media in the 1940s and

1950s. Further, this history shows how remediation is not necessarily neutral, but rather, can be shaped by complexes of moral-political forces working to assert competing notions of “the good” onto or through culture. These forces are not vague systems of thought but are rather nameable individuals and groups with set notions of how media can be used for

“good.” The histories of American film and broadcasting in the early 20th century exemplify this.

Propelled by a larger socio-moral movement (in large part instigated by Evangelical

Christian leaders) to purify society of the vice and “immorality” of urban life, 20th century community groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Legion of Decency protested what they saw as offensive depictions of sex, gender, crime, vice, race, and religion by threatening media makers with economic boycott. In an effort to meet the public’s interest and to stave off government regulation, broadcasters and film producers created industry codes and regulatory bodies to ensure that mass mediated content met the moral standards of the majority. The process, I argue, was far from peaceful. Instead, the program to produce morally uplifting culture was made possible by the fierce moral condemnation of a host of topics, bodies, values, perspectives, ways of being, spaces, and modes of speech. The public outcry around Mae West’s sex comedy,

271 her arrests based on obscene performances, and her eventual banishment from film and radio illustrates the ways that emerging articulations of gender and sexuality threatened

Victorian propriety and prompted socially coordinated response. By casting the “offensive” as “obscene, indecent, or profane,” socio-religious reformers and their professional media counterparts drew on a growing body of obscenity law to justify censoring material that would have otherwise enjoyed constitutional protection. The “wholesome” character of mid-century films and broadcast program was wrought through vitriolic condemnation and exile.

The political game of moral offense, however, was not won by way of censorship codes.

Rather than transforming the morality of the public, mass media’s moral censorship in the

1940s channelled politically, ideologically, and morally contentious bodies and content into the world of semi-private, semi-public space. Performing before contained audiences, a host of writers, musicians, and “new wave comics” (e.g., Lenny Bruce) kept a world of moral and discursive difference alive in, for instance, North Beach’s cafes and nightclubs,

LA’s burlesque circuit, Chicago’s jazz clubs, and the private living rooms of New York’s most eminent cultural critics. I’ve shown how the new wave comics of the 1950s and 1960s incorporated self-reflexivity, critique, autobiography, everydayness, and the form of monologue into the cultural genre of stand-up comedy to present American audiences with fragments of their lives, opinions, and senses of personal truth. Sicknik comedy in live performance scenes allowed for a degree of honest self-expression that comics could not enjoy over the morally prohibitive commercial media of 1950s film, radio, and television.

Lenny Bruce used comedy to explore “what is” rather than “what should be,” an idea

272 echoed by his contemporary Joan Rivers who once said of comedy, “Say only what you really feel about the subject. And that’s too bad if they don’t like it. That’s what comedy is. It’s you telling the truth as you see it.”687

The transformation in stand-up comedy was in itself a transformation of comedic culture, but it also contributed more generally to transformations in mediated culture. What we see in the case of Lenny Bruce is the role of small and niche media in moving the live, dynamic, and sometimes “offensive” world to a larger audience. The personal and niche recordings of enthusiasts like Wally Heider, Hugh Heffner, and the folks at Fantasy, aided in moving moral and discursive difference from live performance spaces to the homes of friends, cultural intermediaries, and eventually a larger public of “sick humor” fans. Those cultural artefacts, initially rare or hard to obtain, moved gradually (hand-to-hand) from the periphery toward the center of American consciousness, eventually influencing the development of mid-century comedy LPs, and culminating in Bruce’s invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall and on Steve Allen’s primetime TV show. The growing enthusiasm around the new wave comics, however, was met by guardians of culture and propriety who were not only offended by much of the new comedy, but actively sought to abolish it.

Alongside, or on the heels of, the prosecution of avant-garde writers and filmmakers, Lenny

Bruce was charged with obscenity on several counts across American cities and barred from performing in Canada, the UK, and Australia. The criticisms of Bruce in the press

687 Joan Rivers, “Joan Rivers: Why Johnny Carson ‘Never Ever Spoke to Me Again,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 6, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/joan-rivers-why-johnny-carson- 398088. Accessed July 2, 2017.

