Striking Back At The Empire

Juvenal, in contrast, lived a Spartan existence of broiling anger. Little is known of his life but most agree he was born some time around ad 60. The son of a rich freedman, he saw his society as a diseased mockery of the glory it had once displayed. He created sixteen blistering satires assailing everything from the city of Rome to women to homosexuals to patrons and judges. He wrote during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian when, though there was limited free speech, open attacks against the powerful were dangerous. “We live in the Ninth Age,” he wrote in Book Five of his Satires, “an era more evil than that of iron. Nature herself has found no name for its wickedness, no metal base enough to distinguish it.”

The rise of personal invective during the first bloom of a new empire is visible throughout Western history. Each time there comes a period in which individual malcontents feel compelled to express their criticisms with humour, satirists adopt the most efficient means of disseminating their message. In Rome, it was the art of declamation. In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the printing press used by satirists such as John Dryden and Jonathan Swift, who published cutting parodies of their era’s foibles, like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. For Bruce, it was the microphone and the record album.

It is fair to say that America’s ascent to empire was complete by the end of the Second World War. And, like all successful empires, it had an adversary with which to justify its expansion: communism. In 1945, Leonard Alfred Schneider left the US Navy and by 1947 had changed his name to Lenny Bruce. By 1957, he had become what then Tonight Show host Steve Allen called “the most shocking comedian of our time.”

Bruce inevitably was intrigued by the moral implications of words and their mainstream connotations. He said that if anyone “believes that God made the body, and the body is dirty, the fault lies with the manufacturer.” He was famous for his riff on the expression “to come.” “If anyone in this room,” he would tell the audience, “or the world, finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual—the words ‘to come’ really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I’m rank for saying it to you, you the beholder gets ranked from listening to it, you probably can’t come.”

Bruce drew the ire of the Catholic Church, which he regularly attacked, as well as the government and pretty much every other establishment organization. It became fashionable for local forces to charge him with obscenity. Club owners became afraid to book him—all because he spoke openly about the realities he saw in America. “My humour is based on destruction and despair,” he wrote in his book, The Essential Lenny Bruce. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”

Bruce’s death was ruled a drug overdose, but the genie had been released, and those who followed him were even more “obscene” and confrontational. By the mid-1970s, it became fashionable in the US to refer to the “imperial presidency.” The theory, one established in the 1970s by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his book The Imperial Presidency, was that the powers of the office threatened the constitutional system. The Watergate scandal then helped set the stage for Richard Pryor and George Carlin, two stand-ups who both had problems with drugs. Pryor had an acute sense of comic timing. His albums, such as That Nigger’s Crazy, revolutionized popular culture. About drugs, he said, “They call it an epidemic because white people are doin’ it.” On meeting President Ronald Reagan he said, “The motherfucker looked at me like I owed him money.” Rap, hip hop—none of it would have been possible without him. Carlin, meanwhile, took a broad approach to the notion of what is, or is not, obscene. His “The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” remains a classic. Religion was another Carlin favourite. “Eating meat on Friday? Man, imagine—are there people in purgatory still doing time for a meat rap?”

In the 1990s, Bill Hicks became the standard-bearer for agitating comedy. Born in Texas, Hicks was the only one of a few comedians doing material that questioned the validity of the first Gulf War. “I guess the most amazing thing about the war is the disparity in the number of casualties, Iraq: 150,000. usa: 79. Does that mean if we’d sent over eighty guys we still would have won that fucking thing? People say: ‘Yeah Bill, but Iraq had the fourth-largest army in the world.’ Yeah, well, after the first three, there’s a real big fucking drop-off; the Hare Krishnas are the fifth-largest army in the world.” Hicks was frequently censored and bumped from American network television. He eventually found acceptance in Britain, but died in 1994 at thirty-two of pancreatic cancer. He had finally signed a deal to do an American television series.

Lenny Bruce, Petronius, Bill Hicks, Juvenal. The truth doesn’t pay very well and the hours are horrible, yet there are always a few willing to voice their outrage against the empire through comedy. At least, as long as the memory of better days gone by still holds. It may be a higher calling, or it may just be a matter of matching skills to job description. “What am I to do in Rome?” Juvenal asked. “I don’t know how to lie.”