Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  Table of Contents

  Also by James Sullivan

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  WARM-UP

  Chapter 1 - HEAVY MYSTERIES

  Chapter 2 - CLASS CLOWN

  Chapter 3 - ATTRACTING ATTENTION

  Chapter 4 - VALUES (HOW MUCH IS THAT DOG CRAP IN THE WINDOW?)

  Chapter 5 - THE CONFESSIONAL

  Chapter 6 - SPECIAL DISPENSATION

  Chapter 7 - SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION

  Chapter 8 - WASTED TIME

  Chapter 9 - AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

  Chapter 10 - SQUEAMISH

  KICKER

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Also by James Sullivan

  The Hardest Working Man:

  How James Brown Saved the Soul of America

  Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon

  For Jim Sheehan, who taught his kids the most offensive words are shut up.

  I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech—up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  WARM-UP

  YOU HAD TO LAUGH.

  In twentieth-century America, he went looking for the sublime and found only the ridiculous. How could any thinking person see it otherwise? Born on the eve of World War II, he lived the Atomic Age up close, working on bomber jets while serving in the U.S. Air Force. He experienced the cultural upheaval of the 1960s from its epicenter, and he lived long enough to experience the absurd excess, and the inevitable, colossal hangover, of the end of the American century.

  It’s called the American Dream, he said, because you have to be asleep to believe it. In his lifetime, laughter seemed like the only sane response. So George Carlin set about studying it and creating it. For fifty years he may well have produced more laughs than any other human being.

  He also rubbed his share of people the wrong way. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been doing it right. Carlin knew that comedy is meant to shock. Funny doesn’t happen without a sense of surprise. And audacity—the courage to say what you mean—is critical to the art of making people laugh. Whether speaking truth to the powerful or telling fart jokes, comedians, by their very nature, deal in taboo.

  Comedy bends the rules. Humor, wrote an early scholar of American popular culture, is “a lawless element.” Every comedian is “a scofflaw,” wrote another, “who could be charged with breaking and entering—with breaking society’s rules and restrictions, and with entering people’s psyches.”

  George Carlin was a natural born transgressor. He saw where the line had been drawn, and he leaped. If he spotted a sacred cow—God, country, children—he went cow-tipping. Raised on Spike Jones anarchy and Beat Generation rebellion, he heard it every time he got into hot water, with the nuns and priests, the owner of the corner drugstore, his commanding officers: “What are you, a comedian?”

  Yes, he was. Wholly devoted to the craft, he made every kind of comedy his own. Some comedians do self-deprecation. Some do surrealism. Some do political humor or dick jokes, impressions or observations. Carlin did it all. He questioned everything, from the existence of God and the authority of government, to the military and the police, to the accuracy of the phrase “shelled peanuts”: “If you’re clothed, you have clothes, so if you’re shelled, you should have shells.” “Every comedian does a little George,” Jerry Seinfeld wrote in the New York Times upon Carlin’s death. “I’ve heard it my whole career: ‘Carlin does it,’ ‘Carlin already did it,’ ‘Carlin did it eight years ago.’”

  Carlin often said there were three main elements to his comedy: the “little world” of everyday experience (“kids, pets, driving, the stores, television commercials”); the big, unanswerable questions, such as race, war, government, big business, religion, and the mysteries of the universe; and the English language, with all its quirks and frustrations (“lingo and faddish trendy buzzwords and catch phrases and Americanisms”). In fact, that covers just about everything under the sun.

  Just as no topic was off-limits for Carlin, no style of comedy was beyond his grasp. He was equally enamored of hokey puns (“My back hurts; I think I over-schlepped”) and sly brainteasers. (“If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”) He did street corner insults and Zen non sequiturs. He changed voices, made sound effects, whistled, sang, stuck out his tongue and blew raspberries. He was an outstanding physical comedian, too, with enough rubbery faces and herky-jerky gestures to do an entire set in mime.

  Many comedians have distinctive voices, but only a few are fortunate enough to develop one that’s never been heard. George Carlin’s voice was unmistakable. In his younger years he had the mellow, quizzical tone of a perpetually amused pot smoker. Later it aged into a hard-earned rasp. Throughout his various stages, this one-of-a-kind voice—quintessential New Yorker, representative hippie, reflexive contrarian—spoke for a nation of dissatisfied idealists and for himself alone.

  Timing is essential to comedy, and Carlin’s personal timing could not have been more precise. “The comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art,” wrote Henri Bergson in his famous essay on laughter. Born during the Golden Age of Radio, Carlin devoted more time to reading Mad magazine (established 1952) than to his Latin and algebra lessons. The stand-up comedy rebirth of the 1950s, when performers including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Gregory demolished the old order of vaudevillian shtick, gave his early career its context. And Carlin was at that crucial age of transformation—thirty-three—when he found he could no longer ignore the lure of the countercultural revolution. Comedy, as the proud autodidact knew better than anyone, is a constant voyage of discovery.