273 and in his trials illustrate the hold that 1950s mass media morality had over audiences, critics, and state representatives who were deemed responsible for determining the legal boundaries of expression. Although Bruce tragically did not see the many ways that history eventually vindicated him, his life, work, and example contributed to the broader changes in culture. The unwieldy and unconstitutional application of obscenity and indecency law to performers was fought, through cultural work but also more formally in battles with the

FCC or, in Pacifica’s Supreme Court trial, by countercultural humorists and those working in listener-sponsored radio who fought for their First Amendment rights and cultivated enthusiasm for experimental, unorthodox, and even offensive culture and programming.

Although the indecency standard continues to shape how broadcasters are able to present

“adult” content over the airwaves, today, it seems as though there are almost limitless avenues to circulating frank, personal, offensive, and (what was formally considered)

“immoral” and “irreligious” content.

In telling this history, I hope to have presented a model of thinking about the social, moral, and cultural histories that shape the development of media institutions, media regulation, and obscenity or First Amendment law in 20th and 21st century America. Attending to the cultural work of performers, cultural intermediaries, club owners, and radio broadcasters who sought content that was forbidden in mass media, we see the everyday ways individuals used culture to resist moral impositions, as well as the alternative labor practices that enabled a broader and richer spectrum of thought and opinion in the face of commercial and political suppression in the 1940s and 50s.

274 For those working in Communication and Media Studies, this history may contribute to thinking about the moral work of remediation, the significance of hand-to-hand distribution and semi-public spaces for cultural innovation, and the role of comedy in pushing public discourse to uncomfortable but sometimes necessary discussions. For legal scholars interested in the First Amendment, this history presents a way of understanding cultural forms of resistance to censorial practices or regimes, and an understanding of the significance of interpersonal networks in cultural scenes to help support individuals’ First

Amendment rights. More generally, what this dissertation may contribute to future research is an understanding that the boundaries of free speech are not clear or a given, but are defined by specific social actors responding to culture and experimentation, and who assert their ideals of morality and harm through coordinated work in communities, with industry players, and through law. Finally, by remediating the voices of Mae West, Lenny Bruce, and those who have worked in listener-sponsored radio, this dissertation brings into focus some of the bold, vigorous, and independent trains of thought of figures who were deemed immoral and irreligious by those who claimed moral righteousness. Examining the performances and humor of the prosecuted, persecuted, and vilified allows for a better understanding of the deep care expressed for self and society in many ostensibly obscene and indecent works.

Today, the politics of offense continues to undergird discussions about censorship and free speech. We see the politics of offense at play in debates over free speech on university campuses, in contestations over language about identities, as well as in the world of comedy

275 as people continue to debate over when comics go “too far.”688 What this dissertation hopes to lend to the analysis of such situations is a model for considering the historical conditions of free speech claims and for thinking about the investments and goals of social groups who are motivated in either limiting or enabling certain kinds of expression. This dissertation seeks to encourage analyses of speech conflicts that are based in considerations of the moral, political, and ideological structures informing how people come to value speech. Further, this dissertation seeks to assist scholars in considering the spatialization of opinions, bodies, and ideas in and through media forms, and the ways that value systems become hardened in media’s regulatory codes and institutions. Further, my analytical model, which ties together moral-political battles with media regulation, offers those now at the helm of Internet regulation a model of thinking about how media regulation can censor unconstitutionally, and how regulatory frameworks that intend to enhance the well- being and morality of the public can work against the public’s interest. This way of thinking about the moral politics surrounding media institutions and regulation is important particularly for dealing with the many pressing problems that have arisen with the expressive permissiveness of the Internet.

The Politics of Offense in the Internet Age: Free Speech vs. Privacy

After Reno v. ACLU, the Communications Decency Act was redrawn to protect freedom of expression on the Internet rather than to hinder it. Section 230 of the CDA states, “No

688 For this last issue, I am referring to debates such as that around if people should be “allowed” to make rape jokes (or what constitutes an “appropriate” rape joke), and the controversy around Quebecois comic Mike Ward who was ordered by Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal to pay a former child singer with Treacher Collins syndrome, Jérémy Gabriel, $35,000 for making jokes that violated his right to dignity. For more, see Elysha Enos, “Comedian Mike Ward ordered to pay $35K to Jérémy Gabriel,” CBC News, July 20, 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mike-ward-verdict-1.3688089. Accessed July 2, 2017.

