Last Words

by George Carlin

  and Gayle from the New Christy Minstrels. Jackie eventually married John Davidson. It was a "young" show and the guests included

  Richie Pryor and Flip Wilson, singers like Nancy Sinatra, Noel Harrison (Rex's son), the Everlys, Chad & Jeremy.

  John Davidson himself was bland as hell but easy to please; the

  son of a Baptist minister. Nothing seemed to upset him. One reason

  could've been, as he told me years later, that he'd fucked every girl

  on the show. I was always impressed with that. At the time I would

  never have thought it possible.

  I did my spot and I wrote the chatter. The chatter was easy, because it was always, "Thank you, Gayle, thank you, John." I had

  those two lines and I worked from there. With the exception of the

  white pants, yellow shirts, striped blazers and boaters—that Andy

  Williams touch of Iowa in the summer of 1890—the show was very

  pleasant. It seemed as though this shit would lead somewhere.

  Still, the Jimmy Dean and John Davidson shows, my first extended network exposure, were also the first taste I got of all the

  blocking and sitting around empty TV studios for long hours while

  whatever went on went on around you. Which you didn't understand a word of nor wanted to. Occasionally a voice up in the lights

  would tell somebody on the stage, "Do that again." "This time come

  in from the right." "Now stand over there . . ." All this boredom—

  the other driving force of television.

  That didn't mean the fear was gone. However pleasant the people

  were, fear kicked back in with the endless fucking run-throughs.

  These were nerve-racking because you had to succeed for everyone

  present, the cast, the guests, the execs, the staff. Then you had to

  succeed again at dress rehearsal for the same people (who'd now

  heard your material at least once) plus the technicians and cameramen. And you still had air ahead. You'd dissipated your edge and

  energy and you hadn't even done yet what you'd come to do. Fear

  and boredom. Boredom and fear.

  There were some private compensations. Kraft Summer Music

  Hall was where A1 Pouch, the Hippy-Dippy Mailman, made his

  debut until he became A1 Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman.

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  INSIDE EVERY SILVER LINING THERE'S A DARK CLOUD

  What was great about having A1 on this harmless, pleasant, whitebread show was that to my way of thinking—after all, I was Al—A1

  was a pothead. Like me, he was permanently stoned. That's where

  his misperceptions came from. Sure, he was a bit ignorant too. But

  he was fueled by cannabis.

  I don't know where the John Davidson staff and the great

  middle-American viewing audience thought Al's weirdness came

  from, whether he sipped a little wine or whether they just thought

  Al was dumb as a brick, an early version of Forrest Gump.

  But I knew Al's jokes were written from a pot mentality. By someone who smoked pot all day, every day. That felt wonderfully subversive. I ' v e never been a full-blown radical. I wasn't cut out to man

  the barricades. But any time the subversive part of me is satisfied,

  it delights me. Thank God I'm nurturing this little animal over

  here.

  'EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, baby, was' happenin'?

  Que paso? Al Sleet your Hippy-Dippy Weatherman here with

  all the hippy-dippy weather, man! First of all the pollen count

  from Long Island Jewish Hospital, onetwothreefourfive haha-

  haha. Present temperature is sixty-eight degrees at the airport,

  which is stupid 'cos I don't know anyone who lives at the airport.

  Downtown it's much hotter. Downtown's ON FIRE, man.

  Now, I imagine some of you were a little surprised at the weather

  over the weekend. Especially if you watched my show on Friday.

  I'd like to personally apologize to the former residents of Rogers,

  Illinois. Caught them cats nappin', man! . . .

  Now we take a look at the radar. Hey, the radar's pickin' up Mitch

  Miller! Sing along with Mitch, man! (sings) Baby . . . Gimme

  your answer do, I'm half crazy, all.. . Where was I, man . . . ?

  Oh yeah, the radar's picking up a line of thundershowers extend-

  ing from a point nine miles north-northeast of Secaucus, New

  Jersey, to a line six miles on either side of a line somewhere south-

  southwest of Fond du Lac. However the radar is also picking up

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  a squadron of incoming Russian ICBMs so I wouldn't sweat the

  thundershowers!

  Tonight's forecast: DARK! Continued mostly dark tonight turn-

  ing to widely scattered LIGHT in the morning, man!

  That's it from Al Sleet. Don't forget, folks: inside every silver lin-

  ing there's a DARK CLOUD!

  As I did more and more television— The Hollywood Palace, The

  Tonight Show, Perry Como, Jimmie Rodgers, Roger Miller, more

  Douglases, other variety crap I've mercifully forgotten—I began to

  realize that there was a price you paid for the chance to do your

  stuff. You had to make believe you really cared about and belonged to the larger community of show business. That you were

  really interested in their small talk and shared whatever their values

  were.

