Last Words

by George Carlin;Tony Hendra

  A simpler pleasure was standing over on the northwest corner of 57th and Seventh and watching people milling around outside the stage door. Summer night, and I’m thinking, “Gee, here I am, where I used to stand waiting to get Gene Krupa’s autograph.” And now I’m going to come out the same doors where I once got his autograph, twenty years before.

  Gene Krupa was my hero. I have had very few heroes in my life—mostly they’re people who’ve been arrested. But when Gene Krupa came out those doors, he had on a fucking camel’s-hair, wraparound overcoat, he had the forelock hanging down in all its marvelous arranged casualness and he had a terrific-looking blonde on each arm. With a big smile and chewing gum. I got his autograph and all the other guys’. Jazz at the Philharmonic. I still look at those autographs and play the music from that night.

  I yelled out during the show because I knew they were recording—there was a sound van outside the stage door. My pal Doug and I were there and we were loaded. It was the midnight show during a slow ballad medley and Charlie Shavers was taking a really romantic solo. Right in the middle, at the top of my lungs, I yell, “Make me cream, Charlie.” That way I figured I’ll be on the record.

  Later, when I’d be recording, it was done to me. Many times.

  Carnegie was a completion of a loop, a coming back to a beginning. It was also something of a trauma for my mother. This was Carnegie Hall, after all—just as much a pinnacle for her as it was for me. And here I was at my very hottest, doing “Seven Dirty Words” and all the other stuff, making light of the Church and God and of the business world she loved. And they gave me a standing ovation. She was profoundly shocked that in a place like that what I was saying would be so rewarded by approval. When she came backstage after the show, she was ashen. Brenda and I often used that word about her face that night. Ashen.

  But she soon had the approval of Holy Mother Church, thanks to the Corpus Christi nuns who loved what I was doing, and roses returned to the cheeks of the Rose of Tralee.

  As usual, a price had to be paid for all this pleasure. I discovered in July of ’72 that not only could you not say the Heavy Seven on television, you couldn’t say them in Milwaukee either. Here’s how the AP reported it:

  Comedian George Carlin was taken into custody Friday night and charged with disorderly conduct after he allegedly used profanity during a performance at Summerfest, a ten-day festival on the city’s lakefront. Henry Jordan, executive director of Summerfest, said, “Carlin got up on stage and … he used a lot of profanity. The police went up on stage after he had finished his act and arrested him.” Jordan said he supported the police, adding that many in the crowd of 70,000 were children.

  According to the arresting officer and complainant, Patrolman Elmer G. Lenz, about forty of the many thousands of children were “youths in wheelchairs who were physically unable to leave the showgrounds even if they found the show was in bad taste.” Of course, wheelchairs are so named because they include wheels with which their occupants can propel themselves wherever they wish to go, but that wasn’t foremost in Patrolman Lenz’s mind in bringing their presence up. When it came to words, he knew right from wrong.

  What Lenz didn’t know was how close he came to really nailing me. While I was out onstage at Summerfest, Brenda came on under the pretense of bringing me a glass of water. She says: “There’s police backstage, and when you come off they’re going to grab you and arrest you.” Now, I have a lot of cocaine in my jacket pocket. I have at least a full vial, probably a vial I’m working from and whatever else I have in a little bag. It’s all on me out there onstage. I can’t give it to her, so off she goes. She comes back on a little later and says: “We’ll all make like you’re coming off one side. Then you come off the other side and Corky or Jim (two of the musicians from the band who were opening for me) will be over there and take your jacket.” So I come off the side where the police weren’t and handed my jacket to these guys. I’m clean and they’re happy as hell. They have all my drugs.

  Throughout the trial I was represented by the distinguished civil-rights attorney William Coffey—who had also represented the Milwaukee activist Father Groppi. Five months later, one Judge Gieringer threw out the complaint, saying that while he had no doubt indecent language was used, he didn’t believe anyone was violently aroused. Interesting, because at the concert, I had been talking about “fuck” meaning loving and at some point I’d told all these people that I’d like to fuck them. You’d think that would have aroused at least one or two Milwaukeeans in a crowd of seventy thousand. I’m a nice-looking guy. And I had more hair then.

  Actually, it wasn’t a recording of the concert that was played in court for the judge but the cut from Class Clown. “During the recording,” wrote the Milwaukee Journal, “Judge Gieringer grinned and laughed softly, though self-consciously.” Patrolman Lenz was incensed by the judge’s ruling and said the hearing was a “railroad job”—although the only person who could’ve been railroaded was me, and I hadn’t been.

  Judge Gieringer’s decision sidestepped the little matter of the First Amendment and its pesky guarantee of free speech. That wasn’t the case in my second “bust.” By now what I used to refer to as the Milwaukee Seven had spawned an equally mind-rotting, spine-curving, peace-without-honor sequel called “Filthy Words,” which first appeared on Occupation: Foole:

  The list is open to amendment. Lots of people pointed things out to me, and I noticed some myself. The first thing that we noticed was that the word fuck was really repeated in there because the word motherfucker is a compound word; it’s another form of the word fuck. If you want to be a purist, it can’t be on the list of basic words. Also, cocksucker is a compound word, and neither half is really dirty. The word sucker is merely suggestive. And the word cock is a halfway dirty word; fifty percent dirty, dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. Remember when you first heard it in sixth grade, you used to giggle, “And the cock crowed three times! Heyyy! It’s in the Bible! Cock is in the Bible!” And the first time you heard about a cockfight, remember? “What!” “Nooo! Are you kidding?” “It’s chickens, man.”

