Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce treated the stage as a place to say what he really thought about religion, race, sex and hypocrisy, in the words people really used, and he paid for it. Arrested repeatedly for obscenity, he was convicted in New York in 1964 after undercover police attended his shows at the Cafe Au Go Go. Governor George Pataki pardoned him in December 2003, the first posthumous pardon in the state's history. Every comic who has argued about free speech on stage is quoting his case. Recommended recording: The Carnegie Hall Concert, taped at a midnight show on 4 February 1961 during a blizzard, and issued complete in 1972. It catches him loose and brilliant before the trials consumed him, and streams on Apple Music.