276 provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”689 The loosely defined term “indecency” would not be allowed to be used as a weapon to censor material that vaguely offended but did not directly harm individuals. The striking down of the indecency provision in the CDA was a turning point in American media regulation, opening up the field of electronically mediated expression to a vast array of morally and politically contentious material. The legal ruling that allowed for the openness of the

Internet invited not only the proliferation of educational and politically important information that would have otherwise been regulated unduly (e.g. sexual education), but it also posed challenges for how we now think about the public circulation of “private” or

“sensitive” information.

Today, one of the most contentious areas of Internet regulation comes out of users’ ability to easily distribute sensitive information online. Moments during which content is

“liberated” over the Internet and subsequently legitimized through discourses of free expression, sometimes disguise the fact that the sharing of content knowingly and unnecessarily harms an individual, or worse, was motivated by an impulse to shame, intimidate, or attack someone through the exposure of private information.

For privacy law scholar Daniel Solove, the CDA in fact “overprotects speech” and

“promotes a culture of irresponsibility when it comes to speech online.”690 The CDA as it

689 “CDA 230: The most important law protecting internet speech,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230. Accessed on June 17, 2017. 690 Daniel Solove, “Speech, Privacy, and Reputation on the Internet,” The Offensive Internet, eds. Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), 23.

277 stands has prompted some users to justify their malicious decontextualization and sharing of others’ personal information. The inability of individuals to control malicious or otherwise embarrassing information about themselves online has “profound effects on people’s freedom to experiment, to grow, and to change.”691 For Solove, the overprotection of speech online has led to a devaluing of individuals’ relative right to privacy, to

“withdraw from the public gaze at such times as a person may see fit,”692 online. The politics of offense, the battle over who gets to be offended at what and on what grounds, arises as peoples private lives are exposed and as regulators and law-makers attempt to determine what kinds of expressions can be protected and which are to be treated as harmful, and as they build legal mechanisms for dealing with informational breaches.

For instance, in August of 2014, a hacker exposed images of over 100 well-known female celebrities online (including those of Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Winona Ryder, and Kim

Kardashian). A user of the website 4chan posted a list of the women whose sexually explicit photos were among the hacked images, and several sexually explicit photos were then circulated on file-sharing and photo websites.693 Some women claimed that the photos were fake, while others affirmed they were real but expressed outrage at the hack. Shocked at the events, Jennifer Lawrence stated:

I can't even describe to anybody what it feels like to have my naked body

shoot across the world like a news flash against my will. It just makes me

691 Solove, “Speech, Privacy, and Reputation on the Internet,” 16. 692 Solove, “Speech, Privacy, and Reputation on the Internet,” 22. 693 Paul Farrell, “Nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and others posted online by alleged hacker,” The Guardian, 1 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/01/nude-photos-of-jennifer- lawrence-and-others-posted-online-by-alleged-hacker. Accessed July 2, 2017.

278 feel like a piece of meat that's being passed around for a profit… Just

because I'm a public figure, just because I'm an actress, does not mean that

I asked for this. It does not mean that it comes with the territory. It's my

body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is

absolutely disgusting… It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime. It is a sexual

violation… Anybody who looked at those pictures, you're perpetuating a

sexual offense. You should cower with shame… Even people who I know

and love say, ‘Oh, yeah, I looked at the pictures.’ I don't want to get mad,

but at the same time I'm thinking, I didn't tell you that you could look at my

naked body.694

While Lawrence here explicitly blames hackers, websites, and viewers generally for participating in this sexual offense, Google, as the search engine that indexes and directs users to content, also became a target of blame when the company was made accountable for the violation. In October of 2014, Google removed two links to a site hosting the stolen nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence after her lawyers submitted requests for link removals under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), stating the stolen photos impinged on Lawrence’s copyright privileges.695 In response, Google stated “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pictures – within hours of the requests being made – and we have closed hundreds of accounts. The internet is used for many good things. Stealing people’s private

694 Sam Kashner, “Both Huntress and Prey,” Vanity Fair, October 20, 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/10/jennifer-lawrence-photo-hacking-privacy. Accessed May 31, 2015. 695 Samuel Gibbs, “Google Removes Results Linking to Stolen Photos of Jennifer Lawrence Nude,” The Guardian, October 20, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/20/google-search-results- linking-stolen-nude-photos-jennifer-lawrence. Accessed May 31, 2015.

