To those in power it was important that news of Bruce’s death circulate worldwide. He wasn’t just a comedian, as he often told his audiences; he was “Lenny Bruce,” a citizen who never bought into the Cold War, mainstream sexuality, racism, or religion. Bruce once said, “If communism cooks for you—solid, man. But I’m not gonna try to free anybody.” In fact, he questioned the very notion of American supremacy. “I’d walk in any country, I don’t need a visa,” he said. “But I would shit to walk in Mississippi with a sign on my back: ‘I’m from New York.’ ”
Talk alone didn’t make him dangerous. It was the fact that people listened that made Lenny Bruce lethal. He was a Pied Piper, a philosophical enemy of the state, hounded by the religious right, the police, and the fbi. They accused him of obscenity, but Bruce knew the truth. When a New York City court found him guilty, he answered: “The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority.”
While Bruce may seem like a twentieth-century original, his comedy and that of the adversarial American stand-ups who have followed him—comics such as Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, and Lewis Black—are, in fact, distant cousins to a breed of satirists who assailed another political colossus: the Roman Empire. These ancient satirists practised their acerbic arts just prior to and during the age of the Principate (27 bc to ad 235), when Rome changed from a republic governed by the senate to an empire ruled by a single man. Then, as in Bruce’s heyday, the shift from a state responsible to its citizens to a state maintained for those who wished to expand and rule it created a climate in which the individual’s right to object became a sacred calling. “It’s hard not to write satire,” wrote Juvenal, arguably Rome’s greatest satirist, “for who is so tolerant of this unjust city, so unfeeling, as to hold himself back?”
While the Romans borrowed theatre and literature from the Greeks, satire was theirs alone. The first satire was written by a Roman named Ennius and only fragments of his work still exist. He was followed by Lucilius, who targeted both private figures and Roman society, which he described as “disgruntled, hard to please, scornful of good things.” Horace (65–8 bc), one of Rome’s greatest poets, fought on the side of Brutus during the civil war. He returned, defeated and bankrupt, and turned his hand to writing. “Why may not one be telling the truth while one laughs,” he wrote, “as teachers sometimes give little boys cakes to coax them into learning their letters?”
It is important to recognize that Roman poets not only wrote their satire, they spoke it, in public. Tony Perrottet, author of Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, notes that poets would speak at the villas of the rich, art galleries, and even during intermissions at sporting events. Readings could last for days, and the wine-soaked crowds, much like contemporary stand-up comedy audiences, were expected to be vociferous in their praise or distaste.
The early years of an empire inevitably trigger, in certain individuals, the need to call that empire’s weaknesses to account. One quality both Roman satirists and their latter-day American counterparts share is an idealist’s nostalgia for the past. Bruce was a true believer in the US Constitution, just as Lewis Black is today. “It’s a damn fine piece of writing,” Black says during his stand-up performances. “But we shit on it all the same.” This romanticism is almost always punished. Wrote Frank Kofsky in Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist, “Lenny was betrayed by his faith in the power of truth and reason as weapons, and his corollary tendency to underestimate the extent of official venality and incompetence.”
In essence, the same can be said for Rome’s most notorious satirists: Petronius and Juvenal, both of whom wrote and declaimed during an age of bad emperors. Petronius (ad 26–66) was a nobleman “learned in luxury” and a favourite of the emperor Nero, who gave him the title “the Arbiter of Elegance.” Petronius was the author of Satyricon, only a small portion of which survives. The Satyricon follows the exploits of two adventurers making their lascivious way through Roman society. It is a meandering, smutty tale filled with homosexual rape, anal dildos, incest, pederasty, fellatio, heterosexual anal sex, and virtually any other wrinkle one can conjure up. “She mixed the juice of watercress with absinthe,” Satyricon’s hero, Encolpius, recounts, “and after soaking my genitals in it took a bunch of stinging nettles and started gently lashing my whole body from the navel down.”
Petronius, like Bruce, was obsessed by the notion of obscenity and led a life of hedonistic excess. His book is a blow not against sexual dalliance, but against bad taste and hypocrisy, an ironic twist considering his audience—Nero—was a man known for his vulgarity. Ultimately, Petronius fell out of favour and Nero ordered him to commit suicide. Even so, the Arbiter of Elegance did not lose his composure. He ran a bath, slit his wrists, and slowly bled to death. Periodically he stopped up his wounds and did some writing. By the time he was finished, Petronius had composed a volume detailing all of Nero’s bisexual encounters, making special effort to cite the names of each and every partner. He sent a copy to the emperor. “There is nothing more insincere than people’s silly convictions,” he wrote prophetically in the Satyricon, “or more silly than their sham morality.”
Comments