He would have turned 80 this month. And in our time of ill-lived religious fanatics and retrograde policy planners, we feel his loss all the more.
Lenny Bruce, brilliant U.S. satirist and comedian, pointed his whip and lashed out at America's hypocrites, whether high-toned charlatans of the church or "some of my best friends are Negro" liberals.
His heyday was the decade between 1955 and 1965, when several leading stand-up comics turned philosophical and radical. But even his contemporaries such as Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart and the comic duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, were much more in a mold that would give shape to the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen: gentle lampooners of the middle class and its newfound suburban neuroses.