  Then you had the four-letter words of old Anglo-Saxon fame—Shit and fuck. Shit is an interesting word because for the middle class it’s still a rude, dirty, gooshy kinda word. But the word shit is okay for the man at work—he can say it like crazy:

  “Get that shit outta here, will ya?” “I don’t wanna see that shit anymore.” “I can’t cut that shit, buddy.” “I’ve had that shit up to here.” “I think you’re full of shit myself, man.” “He don’t know shit from Shinola.” (I always wondered how the Shinola people felt about that. “Hi! I’m the new man from Shinola!” “Hi, how are ya? Nice to see ya.”) “I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch. Guess I’ll shit on my watch.” “Boy, the shit is gonna hit the fan!” “Built like a brick shithouse.” “He’s up shit creek.” Hot shit, holy shit, tough shit, eat shit. Shit-eating grin. (Whoever thought of that was ill.) “Shit on a stick.” “Shit in a handbag”—I always liked that—“He ain’t worth shit in a handbag.” Shitty. “He acted real shitty, you know what I mean? I got the money back, but a real shitty attitude.” “Yeah, he had a shitfit! Wow! Glad I wasn’t there!” And all the animals: bullshit, horseshit, cowshit, ratshit. Batshit! First time I heard batshit I really came apart. Guy in Oklahoma said it, man. “Awww, batshit!” Snakeshit. “Slicker than owlshit.” “Get your shit together.” “Shit or get off the pot.” “I gotta shitload fulla them.” “I got a shitpot full, right?” Shithead, shitheel, shit in your heart, shit for brains, shitfaced—heyyy! Always try to think of how that could have originated … the first guy to say that. Somebody got drunk and fell in some shit, you know? “Hey … I’m shitfaced! Shitfaced today!” Anyway, enough of that shit.

  The big one, the word fuck. That’s the one that hangs them up the most. ’Course, in a lot of cases that’s the very act that hangs them up the most. So it’s natural that the word would have the same effec
t. It’s a great word, fuck. Nice word, easy word, cute word. Easy word to say: one syllable, short u … Fuck! Starts with a nice soft sound, “fffff,” ends with a “KKK”! Right? It has something for everyone: fffucKKKKK! Good word. Kind of a proud word too. “Who are you?” “I am FUCK! FUCK of the MOUNTAINS!” “Tune in again next week to Fuck of the Mountains !”

  I’ve also found three more words that you could never say on television, and they are fart, turd and twat. Those three. Fart we talked about, it’s harmless, it’s like tits, it’s a cutesy word, no problem. Turd … you can’t say, but who WANTS to? The subject never comes up on the panel, so I don’t worry about that one. But the word twat is an interesting one. Twat! “Right in the twat!” Twat is the only slang word applying to a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn’t have another meaning to it. Like snatch, box and pussy, all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie you can say, “We’re gonna snatch that pussy and put ’im in a box.” But twat stands alone.

  On October 30, 1973, WBAI in New York broadcast this cut during a program called Lunchpail, in the course of a discussion about society’s double standards toward language. The host warned the audience in advance that, “If you don’t like this sort of thing, don’t listen.”

  “A New York man,” said a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court summary, “who, while driving with his young son, heard the WBAI broadcast, wrote a letter to the FCC complaining about the use of such language on the air.” After some back-and-forth between the FCC and WBAI, the FCC released in 1975 a declaratory order concerning the broadcast of “indecent” language, defining “indecent” as words that describe “in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards sexual or excretory activities and organs at times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.” The FCC found my routine to be indecent by that standard and put what amounted to a warning in WBAI’s license file. WBAI—actually the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI—fought it, won in the U.S. Court of Appeals, the FCC appealed to the Supreme Court, and in 1978 the Supreme Court—surprise, surprise—found in favor of the FCC, 5–4.

  The Los Angeles Times ran the news as its front-page lead on July 3, 1978—“Court Bans 7 Dirty Words,” blared the headline.

  Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority decision, saying: “The broadcast media have established a uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans. Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen … in the privacy of the home, where the individual’s right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.” Why can’t the individual reach out his or her hand and turn that little knob? “To say that one may avoid further offense by turning off the radio when he hears indecent language is like saying that the remedy for an assault is to run away after the first blow.”

  I’m no lawyer, but this guy seems to be saying that anyone whose language he finds indecent is like a burglar coming into his house with a gun or a mugger hitting him in the head with a pipe. Which is a pretty paranoid view of free speech.

  Justice William Brennan wrote the dissent: “In our land of cultural pluralism there are many who think, act, and talk differently from the members of the Court and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve censorship of the communications solely because of the words they contain … The Court’s decision … is another of the dominant culture’s efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its own way of thinking, acting, and speaking.”