  The two-track life was there all the time. I clung to the respectability and mainstreamness, yet I had no respect for the things stars

  did and talked about and seemed to glorify and find glory in. I'd

  watch other people do the show after I had: the same junk talk, the

  same empty chatter, all this stupid fawning and caring that wasn't

  really there.

  But then along came the main chance. What all this dumb shit

  was leading to, my ultimate goal, the Holy Grail. Stage Three: my

  first shot at real acting!

  I decided to start modestly with a small role in That Girl. No need

  to overreach. Take it nice and easy. I was cast as Mario's agent. I

  knew I could do well at this. I was a natural onstage. Acting was just

  the next step in other kinds of performance I had mastered. Doing a

  character voice was an extension of what I did in my act. You memorize your lines and speak them, moving when needed. In the end it

  was all television. Piece of cake.

  There were a few other considerations, like real direction. (Variety TV directors direct cameras and not much else.) On the set,

  Mario's producers, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, successful TV writ1 2 4

  INSIDE EVERY SILVER LINING THERE'S A DARK CLOUD

  ers who were moving fast up the food chain and knew what they

  wanted, gave me some direction:

  "Okay, remember now, you'd like to handle this account. You've

  had trouble with this type of person in the past, so you're a little

  leery, but at the same time you have to pay the bills and your wife

  has just left you. The phone upstairs is ringing but you're not going

  to answer that because you know the maid is going to get it. And

  there's a fire in the basement. By the way, you're originally Romanian, so you have an Eastern European attitude to everything . . ."

  You absorb that and walk through it and now there's blocking:

  "Okay. Try to come down and cut a little to the left, then come all

  the way down, cheat a bit toward the light, but stay out of her light

  and this time get closer to the window. Okay? Let's do it again."

  And . .
. action!

  I try to remember the words, while putting something behind

  the words that smacks of authenticity—motivation, character, something, and also while following the direction and blocking, wondering if I should use one of my own characters, although then I'll

  be putting alien words into my guy's mouth and bang goes all his

  naturalness, because they're someone else's words which I have to

  somehow interpret. . .

  In short: Acting.

  And I was NOT ABLE to do that! I was absolutely at sea, completely lost. Whatever competence I might have had going in had

  vanished. I floundered. I fluffed lines. I tried to do everything I'd

  been told at the same time. I was failing! And failing feeds on itself.

  There's a constant diminution of confidence. On top of failing, your

  brain is whirring: "They hired me! They are thinking about that

  RIGHT NOW! About the three more days they have to go through!

  They must be very dissatisfied! I SUCK! I will CONTINUE TO

  SUCK! And it WILL BE ON NETWORK TELEVISION!"

  I'd lobbied my manager hard for auditions and they came in

  thick and fast.

  There was a screen test for a series called Manly and the Mob.

  Anthony Caruso, who'd played a million mobsters, whose face you

  would know in a minute, was the Mob. Great casting. I was Manly,

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  the inept private detective—an American Clouseau. Easy enough

  comic character to play. Not that complex a task. This was my series

  to have or not have. This was my pilot. My ticket to stardom.

  I couldn't do that either! Or any of the others. They were all absolute, total failures, every one a humiliation. That Girl hadn't just

  been first-time-out nerves. I was devastatingly inept! There were no

  Oscars in sight. No Hollywood helpless with laughter at my feet.

  Danny Kaye the Second? Jack Lemmon the Second? Forget it. It

  was all beyond my reach.

  I felt like I'd lost both legs in a car crash. My dream, this thing

  I'd wanted since I was a little kid sitting transfixed in a funky, dark

  movie house on the edge of Harlem, this future I believed was my

  birthright, had dissolved into thin air like the morning mist.

  Meanwhile Stage rlwo, which was to have been phased out, having

  served its purpose, the booster rocket designed to fall back to earth

  as I shot to movie stardom, continued to barrel upward, getting bigger and stronger all the time. To the outside world I was a comic on

  the fast track, hitting all the professional heights. But inside I was

  full of fear and confusion. I was beginning to feel the discontent that

  became intolerable later on.

  Objectively 1967 was full of success. In February my first album,

  Take-Offs and Put-Ons, came out and went gold. It was nominated

  for a Grammy and lost by a squeaker to Bill Cosby, a very worthy

  opponent. I was playing the biggest nightclubs in the country. I was

  starting to play Vegas. That summer, I did another replacement series called A w a y We Go, fourteen episodes, this time in the Jackie

  Gleason Show slot. (Hence the title, "Away we go!" being one of

  Gleason's catchphrases. "To the moon, Alice!" didn't seem to work

  so well.) But this summer I was a star of the show. Along with Buddy

  Rich and Buddy Greco.

  My schizophrenia was beginning to show. I would come to the

  studio every day with a single strand of Indian beads and a different button. One day the button said, "The Marine Corps Builds

  Oswalds," and Buddy Greco took great exception to that. (He later

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  became a very different person, completely relaxed with the human

  race, but he used to be a very difficult, very conservative guy.)

