• DOI:10.1353/AJH.2015.0023
• Corpus ID: 162195868

The Anti-Gospel of Lenny, Larry and Sarah: Jewish Humor and the Desecration of Christendom

@article{Tanny2015TheAO,
  title={The Anti-Gospel of Lenny, Larry and Sarah: Jewish Humor and the Desecration of Christendom},
  author={Jarrod Tanny},
  journal={American Jewish History},
  year={2015},
  volume={99},
  pages={167 - 193}
}

• J. Tanny
• Published 1 April 2015
• History
• American Jewish History

The legendary Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce is often credited with transforming american entertainment in the early 1960s. His yiddishinflected, iconoclastic standup routines shredded the veil of silence that had kept racism, sexuality, drugs, religion and other taboo topics out of the spotlight. although Bruce was hardly the first comic to draw from the well of Yiddishkeit, none of his predecessors had been so brazen, so vulgar or so unapologetically Jewish in a public sphere that had become more tolerant since World War II, but that still reflected its white Christian heritage. For Bruce, it was an opportunity to provoke discomfort through the exploitation of theology and the ghosts of antisemitism, to flaunt his own Jewish heritage as a Christian heresy, to boast of his personal guilt for a 2,000-year-old crime for which, he quipped, there should rightfully be a statute of limitations. as if on behalf of the Jewish people, Lenny Bruce claimed responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus: “yes, we did it. I did it. ... [and] not only did we kill him, but we’re gonna kill him again when he comes back.”1 It was an unprecedented act, for he asserted responsibility in public, with more than a touch of irreverent pride, for the very act that had marked the Jew as a criminal, a blasphemer and a demon throughout the Middle ages and well into the modern era. Bruce’s rebellious shtick of the early 1960s proved to be a trendsetter, and it set the stage, in the ensuing years, for the numerous Jewish comics, writers and film producers who would mine Christian theology and misappropriate its symbols in order to entertain through derision. Lenny Bruce was a Jewish revolutionary because he expressed his frivolous blasphemy in public, not because it was created on a tabula rasa. The ridicule of Christianity and Jesus has a long genealogy in Jewish discourse, going back to the talmudic era, and, despite the changing historical context, blasphemous tropes from bygone centuries resemble those of today. Blasphemy in a time of Christian theocracy was a deadly serious matter, and the beleaguered Jews of ashkenaz endured severe