  Picking up the baton from the martyred Lenny Bruce, he remade stand-up, once the trade of strip-club flunkies in cheap tuxedos, for the rock ’n’ roll crowd. He took it to theaters, turning the art of the joke into a concert event. Then he brought his provocative routines into the home, rejuvenating his career with an association with HBO that would last three decades. Some comedians can stretch a halfhour’s worth of one-liners to last a lifetime. Carlin wrote an hour of new material for each HBO show, roughly every two years. Younger comedians are awestruck by the sheer vastness of his productivity. No one else came close.

  For most comics, stand-up is a means to an end. In the 1980s, ten solid minutes got more than a few their own sitcoms. In the age of television, Carlin was a rare creature—a comedian for whom stand-up comedy was the mountaintop. “I found out that it was an honest craft, and in fact, that art was involved,” he said.

  Like a master craftsman, Carlin worked with words. He held them up to the light. He inspected them, rubbed them, and whittled them. He worshipped them, in a way that he felt precious few products of the human mind deserved to be worshipped.

  His most famous routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” branded him as a vulgarian, a foul-mouthed comic who worked “dirty.” But the routine was much more than mere titillation. It was an airtight example of Carlin’s belief in the one thing he truly believed in—the power of reason. Why, exactly, are these few words—out of 400,000 in the English language—off-limits? Who are they hurting, and how? When Carlin reserved the right to use the whole language, he sparked a debate about censorship that brought his seven magic words—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, a
nd tits—into the halls of the Supreme Court. Decades later, his questions are more relevant than ever in our media-saturated culture.

  In his later years, the unruffled hippie became known for a certain irascibility. As he pointed out, laughter is our response to injustice. (“The human race has one really effective weapon,” said Mark Twain, “and that is laughter.”) The old shpritzers who played the Catskills told zingers about their mothers-in-law. He took the longer view. His targets were the massive institutions that supposedly have civilized the species.

  To Carlin, American mediocrity was a real disappointment. We’ve sold our souls, he said, for cheap thrills and false beliefs. In his later years he cranked up the volume on his rants, writing darkly comic pieces about the fate of humanity. “I prefer seeing things the way they are,” he said, “not the way some people wish they were.” He became a kind of oracle of disaster, finding black humor in school shootings a few years before Columbine and in horrific calamities just before the planes hit the World Trade Center, and even presupposing the government bailouts of 2009 (“The Fund for the Rich and Powerful”).

  Like a doctor searching for a swollen gland, he pressed on any subject that made people sensitive. At various times in his career it was the Catholic Church, bodily functions, the sanctity of children, the emptiness of our sense of entitlement. Many casual observers thought he grew angry in his later years. To Carlin, it was just an extended comic exercise: How far could he go? Comedy was a constant intellectual challenge, an endless reevaluation of received wisdom and group thinking. He genuinely liked individual people; it was their collective beliefs he couldn’t stand. “No matter how you care to define it,” he once said, “I do not identify with the local group.”

  “How he stood above and apart from the world . . . observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulences of man!” another wicked American humorist once wrote of Mark Twain. “What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue!” When Carlin learned that he was to be honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor—five days before his death, as it turned out—much was made of the comparison between the comic and the writer for whom the award was named. But Carlin had at least as much in common with H. L. Mencken, originator of the above quote, the iconoclastic journalist who saw the rampant misuse of the English language as an all-too-perfect symbol for the dismayingly low standards of his culture. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” Mencken famously put it.

  Few things, Twain felt, are as rare in American life as the act of a man speaking freely. Our constitutional commitment to free speech is a wonderful idea, in theory. In practice, however, we can speak freely only so long as we are willing to keep our most uncompromised thoughts to ourselves. Unequivocal free speech, Twain argued, is “the privilege of the dead.” The living are much too paralyzed by the potential social costs to dare utter “unpopular convictions.”

  In a society inescapably inundated with evasions, false promises, phony manners, fine print, and outright lies, George Carlin never failed to say what he meant. “Just when I discovered the meaning of life,” he joked, “they changed it.” If the meaning of life is laughter, he changed it himself.

  1

  HEAVY MYSTERIES

  The kid had a mouth on him, and he knew it. Young Georgie Carlin, a scrawny, buzz-cut New York City boy in striped shirts and rolled-up jeans, had predicted his professional life almost to the letter. Required to write a self-portrait in Sister Nina’s fifth-grade class, he had confidently explained that he would become a radio announcer, an impersonator, a stand-up comedian and, finally, an actor.

  Now, barely into his twenties, he was in Boston, working as a board announcer at an easy-listening radio station. He read promos and sponsorships, patched through the various programs of the NBC radio network, and hosted an after-hours show featuring the “beautiful music” of Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. It was here that Carlin met Jack Burns, a fellow radio newcomer with whom, within a year, he would appear on The Tonight Show, doing comedy.