  The kind of stuff I did on Away We Go was singing a trio with my

  two Buddies of "It Was a Very Good Year." It was creaky sketches

  with creaky premises, it was trivial numbers in bunny suits. It began

  boring in on me how untrue I was being to myself. These dreary

  variety shows with uninteresting people who were just walking

  through their lives. Doing bland, middle-American showbiz-asusual material. The more that feeling piled up, the more my acting

  failures weighed on my mind, the more I was becoming aware that

  something was seriously wrong. That I was in the wrong place with

  the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

  Then there was The Ed Sullivan Show. The horrible, horrible Sul-

  livan Show, torture chamber of comedians. I'd resisted doing it for

  a long time, but the offers kept improving and they agreed not to

  hack up my material, like they did with every other comic, however

  big. So in '67 I finally went on Sullivan. On what I thought were my

  terms.

  The Ed Sullivan Show's worst weapon of torture was that it was

  live. There were no second takes on Sullivan. If you fucked up, all

  America saw it. If Mr. Pastry dropped his plates or Jackie Mason

  gave Ed the finger there were no do-overs, no cutaways, no edits. No

  apologies were accepted.

  There was additional pressure: the studio audience knew the

  show was live too. They knew there was a chance they might be on

  television, sitting in front of the picture of Joe Louis or Jimmy Cagney or some other celebrity Ed wrote about in his stupid column.

  Half the audience had special invitations. It was a perk. If you were a

  Lincoln Mercury dealer on Long Island you got ten tickets and you

  brought people you wanted to impress. Everybody had their best

  things on. The audience was on display as much as you were.

  When an audience is potentially on display, they're very inhibited. They're reluctant to let go. So laughter, which is a natural,

  spontaneous thing, must be avoided. They think: "I'll wait and

  make sure that if I laugh, it's something everyone's laughing at. That

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  LAST WORDS

  I'm right in with the crowd. Because if I start roaring, 'Hahahaohhhahaaahaaaa-God-oh-fuck-that's-funny,' and no one else does,

  I'll embarrass the shit out of myself." Not good for comedy.

  The final turn of the screw: Sullivan himself. During your set,

  Ed would stand onstage over to stage right. Out of camera range

  but onstage. So the entire audience never watched the comic. They

  were watching Sullivan to see if he would laugh. And he never did.

  Add all this up and you have the graveyard of laughter. Playing

  comedy to the Sullivan audience was agony. You'd get more laughs

  in a mausoleum.

  I've always been an ordered and left-brained person about performance, worried to the point of obsession that every detail has

  been taken care of, is precisely in place. But I don't get nervous. On

  Sullivan I was always incredibly nervous. At first I thought it was

  the unpredictability, the lack of control, but I soon figured out it

  was because the show cultivated, it seemed almost deliberately, that

  driving force of network television—fear.

  I'd stay at the Americana Hotel (now the Sheraton) on Seventh

  at 52nd. I'd take that walk—the Last Mile—across to Broadway and

  up to the stage door on 53rd Street. There was a deli right at the

  stage door; I'd get my two cans of Rheingold, because I knew I could

&
nbsp; handle two cans. It wouldn't show and it might help a little. But the

  nervousness never went away.

  These days Letterman is taped in the same place, the Ed Sullivan

  Theater. Once in a while when I'm in New York I purposely walk

  the Last Mile across those same streets and up to that stage door on

  53rd. Forty years later I still reexperience all the fear and vomiting

  nervousness.

  It got even worse. Sullivan was on Sunday nights at eight. Because the dress rehearsal began around one to two p.m., you had to

  be there fairly early in the morning, right around the time normal

  people were in church. That was the choice: church or Sullivan. So

  you had ten to twelve hours to sit around getting absolutely fucking

  terrified before you went on live in front of 50 million belching, farting, comatose Americans who'd just eaten a big Sunday dinner. The

  boredom part of fear and boredom.

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  There was one tiny ray of sunlight. Ed found out that I was an

  Irish Catholic from New York. It didn't help with any of the physical

  horrors of the show, but it did mean I got preferential treatment when

  it came to having my material butchered, or simply being cut from

  the show after dress, both of which could happen even to the biggest

  names in comedy. The Sullivan people told my manager—whether

  it was true or not who knows—that I was Ed's favorite comic.

  On one show he called me over after my set to where he stood,

  stage right. This was supposed to be a big honor. We had some inane

  exchange and then he said out of the blue, "You're a Catholic!" and

  then gestured to the audience with that weird insect thing he did

  with his arms: "Give him a big hand! He's a Catholic!"

  Ed was partial to this form of intro. He once introduced my friend

  the Hispanic singer José Feliciano (another of the Au Go Go gang)

  as follows: "Want you to give the next act, José Feliciano, a big hand!

  He's blind—and he's Puerto Rican!"

  But the real milestone of my Sullivan career was the show where

  I followed the skating chimpanzees. There's something I can say for