279 photos is not one of them.”696 Privacy and obscenity law were not invoked in this case to take down the photos, but rather property law and the mechanism of the DMCA that attempted to erase the offense from the Internet. Unlike the religious ideals and calls to propriety that shaped media regulation in the early to mid-20th century, what this case signals is the force of economic thinking (i.e. property law) in media and cultural regulation in the 21st century. Although Lawrence and others were inevitably supported in this instance, the general “overprotection” of speech on the Internet continues to enable countless similar instances of exposure, shaming, and misogyny online.

Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the name Roosh Valizadeh or Roosh V, is a men’s rights activist, pickup artist, and proponent of “neomasculinity.” He became infamous in recent years for (what he now claims were “satirical”) statements that rape should be legalized on private property and for his many derogatory statements about women. In 2015, he encouraged his following of young men to dox697 feminists who were participating in an anti-rape demonstration that was being organized in response to an event he was holding

696 Gibbs, “Google Removes Results.” 697 Doxing, or doxxing, is a term associated with the unauthorized or undesired obtaining and publication of previously secured, private, or personally identifiable information. Bruce Schneier explains that it “emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic… [and] has since been [used] as a tool to harass and intimidate people, primarily women, on the internet.” Bruce Schneier, “The Rise of Political Doxing,” Motherboard, October 28, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43bm8/the-rise-of-political- doxing. Accessed July 2, 2017.

“Doxing” comes from the expression “dropping documents," which in 1990s hacker culture referred to the act of obtaining another hacker’s personal information and publishing it, thereby demonstrating the prowess of the individual who uncovered the private information, and potentially harming the reputation of the person exposed. Caitlin Dewey, “How doxing went from a cheap hacker trick to a presidential campaign tactic,” The Washington Post, August 12, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2015/08/12/how-doxing-went-from-a-cheap-hacker-trick-to-a-presidential-campaign- tactic/?utm_term=.8130ea546033. Accessed July 2, 2017.

280 in Toronto.698 He encouraged his followers to use the doxed information to “seduce” and then “fuck” the organizers and attendees of the demonstration, which one organizer interpreted in this way: “He’s kind of telling people to go out and try to rape me, but without really saying it.”699 Further, he encouraged his followers to share with him the names, locations, Facebook profiles, photos, and other details of reporters who published stories stating that Roosh V supports the rape and harm of women—which his followers did.700

Doxing, the freeing of private information, in this instance was clearly aimed at demeaning and silencing Roosh V’s opponents.701

Bruce Schneier suggests that, however, not all doxing is done entirely maliciously. In his article “The Rise of Political Doxing,” he identifies the trend of people doxing “for good,” or politically motivated doxing which is sometimes seen as a public service, as a way of holding people or institutions accountable for actions they have conducted in secret to the detriment of others. He considers Edward Snowden’s release of classified NSA documents an example of politically motivated doxing for good. In these cases, “doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful. It can be used for whistleblowing.

698 Jordan Pearson, “A Rape Advocate Is Targeting Canadian Women In an Online Harassment Campaign,” Motherboard, August 14, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a-rape-advocate-is-targeting- canadian-women-in-an-online-harassment-campaign. Accessed July 2, 2017. 699 Ibid. 700 Josh Lowe, “Anti-Feminism Blogger Daryush Valizadeh Of 'Return Of Kings' Asks Followers To Post Journalists' Details,” Newsweek, February 3, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/daryush-valizadeh-return- kings-meeting-roosh-v-neomasulinism-422724. Accessed July 2, 2017. 701 One article reports that the leader of the demonstration, referred to by the pseudonym Vanessa, “received friend requests on Facebook from men she has never met, and her parents began receiving unwelcome phone calls. One, she said, came from a man claiming he was from the Canada Revenue Agency and that he was going to arrest her father. Vanessa visited the Toronto police on Wednesday night to file an incident report… At the time of writing, the Toronto police have not opened any investigations regarding Roosh, a police spokesperson said. Indeed, while harassment against women online is routine and in many cases frightening and severe, policing the internet continues to be a massive blind spot for authorities in Canada and abroad.” Jordan Pearson, “A Rape Advocate Is Targeting Canadian Women In an Online Harassment Campaign.”

