Seattle U. professor helped comic Lenny Bruce get the last laugh

If the heavenly authorities take any cues from their earthly counterparts — please no! — then the late comedian Lenny Bruce is in a funnier place, following his posthumous pardon Tuesday from New York Gov. George Pataki.

For that, Bruce in part can thank Seattle University School of Law professor David Skover, who spent five years researching and writing about Bruce's obscenity crimes and then led a six-month national petition drive to get him pardoned for his 1964 conviction.

"I didn't really know Lenny Bruce. I was too young. But in many respects he seems like my alter-ego," deadpanned Skover, 52, who used no profanities, satirized no institutions, made no jokes and hardly laughed during a phone interview.

Skover is quite serious about Bruce, whom he considers a comedy pioneer for his irreverence toward once-sacred subjects, as well as a "First Amendment martyr" for the harassment he received at the hands of the authorities.

Bruce was arrested nine times, tried six times and convicted twice (one conviction was overturned, and he has been pardoned on the other) for his nightclub bits on the pope, Eleanor Roosevelt, bigotry and official hypocrisy — sprinkled with the occasional profanity.

"Lenny Bruce paid the dues, and no one has been arrested since him; (performers) are free because of him," said Skover, co-author of "The Trials of Lenny Bruce" (Sourcebooks).

In other words, when the satirical newspaper The Onion writes that "Jesus is 'really dreading' this birthday," or when Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" or a staff writer for The Stranger uses the now-ubiquitous vulgarity for a little emphasis, thank Lenny Bruce.

A friend from the American Civil Liberties Union suggested Skover, a constitutional law scholar, look at the Bruce case, which lay like a festering and unfunny wound in the side of First Amendment advocates. Many thought the ongoing trials hastened Bruce's comedic demise and eventual death from a heroin overdose in 1966 at the age of 40.

Skover and co-author Ronald Collins discovered that Johnnie Cochrane, who later headed O.J. Simpson's defense team, was one of his prosecutors and eventual Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall one of his judges.

Skover said that "Lenny Bruce was prosecuted because of his message, not because of his words. He had an undoubted political right to expression, but obscenity gave the prosecutors a method."

Bruce was arrested after reportedly using 100 obscene words during an act at Cafe Au Go Go, a Greenwich Village nightclub that was staked out by an army of plain-clothes police.

The authorities apparently didn't laugh (if they did, it was muffled) at bits that impaled religion, sexual mores and even Jackie Kennedy just after the death of President Kennedy.

Called by civil libertarian Nat Hentoff "the embodiment of the First Amendment" for happily offending the authorities, his comedy viewed no subject as untouchable.

No matter how offensive to the public's early-'60s sensibilities, those routines were constitutionally protected speech, Skover concluded.

Following the trials, prosecutors across America "realized that the Lenny Bruce charge was impossible. The injustice of his prosecution ... shut the door on that type of prosecution," Skover said.

That wasn't enough, though, for Collins and Skover, who discovered that Bruce's conviction had never been overturned, even though that of a nightclub owner convicted along with him had been overturned by a higher New York court.

Skover and Collins enlisted Robert Corn-Revere to be a pro-bono First Amendment attorney to represent Bruce in the petition drive. Celebrities, including Robin Williams and the Smothers Brothers, implored Pataki to act.

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this story. J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com