Lenny Bruce Trial(英)

　　A largely beat audience turned up at the Criminal Courts Building for the opening of the Cafe Au Go Go trial on June 16, 1964. To accommodate the large crowd, the trial was moved to a larger courtroom with twenty-foot high ceilings. The trial would be before a three-judge court, not a jury. The presiding judge was John Murtagh, who "dominated his two colleagues and ran the trial as if they were not there."

　　The prosecution's key witness was Inspector Ruhe, who described what he had heard and seen during his visit to the Cafe Au Go Go. Ruhe perspired heavily and seemed nervous on the stand. At first, every time he repeated a "dirty word" he seemed embarrassed, but as his testimony went along he seemed more comfortable. Reading from notes taken at the nightclub, Ruhe delivered a sort of butchered performance of Bruce's routine as the comedian, dressed in a black tunic and sporting a new beard, suffered silently. Bruce worried, "I'm going to be judged by his bad timing, his ego, his garbled language." Most upsetting to Bruce was Ruhe's suggestion that he had slid his hands up and down the microphone in "a masturbatory gesture." "I would never do anything like that," Bruce protested to Garbus.

　　In addition to Inspector Ruhe, the prosecution called police officers who attended performances at the Cafe Au Go Go and talked to either Bruce or Solomon afterwards. Kuh also introduced audiotapes of Bruce's two performances on the night of April 7. After just three days of testimony, the prosecution rested.

　　The next day, Bruce was hospitalized with pleurisy and the defense was granted an adjournment. In the hospital, Bruce obsessed over his case. He read law books from cover to cover, sometimes complaining to his lawyers about their omitting from arguments cases he considered of special importance to his case. He also listened to tapes he had made of trial testimony, recorded on a device he smuggled into the courtroom in a gray attaché case.

　　When the trial reconvened on June 30, the defense

moved to dismiss on the grounds that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence to prove a violation of Penal Code Section 1140. Defense lawyers strenuously contended that the prosecution's case rested largely on Bruce's coarse language, and that Supreme Court precedent required the prosecution to show that the defendant's words had inspired "lustful and lecherous thoughts." The Court denied the defense motion. Justice Randall Creel dissented, saying that although he found Bruce's performance "distasteful," he did not think it made "the grade as to hard-core pornography."

　　The defense's case rested heavily on the testimony of expert witnesses. The list of defense witnesses included psychiatric witnesses (who testified that Bruce's performance was not sexually arousing), New York media experts (who testified that the performance did not offend local community standards), and critics (who testified to the social importance of Bruce's brand of humor).

　　No defense witness made a stronger impression than did newspaper columnist and What's My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen. Defense lawyers contacted Kilgallen because she had previously written favorable reviews of Bruce's work, but was prim in manner and not a person associated with the avant-garde. Garbus thought Kilgallen's testimony would be especially persuasive because she was "considered by man to be a spokesperson for the more prudish elements of the entertainment world." Kilgallen appeared cool and unruffled on the stand as she testified that she had "enormous respect " for Bruce. Kilgallen described Bruce as "a brilliant satirist, perhaps the most brilliant that I have ever seen." She said his "social commentary, whether I agree with it or not, is extremely valid and important, and I have enjoyed his acts on several occasions." Garbus asked Kilgallen about Bruce's use of dirty words:

　　Garbus: Miss Kilgallen, in the transcripts the words "motherfucker," "cocksucker," "fuck," "shit," "ass" are found, isn't that correct?

　　Kilgallen: Yes.

　　Garbus: Is there an artistic purpose in the use of language as set forth in these transcripts in evidence?

　　Kilgallen: In my opinion there is.

　　Garbus: In what way?

　　Kilgallen: Well, I think that Lenny Bruce, as a nightclub performer, employs these words the way James Baldwin or Tennessee Williams or playwrights employ them on the Broadway stage——for emphasis or because that is the way that people in a given situation would talk. They would use those words.

