DIRTY TOILET (Lenny Bruce, San Francisco, 1961)

October 4, 1961

las bastardillas son mías

Oh, I like you, and if sometimes I take poetic license with you and you are
offended...now this is just with semantics, dirty words.  Believe me, I'm not
profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me,
because I do not have an original thought.  I am screwed.  I speak English.
That's it.  I was not born in a vacuum.  Every thought I have belongs to
somebody else.  Then I must just take, ding ding ding, somewhere.
So I am not placating you by making the following statement.  I want to help
you if you have a dirty word problem.  There are none, and I'll spell it out
logically to you.

Here is a toilet. Specifically - that's all we're concerned with, specifics
- if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet.
That's what we're talking about, a toilet.  If we take this toilet and boil
it, and it is clean clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet
joke about this toilet.  I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner
Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now.

Obscenity is a human manifestation.  This toilet has no central nervous
system, no level of consciousness.  It is not aware - it is a dumb toilet -
it cannot be obscene - it's impossible.  if it could be obscene, it could be
cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet.
It can do none of these things.  This is a dopey toilet, Jim.

So nobody can ever offend you by telling you a dirty toilet story.  They can
offend you from the area that it's trite - you have heard it many, many
times.  Now all of us have had a bad early toilet training - that's why we
are hung up with it.  All of us at the same time got two zingers - one for
the police department and one for the toilet.  "All right he made a kahkah,
call a policeman.  All right, OK.   Are you going to do that anymore?
OK, tell the policeman he doesn't have to come up now."

All right, now we all got the "Policeman, policeman, policeman," and we had
a few psychotic parents who took it and rubbed it in our face, and those
people for the most, if you search it out, are censors.  Oh, true, they hate
toilets with a passion, man.  Do you realize if you got that ranked around
with a toilet, you'll hate it, and anyone who refers to it?  It is dirty
and uncomfortable to you.

Now if the bedroom is dirty to you, then you are a true atheist, because if
you have any of the mores, the superstitions, if anyone in this audience
believes that God made his body, and your body is dirty, the fault lies
with the manufacturer.  It's that cold, Jim, yeah.

You can do anything with the body that God made, and then you want to get
definitive and tell me of the parts He made, I don't see that anywhere in
any reference to any Bible.  Yeah, He made it all.  It's all clean, or all
dirty.

But the ambivalence comes from the religious leaders, who are celibates.
The religious leaders are "what should be."  They say they do not involve
themselves with the physical.  If we are good, we will be like our rabbi,
our nun, our priests, and absolve, and finally put down the carnal
and stop the race.

Now, dig, this is strange here.  Everybody today in the hotel was bugged with
Knight and Nixon.  Let me tell you the truth.  The truth is "what is."
If "what is" - you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the
truth.  A lie will be: People need no sleep at all.  Truth is "what is."
If every politician from the beginning is crooked, there is no crooked.
But if you are concerned with a lie, "what should be" - and "what should
be" is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people
long ago: This is what should be - and no one ever saw what should be,
that you don't need any sleep and you can go seven years without sleep,
so all the people were made to measure up to that dirty lie.
No, there's no crooked politicians.  There is never a lie because
there is never a truth.

[h/t]