DIRTY TOILET
(Lenny Bruce, San Francisco, 1961).
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.