Humor & Life Quote by Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce lands this line like a switchblade: it’s a joke about “anonymous donors” that refuses the antiseptic comfort of the phrase. In the early 1960s, “donor” language was starting to sound modern, clinical, even benevolent - the kind of euphemism that lets polite society talk about sex, responsibility, and consequences without actually naming any of it. Bruce’s move is to smash the euphemism with a scenario nobody can keep abstract: an unwanted pregnancy in your own family.

The intent is twofold. First, it ridicules the moral theater around anonymity. People love the idea of giving without being seen because it suggests purity, altruism, a clean conscience. Bruce points out that anonymity usually isn’t noble; it’s often the absence of accountability. The “guy who knocks up your daughter” isn’t a saintly benefactor, he’s someone disappearing from the wreckage. Calling him a “donor” is the punchline precisely because it’s the wrong genre of word for the situation.

Second, it forces a class-and-power subtext: anonymity tends to protect the person with more freedom to vanish. The family left to deal with pregnancy, reputation, and economic fallout doesn’t get to be anonymous. That’s Bruce’s core weapon: taking a respectable term and showing the ugly social arrangement it helps launder.

Context matters. Bruce was being arrested for obscenity while building a comedy that treated America’s polite vocabulary as the real obscenity - a system of words designed to keep everyone comfortable except the people paying the price.