　　Forrest Johnson, a Presbyterian minster who happened to attend Bruce's April 1 performance at the Cafe Au Go (and who denied that Bruce had made any "masturbatory gesture" with the microphone) also testified that he didn't consider the comedian's use of taboo words to be inappropriate. On cross-examination, Kuh asked Johnson whether he thought Bruce's might have violated a Biblical command:

　　Kuh: Would you say the phrase, and you'll excuse me, Reverend, for using this language, but the phrase "motherfucker" is in accord with that Commandment [the Fourth Commandment, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother"]?

　　Johnson: I don't think the term "motherfucker" has any relationship to that Commandment……

　　Kuh: To the uninitiated, to the unsophisticated, to persons other than reverends, Mr. Johnson, might someone understand the word "motherfucker" as having to do with mothers and fucking?

　　Village Voice entertainment critic Nat Hentoff, who had reviewed Bruce and seen him perform at least forty times, testified both as to the social value of Bruce's humor and its having little in the way of a titillating effect on audiences:

　　Garbus: Can you tell us if you were in any way titillated by Mr. Bruce's performances?

　　Hentoff: No……nor have the audiences that have been present……It's like a shock of recognition, very effective.

　　Garbus: Would it be fair to say Mr. Bruce's performances are primarily concerned with arousing sexual thoughts?

　　Hentoff: He is certainly concerned in making people think in sexual terms, I would say, in a rather snickering way.

　　Garbus: Is that the purpose of Mr. Bruce's performances?

　　Hentoff: That is absolutely not the purpose of Mr. Bruce's performances.

　　Two professors appeared as defense witnesses. Daniel Dodson, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, described Bruce has having the "moral outrage" characteristic of all great satirists. Dodson testified that Bruce "very effectively" satirized "the pomposity, the ridiculousness, the hypocrisy of our society" in the great tradition of Swift and Rabelais. Dodson noted that Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver's Travels, had an "excremental obsession……when he wrote the last section of Gulliver's Travels." The other academic expert for the defense was eminent sociologist Herbert Gans. Gans testified that the "dirty words" used by Bruce in his performance were in daily use-as words of anger or accusation——in many American communities, even in mixed company.

　　Prosecutor Richard Kuh complained of the difficulty in rounding up prosecution experts to counter those presented by the defense. According to Kuh, few of the many who privately condemned Bruce's performances had the moral courage "to declare themselves squares." One who was willing to do so, and who appeared as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution, was social critic and frequent New Yorker contributor, Marya Mannes. In her testimony, Mannes labeled the use of obscenities as "the last resort of the comedian" and distinguished Bruce's use of obscenities from the more appropriate use of those words by great authors such as Edward Albee in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In Mannes's opinion, Bruce's use of obscenities added none of the realism, drama, or insight into character that Albee's use did. Daniel Potter, executive director of the Protestant Council of New York, took the stand to speculate that Bruce's "offensive use of words and images would……if, anything, incite and increase the feelings of hostility toward others in the community." John Fischer, editor-in-chief of Harpers, echoed the opinion of other prosecution experts that Bruce's material had no social value and seemed, in fact, "rather incoherent." New York Daily News columnist Robert Sylvester called Bruce "unique" among comedians in the extent of his use of vulgar words.

　　The most extreme criticism of Bruce came from sociologist Ernst Van den Haag, who described Bruce's routines as a "sort of verbal diarrhea——instead of defecating on a stage in a literal sense, he does it through orality." Van den Haag suggested that the wards of a "mental hospital" might be the only community that would view Bruce's act as acceptable. On cross-examination, London called into question Van den Haag's credibility as an expert on contemporary community standards by forcing him to admit that he hadn't been to a nightclub in twenty years.

　　After Van den Haag left the stand and the people rested, Lenny Bruce stood up and announced, "Your honor, at this time, I would like to ask the court to allow me to speak." Bruce complained that "there is evidence withheld from the court" that he wanted to provide. Judge Murtagh called a short recess to allow London to discuss the matter with his client. London was determined to not let Bruce testify——to the point of packing

┨网页设计特效库┠ http://www。z┗co⊙l。com/网页特效/