Last Words

by George Carlin

bursting out of me, full-blown:

  I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I'm an American. You know—

  you GROW. I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in

  New York. A parish school. Corpus Christi was the name, but

  it could have been any Catholic Church: Our Lady of Great

  Agony. St. Rita Moreno. Our Lady of Perpetual Motion. The

  school wasn't one of those prison schools with a lot of corpo-

  ral punishment—Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler:

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  WHEESH! "AAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHH!! My HAND!!"

  You'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right?

  "He's behind in penmanship, Mrs. Carlin. I don't know why."

  He's CRIPPLED-THAT'S WHY! He's trying to learn to write

  with his LEFT HAND!

  We didn't have that. The pastor was into John Dewey and he'd

  talked the diocese into experimenting with progressive educa-

  tion. And whipping the religion on us anyway and seeing what

  would happen. There was a lot of classroom freedom. No grades,

  no uniforms, no sexual segregation . . . In fact, there was so

  much freedom that by eighth grade many of us had lost the faith!

  They made questioners out of us. And they really didn't have any

  answers for us: they'd fall back on, "Well, it's a MYSTERY. . ."

  "A mystery? Oh. Thank you, Fadder!"

  I used to imitate the priests, which was right on the verge of blas-

  phemy. I did Father Byrne the best. He did the children's Mass

  and told parables about Dusty and Buddy. Dusty was a Catho-

  lic. And Buddy—WAS NOT. And Buddy was always trying to

  talk Dusty into having a hotdog on Friday.

  I could do Father Byrne so well that I wanted to do him in con-

  fession. Get into Father Byrne's confessional one Saturday and

  hear a few confessions. Because I knew, according to my faith,

  that if anyone really thought I was Father Byrne and really

  wanted to be forgiven-and PERFORMED THE PENANCE

  I had assigned—they would've been FORGIVEN, man! That's

  what they taught us—it's your intention that counts. What you

  want to do. Mortal sin had to be a grievous o f f e n s e , sufficient

  reflection and full consent of the will. YA HADDA WANNA!

  In fact, WANNA was a sin all by itself! Thou shalt not WANNA!

  It was a sin for you to WANNA feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you

  to PLAN to feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to FIGURE OUT

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  A PLACE to feel up Ellen. It was a sin to TAKE Ellen to the

  place to feel her up. It was a sin to try to feel her up and it was a

  sin to feel her up! There were SIX SINS in one FEEL! . . .

  (With an Irish priest at confession) . . . First of all, he recognized

  your voice, because youd grown up there. He knew everyone.

  "What'd you do that for, George?" "Oh God! He KNOWS!"

  And the Irish priests were always heavily into penance and pun-

  ishment. They'd give you a couple of novenas, nine First Fridays,

  five First Saturdays, the Stations of the Cross, a trip to Lourdes.

  That was one of things that bothered me about my religion. That

  conflict between pain and pleasure. They were always PUSH-

  ING for pain. You were always PULLING for PLEASURE!

  There were other things that bothered me. My church would keep

  changing rules. "That law is eternal—except for THIS WEEK-

  END!" Special dispensation! Eating meat on a Friday is defi-

  nitely a SIN—except for the people in Philadelphia—THEY

  WERE NUMBER ONE IN THE SCRAP IRON DRIVE!

  I've been gone a long time now. It's not even a sin anymore to eat

  meat on Friday. But I'll bet you there are still some guys in hell

  doing time on a MEAT RAP!

  Once a week Father Russell would come for Heavy Mystery

  Time. And you'd save all your weird questions for Father Russell.

  You'd take a whole week thinking up trick questions. "Ey, Fad-

  der: If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock so big he himself

  can't l i f t it? AHAHAHAHAHA! We GOT 'IM NOW!"

  Or you'd take a simple sin and surround it with the most bizarre

  circumstances to relieve the guilt. Example: you had to perform

  your Easter Duty—receiving communion at Eastertime—once

  between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost Sunday. So you'd ask

  the priest: "Ey, Fadder: Suppose that you didn't make your EAS-

  TER DUTY. And it's PENTECOST SUNDAY. And you're on

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  a SHIP AT SEA. And the chaplain GOES INTO A COMA.

  But you wanted to receive. And then it's MONDAY, TOO

  LATE! But then ...you CROSS THE INTERNATIONAL

  DATE LINE!...

  With Class Clown and Occupation: Foole in 1973 (which was

  really part two of Class Clown), I had a sense of coming alive, of

  experiencing myself fully, of great potential for further exploration.

  Each time I shone light into a new corner I discovered new passageways. What I had been doing before had been limited and closed: a

  cul-de-sac. This new approach had an open end. It stretched off into

  the distance and the future.

