The Fall and Rise of Forbidden Language

Bob Fosse’s Film about Lenny Bruce contains one of Bruce’s routines in which he used the N-word, followed by every other racial/cultural epithet for Jews, Italians, Poles etc. Bruce then argued that if we are willing to use these words we can rob them of their power. Bruce got jailed for this attitude in the 50s. This made him a secular saint in 60s, when many of us believed that true freedom was achieved only by saying the unspeakable, and showing the unshowable. George Carlin and Richard Pryor were considered to have an equal right to use the N-word. John Lennon wrote a song with the…