Lenny Bruce's last series

Lenny Bruce is mentioned on the cover of "Freak Out!" (1966) under the heading "These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them".

Lenny Bruce's concluding performance

Leonard Alfred Schneider (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), better known as Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic and satirist. He came into the Navy for military service in 1942, and was honorably discharged after dressing in women˝s clothing. This would eventually be the inspiration for the character of Klinger, in the tv series M*A*S*H.

He started to be legendary for his profanity-laced monologues and for his subsequents arrests on obscenity charges, which ruined his career and led to substance abuse and an eventual fatal overdose. In his career Lenny was arrested eight times on obscenity charges, the first time in 1961 at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, for using the term cocksucker. In November 1964, he was arrested at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York City, where police believed he used more than one hundred profanity words in one show. He was charged with giving an obscene performance, and convicted after a six month trial.

His multiple arrests would lead to bankruptcy, club owners refused to book him,, fearing that they would be closed by police. His concluding performance would be at the Fillmore in San Francisco, on June 26, 1966, on the same bill as Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Zappa was a real Lenny Bruce fan, and Lenny Bruce was a jazz enthusiast and was never connected with rock and roll in any way,Lenny simply went to the show, watched the show and then said to Zappa quite simply: 'You know, I really don’t understand this. This is really beyond me. I don’t get it. It’s great, but I don’t get it.’"

He is also pointed out in "The Real Frank Zappa Book" (1989).

"I had seen Lenny Bruce a number of times at Canter's Deli, where he used to sit in a front booth with Phil Spector and eat knockwurst. I didn't really talk with him until we opened for him at the Fillmore West in 1966. I met him in the lobby between sets and asked him to sign my draft card. He said no – he didn't want to touch it. At that time, Lenny lived with a guy named John Judnich. ... Compared to Jerry and Bill, Lenny Bruce was quite normal. At that time, according to Judnich, Lenny used to stay up all night dressed in a doctor's outfit, listening to Sousa marches and working on his legal briefs.

Lenny Bruce quotes:

• Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kyke. And there's another kyke— that's two kykes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kykes here, do I hear five kykes? I got five kykes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kykes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.

• A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord... there should be a statute of limitations for that crime.

• The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

• I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce.

• “If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.”

• “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

• “People are leaving the church and going back to God.”