Jimmy Kimmel & the Decline of the American Comedian

“Jackie hauled ass to save her ass.” Lenny Bruce’s explanation of why Jackie Kennedy crawled onto the back of the limousine after her husband had been shot and reached her hand out to a Secret Service agent is, you might say, the locus classicus of that vein of comedy – the dominant strain now – that seeks not to cause hilarity but to startle by stating the naked “truth”. It’s not clear when Bruce said it, but it was not too long after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Bruce later explained that he wanted to puncture the “bullshit” idealisation of Jackie risking her life to get help. Come on, he said, any woman with children would try to save her life for the sake of her kids, not risk it for the sake of her husband, who clearly had been killed. He never explained why puncturing the heroic interpretation of Jackie getting onto the trunk of the limousine was so morally urgent. The callous remark cost him a significant amount of public support. He died, bankrupt and alone in his Hollywood Hills bathroom, of a morphine overdose a couple of years later.