| Phil Spector, Bruce’s friend, said
that he "died from an overdose of police."
As sure as Lenny was persecuted, smacked around a relevant, often
funny attack on societal power structures, which his material
was symbiotically enmeshed with, under the pretense of lewd language,
he was a worldclass 
dope fiend and a heavyweight poly-substance abuser, even if the
autopsy report was "inconclusive" and the press jumped the gun
in reporting his death as an overdose.
Heroin is the strongest painkiller known to humankind. Lenny
Bruce, who influenced not only countless comedians, but also the
linguistics of the global mass media: hot and cold, was a man
of sorrows, who was persecuted for transmuting that sorrow, which
was universal,into a hidden mirth that was suddenly accessible
to the masses. There may not be a motion picture made today that
didn’t use honest language and vernacular that we use daily if
it was not for Lenny Bruce, but he was persecuted by the legal
system and other institutions, and heroin eased these tortures.
This comedian was not funny to the establishment long before he
wasn’t funny to anyone else, reading his court transcripts on
stage, because he was subversive or counter-cultural. He posed
a revolutionary threat to the political, social, and religious
institutions powers, and they tortured him, killing his sense
of humor, which stole of his audience, which were his true cause
of death.
Lenny Bruce, as a satirist, was as sardonic and important as Juvenal
who once asked, "Who will guard the guardians?" I think, their
shadows will guard them, and it was these shadows, as black as
Turkish tar, that took out Lenny Bruce on August3, 1966, leaving
him naked and dead like Marilyn Monroe for newspaper photographers.
Nelson Gary
Contributing Editor, Freelance writer
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