  As long as you have observations to make, as long as you can see

  things and let them register against your template, as long as you're

  able to take impressions and compare them with the old ones, you

  will always have material. People have always asked me: "Don't you

  ever think you might run out of ideas? Don't you ever worry about

  not having anything to say anymore?" Occasionally that does flash

  through your mind, because it's a natural human impulse to think

  in terms of beginnings and endings. The truth is, I can't run out of

  ideas—not as long as I keep getting new information and I can keep

  processing it.

  I had skills and gifts that I hadn't suspected. Originally, stand-up

  had been intended only as a means to an end. But now that it had

  become its own end, now that it was starting to be the thing I did,

  all the walls came down. "Jesus, I am good at this. Here I am just

  talking about something and suddenly I've attached two minutes to

  it that's funny in itself." I was taking my life and putting it out to the

  world—me, the artist, the writer, the performer, creating something

  out of nothing or perhaps out of something I already knew without

  knowing that I knew it. Making something greater out of something

  smaller.

  All three of these albums eventually went gold, and FM (5 AM

  won me my first Grammy. They also benefited from being on the

  leading edge of a new boom in comedy albums. Albums had been

  the medium of choice for rock and the counterculture, which both

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  rejected and was rejected by television. It was natural for our new

  humor to use albums too as our medium. That's at the heart of

  "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." Even though

  it's been possible for a while to say some of them sometimes on

  television, it's still one of my favorite pieces, if for no other reason

  than the grief it caused people who deserve to have grief caused to

  them.

  There are four hundred thousand words in the English language

&nbs
p; and there are seven of them you can't say on television. What a

  ratio that is! Three hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred

  and ninety-three . . . to seven! They must really be bad. They'd

  have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large.

  "All of you over here . . . You seven, you bad words."

  That's what they told us, you remember? "That's a bad word."

  What? There are no bad words. Bad thoughts, bad intentions,

  but no bad words.

  You know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television?

  Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Those

  are the Heavy Seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul,

  curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.

  Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

  Tits doesn't even belong on the list. Such a friendly-sounding

  word. Sounds like a nickname, right? "Hey, Tits, c'mere, man!"

  "Hey, Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots." Sounds like a

  snack, doesn't it?

  Yes I know, it IS!

  But I don't mean your sexist snack. I mean new NABISCO

  TITS! The new cheese tits. Corn tits, and pizza tits, and sesame

  tits, onion tits. Tater tits. Yeah. Bet you can't eat just one, right?

  I usually switch o f f . But that word does not belong on the list.

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  Actually, none of the words belong on the list but you can un-

  derstand why some of them are there. I mean, I'm not completely

  insensitive to people's feelings. I can dig why some of those words

  got on the list. Like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are

  heavyweight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides

  the literal translation and the emotional feeling, they're just busy

  words. A lot of syllables to contend with. Those k's are aggressive

  sounds, they jump out at you. Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Cock-

  sucker, Motherfucker. It's like an assault on you.

  Two of the other four-letter Anglo-Saxon words are piss and cunt,

  which go together of course but forget that. A little accidental

  humor I threw in. Piss and cunt. The reason that piss and cunt

  are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said, "Those

  are the two I'm not going to say. I don't mind fuck and shit, but

  P and C are out! P and C are out!" Which led to such stupid

  sentences as: "Okay, you fuckers, I'm going to tinkle now."

  And of course, the word fuck. I don't really—here's some more

  accidental humor—I don't really want to get into that now! Be-

  cause it takes too long. But the word fuck is a very important

  word. It's the beginning of l i f e and yet it's a word we use to hurt

  one another. People much wiser than I have said, "I'd rather

  have my son watch a film with two people making love than two

  people trying to kill one another." And I can agree. It's a great

  sentiment, I wish I knew who said it first. But I'd like to take it a

  step further. I'd like to substitute the word fuck for the word kill

  in all those movie clichés we grew up with:

  "Okay, s h e r i f f , we're going to fuck you now. But we're gonna fuck

  you slow."

  Those are the seven you can never say on television under any

  circumstances, you just cannot say them ever, not even clinically,

  you cannot weave them in on the panel with Doc and Ed and

  Johnny, I mean it's just impossible. Forget those seven, they're

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  out. There are, however, some two-way words. Like prick. It's

  okay to prick your finger. But don't FINGER YOUR PRICK!. . .

  Another part of the excitement of doing albums came from them being distributed by Atlantic Records. I had a corporate push behind

  me and also the music business. Going to their offices was exciting!

  Record offices were full of stickers and posters and shit on the walls.