  Boston was Carlin’s second city in radio. He’d broken in three years earlier while serving as a radar technician at Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, Louisiana. Hired in 1956 by an upstart rock ’n’ roll station with the call letters KJOE, he spun records on his own drive-time showcase, Carlin’s Corner. (He had his own zingy jingle: “George, Carlin, is on the air/The coolest record man anywhere!”) Although the Boston gig had a lower profile, it was in a bigger market. Each night at a quarter to seven the city’s archbishop, the stentorian Richard Cardinal Cushing, led the rosary for fifteen minutes, just before NBC’s News on the Hour.

  One night Cardinal Cushing went on the air from his remote location with some spontaneous comments about the Little Sisters of the Poor. By the time he began praying the rosary, he’d fallen behind schedule. At 6:59 the cardinal was just midway through the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary. Carlin was on the edge of his seat, panicking about the news. There was only one thing to do. At seven o’clock on the nose, he pulled the cardinal’s feed and cut to the broadcast: “The NBC News, brought to you by Alka-Seltzer.”

  Within minutes the phone rang in the studio. “I want to talk to the young man who took off the Holy Word of Gawd,” boomed Cardinal Cushing. Carlin, alone in the studio, nervously admitted he was that young man. Then he did something he wouldn’t do again for as long as he lived: He “hid behind the government,” as he recalled years later. He explained to the imposing clergyman that he was bound by law to follow the program log from the Federal Communications Commission. If he didn’t accommodate a network newscast and its paying advertisers, he could lose his job. It was the first, and decisively the last, time that George Carlin would take the side of the FCC. In the morning the station manager backed his junior staffer, telling the archbishop’s office he’d done the right thing.

  The exoneration was short-lived. Weeks later Carlin took the station’s mobile news unit for the weekend and drove to his native New York to score some weed.

  It was a fireable offense, and fired he was. So much for a career in Boston. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that he felt trapped by expectations. A decade after his apprenticeship in radio, just as he was becoming a prime-time television personality and nightclub headliner, he threw away his burgeoning success to pursue a seemingly quixotic vision of himself as a voice of the oozing counterculture. Throughout his performing life Carlin had run-ins with the tipsy crowds and heavy-handed moguls of Las Vegas, where top-shelf comedians could make big money in steady engagements as long as they played nice. When he finally landed a sitcom of his own, in the mid-1990s, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of it. Groucho Marx famously joked that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member. Carlin wasn’t joking. Catholic school, the Boy Scouts, the Air Force, the chummy world of network television—it didn’t take him long to recognize that his natural vantage point was from the outside.

  HIS CAREER WAS BORN at age thirty-three, when he realized that his work was his life, that comedy could be more than just clowning: a calling. It was born during his first appearances on The Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, and Ed Sullivan; it was born on the stage of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, where Lenny Bruce had been arrested for saying the word cocksucker. Or it was born at age thirteen, when he discovered the skewed analytical benefits of smoking marijuana, or when Brother Conrad helped the budding voice artist purchase a primitive Webcor tape recorder, or even earlier than that, when his mother instilled in her second son a lifelong reverence for the dictionary.

  In truth, his actual birth was a mistake. George Denis Patrick Carlin was conceived during a period of separation for his parents, a slick-talking newspaper advertising salesman named Patrick Carlin and an executive secretary named Mary Bearey. Patrick Carlin, the national advertising manager for the Sun newspaper, the conservative broadsheet t
hen in head-to-head competition with the New York Times and the Herald Tribune , had previously worked at a couple of Philadelphia papers and done a stretch at the New York Post as well. He was an accomplished after-dinner speaker who won a nationwide Dale Carnegie public speaking contest in 1935. Throughout his life, George Carlin kept the mahogany gavel his father had been awarded in the contest. “He had a real line of shit, boy. He could talk your donkey’s ear off,” Carlin recalled. The winning speech, given two years before the birth of Patrick Carlin’s second son, was called “The Power of Mental Demand.”

  Patrick Carlin, born in 1888 in Donegal, Ireland, was seventeen years older than Mary Bearey. They were married in 1930, and their son Patrick was born one year later. Though the man of the house was making good money during the Great Depression, averaging a thousand dollars a week in commissions (for three years in a row, he was the leading newspaper ad salesman in the country), he and his young bride fought bitterly over Mary’s “lace curtain” aspirations and Patrick’s prodigious drinking. Within a few years they were separated. By chance they met again in the summer of 1936. Patrick Carlin convinced his estranged wife to accompany him for the weekend to Rock-away Beach, in Queens, where they checked into their old getaway, Curley’s Atlas Hotel and Baths, along the oceanfront. There, as George Carlin often noted, the baby was conceived.