281 It can be used as a vehicle for social change.”702 But there are also more problematic kinds of politically motivated doxing. Consider the case presented by Vice magazine of “Danny,” a Canadian man in his 30s who works for a large IT company and who doxes racists in his spare time. Danny compiles the personal information of individuals who make racist comments online, and then pressures those individuals (often threatening his targets with exposing the humiliating information to the target’s friends, family, and employers) to erase their comments or online accounts. “Danny” states, “All I ever want from people is to simply stop oppressing others… I want white males to accept the yoke of our horrible, terrifying track record in history.”703 One lawyer observes that his tactics could get him into serious legal trouble: “Phishing and misrepresenting who he is” is where it gets tricky, and doxing crosses lines into defamation, extortion, and the disclosure of private information.704 While the motivation might be admirable and the tactic effective, doxing poses a moral question—even though doxing involves a breach of privacy, is it a morally acceptable technique if its ends are desirable? The answer for many will be no. But for those sympathetic to the reality that traditional systems of justice are not necessarily effective or that they don’t equally protect people, the answer might be a hesitant “maybe?”

Doxing has become a kind of moral grey area, in some instances akin to harassment and in some cases used for social justice or whistleblowing. Ironically, in 2016, the online vigilante group Anonymous doxed Roosh V’s private details releasing his home address,

702 Schneier, “The Rise of Political Doxing.” 703 Devin Pacholik, “This Canadian Hacker is Doxxing Racist Internet Commenters,” Vice, August 24, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/vdqvgy/this-canadian-hacker-is-doxxing-racist-internet- commenters. Accessed July 2, 2017. 704 Ibid.

282 telephone number, cellphone number, and date of birth. The act led him to tweet

“Anonymous doxed my family’s address. Whatever I’ve done in life, they don’t deserve to be harassed or harmed.”705 Here, we see doxing as a political tool in contestations over gender and as complicating the boundaries of private and public. Further, Roosh V’s misogynist provocations led to his denouncement by Canadian media outlets and politicians in advance of his events planned in cities across Canada in 2016—Ottawa’s mayor Jim Watson, for instance, tweeted “@ReturnofKings Your pro-rape, misogynistic, homophobic garbage is not welcome in Ottawa #its2016 #TurnAwayReturnOfKings,” and the mayors of several cities followed in suit.706 Afterward, Roosh V claimed the actions taken toward him were threats to his right to free speech, and he went on to publish his recollections of the events in a book entitled Free Speech Isn’t Free: How 90 Men Stood

Up Against the Globalist Establishment – and Won. Here, we see the contemporary gender politics shaping his free speech claims, as he insists, “There are active attempts to silence men, to marginalize them, and at the same time to elevate all these far-left agendas and viewpoints.”707

The Difficulty of Defining “Harm” Today

The Roosh V example reminds us of the uncomfortable ways that free speech claims are made today and the ways that notions of discursive or expressive “harm” continue to

705 Jason McLean, “When the Doxxer Gets Doxxed: Anonymouse Shares Roosh V’s Info with the World,” Forget the Box, February 5, 2016, http://www.forgetthebox.net/when-the-doxer-gets-doxed-anonymous- shares-roosh-vs-info-with-the-world-201502051/. Accessed July 2, 2017. 706 “Roosh V: Canadian mayors decry 'homophobic', 'pro-rape' men's meetups,” CTV News, February 3, 2016, http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/blogger-not-welcome-here-canadian-mayors-tell-roosh-v-1.2762894. Accessed July 2, 2017. 707 Max Kutner, “Roosh V’s journey from pickup artist to right-wing provocateur,” Newsweek, October 13, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/21/roosh-v-pickup-artist-right-wing-provocateur-509319.html. Accessed July 2, 2017.

283 require definition, social and historical contextualization, and nuanced understanding.

When people charge others of censorship, we must ask: what is at stake for those who claim free speech rights and what is at stake for those asserting that certain ideas, expressions, or voices should be silenced? Like the cases of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and the folks at

Pacifica, Roosh V invokes the right to free speech in an environment where his opinions are widely perceived to be a minority position, one that is condemned by the majority.

Additionally, in all these cases, the speaker is understood as inflicting harm on audiences.