  All right, Bill Brennan! We Irish stick together. And he got it right. Words were the issue. The Court was banning not just words, but ways of thinking, acting, speaking, communicating with one another. There was plenty more hypocrisy at work. The original—and sole—complainant wasn’t some average Joe who conceivably might have been speaking for contemporary community standards, if there are such things. He was a character named John Douglas, a member of the board of a big-time right-wing watchdog group called Morality in Media. John Douglas was, in Nat Hentoff’s words, “a professional offendee.” Of course he couldn’t turn off the radio, because that would’ve meant taking his right hand from its ten-to-two-o’clock position on the steering wheel and committing the hideous sin of reckless driving.

  But he could have told his “young son” to change the station. His young son was actually fifteen, several years older than I was when I made my original longhair-fucking-music-prick-Kraut-cunt-burly-loudmouthed-cocksucker list, way back in 1950, in a simpler, more innocent time. Was John Douglas really claiming this angelic midseventies teenager had never heard the word “shit” or “fuck”? Of course not. Other than turning out another fucked-up, tight-assed clone of himself, John Douglas’s complaint showed not the slightest interest in his son’s welfare, poor kid.

  Kids are always the giveaway. “Young sons.” “Youths in wheelchairs.” The main reason to outlaw indecency, wrote Justice Stevens in his majority opinion, is that “broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children, even those too young to read.” Which in turn means that the only thing you can safely broadcast anytime, anywhere, in any medium, is material that’s suitable for kids. Could this be why our society shows so many signs of arrested development?

  FCC v. Pacifica Foundation has become a standard case to teach in communications classes and many law schools. I take perverse pride in that. I’m actually a footnote to the judicial history of America.

  The one part of this I really love is that all nine members of the Berger Court had to sit around listening to the “Filthy Words” cut from Occupation: Foole. I’ve often wondered if, during the presentation of the evidence against me, any of them grinned and laughed softly, though self-consciously.

  12

  HIGH ON THE HILL

  George and Mary Carlin, circa 1974

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  I used to mark my really severe drug use by the years I couldn’t remember who won the World series. There were three or four years in there, mid to late seventies. Cincinnati Reds? Twice in a row? When the fuck did that happen? How the fuck did that happen?

  I’ve always been scrupulous—overscrupulous—about keeping records of every appearance I made anywhere. But during the breakout success after my changes, roughly 1972 to 1975, the record keeping broke down. Anal became cocainal.

  As the period kicked in, we were still living the good hippie life down in Venice. But when the money began to flow we decided to move back into a house—in Pacific Palisades, way at the top of a hill. An area of the Palisades which was at that time almost entirely populated by executives from the RAND Corporation and their families. I was the town hippie—a rebellious weird longhair with a weird family who screamed at one another all night long and had strange people coming in and out at odd hours carrying small packages.

  One night, Kelly and I sauntered outside at twilight in front of the house. Across the way, there was an outdoor cocktail party going on, a gathering of suits. They had obviously come from the RAND Corporation and were having a little meeting-with-barbecue. They were drinking, and definitely within earshot. I don’t know how loaded I was but I said, quite loud enough for them to hear, “Hey, Kelly, look at those assholes over there!” A useful life-lesson for an eight-year-old girl.

  I did tend to direct my hostility at the square world and business men. Disturbing, because it seemed to control me: I couldn’t turn it on and off. I embarrassed myself a lot and probably Brenda just as much. At times it was a component of the drug taking, but it also existed independent of drugs. When I became successful as an outsider and could be physically identified as such, the famous outsider, “the one who’s saying all those things,” I became very defensive.

  Despite my self-discovery and self-fulfillment and excitement about them, I was frustrated at the way the things I was saying in my work—my only artistic way of expressing my feelin
gs—were being received. I really believed that the way these suits ran the world was seriously wrong. Not only were they wrong, they were ignoring people over property and profit. But I wasn’t being fully understood: the people on the other side of the fence—or the street—saw me as a simplistic slogan-monger, a left-wing poseur. I resented that. But my artistic role—comedian—made it impossible to explain how carefully structured it was, how it sprang from profound changes that had occurred in my head as well as my heart. I felt misunderstood and self-conscious. In other words, hostile.

  One convenience of our new house was that right up there on the hill lived an actor who became my most reliable source of cocaine—an actor who later cleaned up and became quite successful. I spent a lot of time up there; it was so easy to go up and score. The only celebrity I ever ran into was Peter Lawford. We did a lot of lines together.

  I had other, less memorable sources, and Brenda would soon develop her own independent ones. It was during this period—in ’73 and ’74—that things really began to unravel. On top of the liquor, Brenda was now doing coke, plus the pills—like Valium—she took to balance the coke. At least she never got involved with heavy downers like reds and Tuinal.

  I’d always used Ritalin. My Ritalin habit didn’t make me crazy. I used to take half a Ritalin, or at most one and a half. (I had a doctor’s prescription for the stuff.) That was my speed during my so-called straight years: the groundwork was laid early on for my attraction to cocaine.