  The people all dressed the way they wanted to. The women looked

  terrific. As if a bunch of high school kids had said, "Let's play office."

  You felt connected to all the other acts on the label—rock and

  folk superstars. You got the feeling vividly when the person whose

  office you were visiting or doing business in took a phone call and

  mentioned some of these artists in the conversation. "Hey, I'm on

  the same roster as the Rolling Stones!"

  Then there's something everyone with an album does. You go

  into the record store and see about ten of your records displayed. Or

  you look in the comedy rack and see your name on the separators.

  You have your own section! And I did this more than once: if there

  was a bunch of comedy albums not organized, I would take mine

  out and put them in the front. Absolutely!

  So suddenly there was money. The college dates I'd wanted began to come in, not huge yet, $3,000 or $4,000 a pop, but some of

  them the kind where you got a guarantee versus a percentage of the

  gross. If you packed them in, those could be big.

  I had money. I felt terrific. So why not get more cocaine? To do

  Class Clown, which I recorded on May 27, 1972,1 had to say to myself, "I want to be sharp and clean and clear tonight. No cocaine."

  My diction on it is remarkably lucid. In other words, I was already

  using enough cocaine that I had to think consciously about not using it to record an album.

  But it was a great time. I felt so free. So flush. It was such a catharsis, such a coming to terms, such a reward. It was proof that I

  was right—fuck you people, look at this! Not only are they going

  for it—it's GOOD too! I needn't have been worried about success.

  Lily Tomlin once said, "I worry about being a success in a mediocre world," and I'd always been fearful that if I had mass appeal I

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  wouldn't have substance. So I was happy that I had substance and

  yet was getting all this attention, approval, applause, approbation,

  affirmation—all those A's I never got in school.

  Throughout '72 and early '73 the excitement built and built. It

  was a time of First Times. There was the first time of selling out a

  theater or a club. I still have the handwritten sign from the Main

  Point, a little folkie room, near Bryn Mawr, west of Philadelphia.

  About four hundred people had shown up, and they had to put up a

  sign on the door: "SOLD OUT." The first time this ever happened

  in my life!

  There was the first time I got caught in my own traffic jam. The

  first time you're driving to the theater and you're stuck in theater

  traffic you have created! (This also happened in Philadelphia, at the

  Academy of Music.) Just a fabulous feeling: "I did this! I've created a

  fucking traffic jam!" To stand there and see them all walking in and

  think: "Each one of these people has left his or her home and paid

  money and come here just to hear me and this stuff I'm doing." It's

  so affirming—it fires your imagination about the rest of your future.

  There was another, deeper level of fulfillment too, about playing

  at colleges to college students.

  I had a deferred adolescence. In my actual adolescence I was

  already thinking like an adult and making adult decisions. I was

  pla
nning my career at eleven, getting engaged at fifteen, getting my

  mother if not out of my life certainly out of my heart in advance of

  any normal differentiation that a child goes through with his parents. And I joined the air force at seventeen.

  So my late childhood was postponed, or rather not experienced.

  Then, in 1967, as I'm entering my thirties, along comes a youthoriented culture that attracts me for political reasons, but for other

  hidden reasons too. "Oh, there's something I didn't do when I was

  that age. They're burning a car!" When I make the identity full and

  complete and it includes what I do for a living and as an art form,

  I say, "Let me tell you about when I was a kid. I'm just like you!" I

  finally found a way to live that deferred adolescence.

  Oenerationally—for what generations are worth—I'm at the midpoint between the Boomer generation and the GI generation. I had

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  no biological identification with one side or the other of the generational conflict of the time. Which was good, because it gave me

  a feeling for both. Though technically I was past the magic age of

  thirty, beyond which there was no trust and no hope and no life.

  My rejection of the older generation's notions of values and authority were by now complete. In my mind and heart, I was saying,

  "Your values suck, I reject your inherent authority, I don't buy that

  authority comes on a direct line from God to my parents, to my appointed church people, or to the police or to anyone else." For me, all

  authority comes from within. All my power comes from within me.

  But the other side of me—the side that respected much about the

  GI generation and had nostalgia for it—could find fulfillment too.

  In the summer of 1972, I played Carnegie Hall. It not only meant

  validation but arrival at a certain level. You may not really be on the

  same level as others who played there before you, but you now have

  something in common with them. Lenny worked Carnegie Hall.

  Stokowski worked Carnegie Hall. I worked Carnegie Hall. Fabulous. And it was an acknowledgment that I did accept certain kinds

  of authoritative wisdom: for example, that Carnegie was a prestigious place to appear.

  A simpler pleasure was standing over on the northwest corner

  of 57th and Seventh and watching people milling around outside