What separates Roosh V’s case from the others, however, is the character of harm involved and the political stance from which he expresses his opinions. The performers celebrated in this dissertation were deemed harmful in their day for the ways that their uses of language offended religious sensibilities and systems of thought regarding gender, race, vice, and sexuality. Roosh V’s speech is similarly considered harmful for his treatments of gender and sexuality (albeit from the other end of the political spectrum), but his invocations to fans to dox women and use private information to humiliate and harass those women moves him out of the realm of offensive opinion to the realm of serious harm.

West, Bruce, and others generally did not incite listeners to attack specific individuals, particularly those occupying the space of the historically oppressed. Recall Time journalist

Richard Corliss’ observation of Bruce: “In his satire he aimed up, at the powerful, not down, at the pitiful. He often made himself and his weaknesses the subject of his comedy.

His material wasn't mean...” 708 Likewise, Mae West, George Carlin, and those involved in listener-sponsored radio did not present audiences with unorthodox material for the

708 Corliss, “A Tribute to Lenny Bruce.”

284 purposes of degrading the historically oppressed. Roosh V advocates for a social order based on the subjugation of women (an opinion that some free speech advocates would believe still deserves constitutional protection, even if the sentiment is offensive), but it his goading of listeners to dox specific women and journalists that sets his expression apart from the examples studied in this dissertation. To aid in thinking about the difference, we can recall Marjorie Heins’ observation that there is a difference between entertainment that involves real harm (she uses the example of child pornography which involves child abuse) and forms of entertainment that produce symbolic harm (for instance, sexually titillating material).709 Likewise, there is a difference between Roosh V’s directives to harm specific women and their allies, and his more general distasteful opinions about the nature of women. Roosh V, like the hypothetical man who yells “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater,710 presents a clear and present danger as he knowingly calls on fans to directly harm his feminist adversaries. Roosh V’s comments encouraging young men to dox women not only represent the viewpoint that women are not entitled to certain rights (to privacy, freedom from harassment, and equal status under the law), but further encourage unlawful or undue action—obtaining specific individuals’ private information/property, using it to shame, harass, and degrade them, and creating a general climate of fear for those individuals as well as their allies. It is the intersection of his general opinions and these more specific directives that make his claims to free speech protections not only spurious but dangerous.

709 Heins, Not in Front of the Children, 13. 710 This is a reference to the metaphor used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the case Schenck v. United States (1919) in which the court found that Congress has a right to prevent speech when it presents a “clear and present danger.”

285 Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic who was (as Lindy West711 puts it) “relentlessly stalked, abused and threatened since 2012” for starting a campaign to fund YouTube videos critiquing the representation of women in video games, identifies the way that “free speech” is used to silence feminists. Sarkeesian holds that “Freedom of speech is such a buzzword that people can rally around… and that works really well in their favor. They’re weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance.” 712 The irony in

Sarkeesian’s case comes from the fact that as men accuse her of censorship, their tactics function to intimidate other women from expressing shared viewpoints: “There are women who have said to me, or to people in my circles, that they don’t want to be me… They don’t want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet.”713 Noting the many instances at which point young male Internet trolls were missing from the free speech battles of black professors, feminists, or satirical comics,

Lindy West writes, “They were nowhere, of course… because their true goal has always been to ensure that if anyone is determining the ways that we collectively choose to restrict our own speech in the name of values, they are the ones setting the limits. They want to perform a factory reset to a time when people of color and women didn’t tell white men

711 Feminist author Lindy West has been targeted by Roosh V and his fans since 2012: “For years, Roosh and his bootlickers have been feverishly monitoring my life, mining it for vulnerabilities that they can exploit. They have stolen my wedding photos. They’ve vandalised my Wikipedia page. They’ve posted pictures of my children and my husband’s ex-wife. They’ve written long, sexually graphic poems about me. They’re obsessed with a completely innocuous YouTube video I made four years ago (because I eat food in it), and still leave comments: ‘Fatty fucking fat ass get raped you stupid fat landwhale.’” Lindy West, “Now Roosh V and his band of sad men in dark rooms know how it feels to be bombarded with bile,” The Guardian, February 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/07/daryush- roosh-v-valizadeh-and-his-acolytes-pilloried. Accessed July 2, 2017. 712 Anita Sarkeesian quoted in Lindy West, “Save Free Speech from Trolls,” New York Times, July 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/save-free-speech-from-trolls.html. Accessed July 2, 2017. 713 Sarkeesian quoted in West, “Save Free Speech from Trolls.”

