Lenny [1974]

Is a dramatization of the life of Lenny Bruce during the 1950s to his death in 1966, the span of his career as a stand-up comic. That career took on increasingly controversial proportions in several arrests for the use of obscene language (beyond other arrests for illicit drug possession), the police constant fixtures at his shows ready to pounce for the smallest of those language infractions. Some of the politically incorrect language he used was meant to show the hypocrisy in society and his want for society to take back things taboo to where they had evolved. The structure of the film is the dramatization leading out from an unseen interviewer speaking to key people in his life about him after his death, namely his Jewish mother Sally Marr, his longtime agent Artie Silver, but most specifically his wife, Honey Bruce Friedman, who was a stripper when they met. The drama not only shows Lenny's career, his routines often borne out of some aspect of his personal life, but also Lenny and Honey's life together, it which devolved with Lenny's open infidelity and both their illicit drug use.