One of the things on which we reflected over the weekend is why Howard Stern, whose off-color satirical radio program has been derailed by government action, has failed to generate the kind of support that was earned 40 years ago by Lenny Bruce, whose off-color satirical nightclub performances got him brought up on criminal charges. The arrest of Bruce by the New York Police Department was met with a petition by some of the most distinguished figures of the day.

They included the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr; the chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Arnold Beichman; future Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow; editor Norman Podhoretz; literary critic Alfred Kazin, and columnist Nat Hentoff, to name but a few of the stars of the era who reckoned that the action against Bruce amounted to a violation of civil liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteen amendments to the Constitution. Mr. Stern has had his defenders in the controversy over his broadcasts, but nothing like that which was mounted in respect of Lenny Bruce.

It may be that the nightclubs that were the venue in which Bruce committed his crimes were more intimate than the broadcast medium in which Mr. Stern operates. Few, if any, are apt to be accidentally exposed to a comic routine in a nightclub. And nightclubs don’t exist under a government license comparable to that granted broadcasters. Or it may be simply that the consequences were so different. In Mr. Stern’s case, a privately owned radio network has decided it doesn’t want to do business with him. In the case of Lenny Bruce, the government charged him criminally and sentenced him to time in a workhouse.

As time passed, the sentence seemed wrong even to a Republican like Governor Pataki, who pardoned Bruce posthumously last year. Yet in the case of Mr. Stern, the consensus seems to be bipartisan that, so long as the public owns the airwaves, it will have a right to decide what can be said over them. One of the commissioners who supported the fines the FCC levied last week, Jonathan Adelstein, worked for seven years as an aide to Senator Daschle, the minority leader, another for Senator Hollings, another Democrat. For our part, we have never had much of a Comstockian instinct, and we hope Mr. Stern finds some place to ply his trade and hawk his humor. But we have a hard time seeing in what Mr. Stern does the same kind of manic courage that Bruce exhibited.

Mr. Stern has been able to become a millionaire many times. A bankrupt Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose while the desperate appeals were under way to keep him out of jail. He never was cleared by a court. But it is he who fought the battles that enabled other off-color humorists to prosper.