286 what to do.”714 Free speech claims cannot be taken at face value, especially in societies that steadfastly protect expression. Rather, when calls to free speech and to censorship are made, adjudicating their legitimacy requires careful consideration of the moral and political backdrops structuring speech conflicts, as well as a serious assessment as to whether or not the expression in question has directly resulted in harm.

The reason I bring the Roosh V case up at the end of this dissertation is that it clearly illustrates the measurable harm of speech, and makes plainly obvious that free speech is not an absolute good or an end in itself. While this dissertation celebrates the ways that a set of individuals fought for their right to speak frankly about their lives and opinions, I do not hold an absolutist’s view on free speech.715 Following John Stuart Mill, I do believe the boundaries of speech should be circumscribed by the concept of harm. Knowing how to deal with the harm of Roosh V’s speech, however, is difficult for a number of reasons.

Roosh V’s call for followers to dox feminists, to harass them both on and offline, is a kind of speech that is mostly easy to define as harmful because of the ways the elements of harassment and property theft inherent in his call are already understood in law as harmful

714 Lindy West, “Save Free Speech from Trolls,” New York Times, July 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/save-free-speech-from-trolls.html. Accessed July 2, 2017. 715 Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum write: “According to a popular misconception, freedom of speech is an absolute, and the First Amendment protects all speech from any type of government regulation… But the absolutist view of the First Amendment is implausible, and it has never prevailed. Regulation of speech is uncontroversially constitutional with respect to threats, bribery, defamatory statements, fighting words, fraud, copyright, plagiarism, and more. What the courts have said is that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not protect these forms of speech. Moreover, few people would defend the position that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ should be trusted to sort out the problems posed by fraud, bribery, and their cousins.” Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum, “Introduction,” in The Offensive Internet: Privacy, speech, and reputation, eds. Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2010): (6).

287 or criminal. Doxing feminists to harass and silence them is clearly reprehensible. But how should we regulate against this kind of anti-feminist doxing, while ensuring that “doxing for good,” political doxing or whistleblowing, can be protected or at least measured by different standards? A law or regulatory code built to deter one kind of action would likely have ramifications for the other. This is related to the dilemma that Solove identifies—how can we create a system of law that both allows for the protection of certain kinds of expression on the Internet and also appropriately balances rights to privacy and self- determination? This question about how to regulate doxing is posed not to suggest that rules around doxing cannot be developed in a nuanced way, but rather to remind us that outlawing one kind of behavior or censoring one kind of speech requires sensitivity to kinds of behavior and speech that are similar on a formal, legal level but that differ in their political character and effects. How can we ensure that normative programs and the creation of legal definitions and regulatory codes for the Internet are not grossly misapplied and move beyond their intended scope? The answer is not yet clear.

Like those working with or against film and broadcasting in the early 20th century, we find ourselves at a moment when the expressive capacities of the Internet have challenged existing ways of thinking about privacy and publicity, complicating how we understand the boundaries of speech and expression, and posing problems for lawmakers and for the regulation of media forms. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the work carried out over the

20th century to enable free speech has created conditions (Section 230 of the CDA and a general enthusiasm for a free Internet) that today makes the regulation of obviously harmful speech difficult in many ways.

288

This dissertation has attempted to show that “offensive speech” does not naturally or self- evidently signify what is good and bad. Instead I have argued that offensive speech involves a relationship between competing values and moral codes. In order to understand offensive speech, it needs to be situated in its historical and social contexts and its value and legality need to be assessed in relation to those contexts and in relation to its actual effects in the world. Finally, we must be sensitive to the ways that media become sites and tools implicated in these moral struggles, as they institutionalize and normalize certain ideals over others. As we go forward finding ways to morally and legally define the boundaries of Internet-mediated expression, we ought to remember that the “immoral” does not simply disappear but instead moves to hidden, confined, and niche spaces, spaces which may prove surprisingly influential in the future. Rather than ghettoizing certain forms of dangerous, immoral, or otherwise illicit speech, then, we would do well to confront them head on, both culturally and legally.

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