Mary contemplated having an abortion, going so far as to schedule an appointment for a D&C with a doctor in Gramercy Park. She’d been to see that doctor before; his code name, according to Carlin, was “Dr. Sunshine.” But fate, and superstition, intervened: Gazing at a painting on the wall in the waiting room, Mary became convinced she could see a likeness of her own mother, who had died six months earlier. “Let’s get out of here, Pat,” she said. “I’m going to have this kid.”
The impending birth of George Carlin brought on a short-lived reconciliation for the couple. But Patrick’s drinking was too much for Mary to take. “The Irish call it the curse,” Carlin said. “My mother called him a street angel and a house devil.” Two months after the delivery on May 12, 1937, Patrick Carlin arrived home at the family’s Riverside Drive apartment, having made his usual stop at an Upper Broadway watering hole en route. In the course of their latest argument, Mary wondered aloud why she should bother to set out crystal and fine china at dinnertime, if her husband was just going to stumble in three sheets to the wind every night. Enraged, Patrick Carlin took a tray of his wife’s place settings and chucked them out an open window.
Mary Carlin gathered up her boys and fled down the fire escape. Making their way through the back lots out to Broadway, they piled into a Packard owned by one of Mary’s brothers and headed out of town. When they returned, mother and sons moved from apartment to apartment in the neighborhood, trying to avoid confrontation with the boys’ father. “We ran for four years,” said Carlin. “I saw the fear in her when the doorbell would ring.” With four brothers living nearby and occasional escorts from sympathetic beat cops, Mary felt safe enough from physical harm, though she could not escape her husband’s intimidation.
He bid the boys a quiet farewell on one last visit; according to Carlin, he sang an emotional version of “The Rose of Tralee,” the traditional Irish ballad about the “lovely and fair” Mary, who won her beloved not with her beauty alone, but with “the truth in her eyes ever beaming.”
The young son understood from an early age that he took great pleasure in entertaining people. As a toddler he learned a few surefire attention-getters from his mother, who worked as secretary to the president of an advertising association, demonstrating the new dance craze called the Big Apple or mimicking Mae West (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”) for her friends in the office secretarial pool. When he was old enough, Carlin began sneaking onto the subway to meet his mother after work, where his impromptu performances for her colleagues sometimes earned him a dinner at the Automat in Times Square. “I noticed that this process of doing something for people pleased them, and you gained some feeling of approval from it,” he said. Approval, attention, applause, approbation: “All these As that I never got in school, I got for acting out for people.”
Patrick Carlin died of a heart attack in 1945, when his youngest son was eight years old. It isn’t difficult to infer that his father’s absence helped shape the son’s lifelong skepticism about authority figures. “The thing is, I never really had issues with my father because I was so young,” he once said. “My brother hates his guts. I hate him by proxy, but I also love him by proxy.”
Almost six years older than George, brother Patrick was often out carousing. When Patrick came home at night, the younger Carlin sometimes lay in bed listening to his mother chastise him. Pat, Mary would say, was just like his father. Georgie was different. He had sensitivity. She vowed to “make something” of her youngest. From a young age Carlin recognized that he would have to contend with Mary Carlin’s smothering instinct. “I had to fight her off,” Carlin recalled. “And it made me stronger.”
With their mother working long hours—earning “a man’s salary,” she said—Carlin and his brother were often on their own in the apartment in which the family eventually settled, on 121st Street. Grant’s Tomb lay two blocks to the west. Morningside Heights, ensconced alongside Spanish Harlem to the east and the main economic artery of black Harlem, 125th Street, was an ethnically eclectic neighborhood, “wonderfully alive and vibrant,” as Carlin recalled. “Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Irish.” In warm weather the smells of spicy cooking and the sounds of imported music hung in the air. The area was also home to an impressive array of institutions, including Columbia University, the Manhattan School of Music, the Union Theological Seminary, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, all of which earned it the nickname “the Acropolis of New York.” Carlin and his Irish friends preferred to call the neighborhood “White Harlem,” which sounded tougher than Morningside Heights.
With Patrick out on the streets, George would fix himself a simple dinner, a hamburger or some spaghetti, and exercise his considerable imagination with the radio and his comic books and magazines. Far from being lonely, he had lifelong blissful memories of this youthful independence. Answering a question about when and where he was happiest, he once replied, “Home alone after school, before my mother got home from work.” Like thousands of kids his age at the time, he devoured the humor magazines that were becoming big business by the late 1940s. Ballyhoo was a groundbreaking parody magazine for kids, packed with advertising spoofs that prefigured the content of dozens of wisecracking titles to come. Another favorite, Thousand Jokes, was a monthly collection of single-panel gag cartoons. Carlin’s Aunt Aggie worked for William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, the newspaper company that produced Puck, the weekly funny pages. Each week she brought her nephew the insert that would run four weeks later. His insider status gave him great leverage on the playground, where he convinced gullible schoolmates that he could predict the storylines of their favorite comics.
He dog-eared a copy of Esar’s Comic Dictionary, a collection of punning definitions by the humorist Evan Esar. In the author’s world, a cynic was “a man bored with sinning”; faith was “the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate”; and freedom was “the ability to do as you please without considering anyone except the wife, boss, police, neighbors and the government.”
Then there was Mad, the legendary sarcastic omnibus magazine, which Carlin started reading in its original comic book format. “Humor in a Jugular Vein,” read a banner on the cover of the debut issue in August 1952. With its direct appeals to kids’ inherent skepticism, Mad “was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren’t alone,” wrote the New York Times on the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. “There were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles.” Another admirer wrote that the magazine gave the writer and countless peersa way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements. . . . It prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual human beings charged with my care ever bothered to.
The radio gave Carlin another world in which his mind could roam. He was enthralled by the adventures of The Lone Ranger, and he became a big fan of Fibber McGee and Molly. Broadcast on NBC at 9:30 on Tuesday nights, the show was a ratings champion by Carlin’s grammar-school years. Jim Jordan and his wife, Marian Driscoll, played the title characters, the scheming, yarn-spinning knucklehead McGee and his ever-patronizing companion. Another popular program, The Aldrich Family, prefigured the family-oriented situation comedies of television, following the mild misadventures of young Henry Aldrich and his chum, Homer Brown, who closed each show by singing a jingle from their sponsor, Jell-O. “That was my family, the people on the radio,” Carlin recalled. “No cousins, no grandparents.”
Henry and Homer were archetypes of the classic all-American boy, soon to be seen on television’s Leave It to Beaver. They were mischievous, but well-meaning. As the critic John Crosby once noted, radio’s
fictional boys, despite their propensity for mischief, were much too timid to ever amount to anything. “There aren’t any Huck Finns in radio,” Crosby wrote. Each week the Henrys and Homers and Oogies (Judy Foster’s pubescent suitor, played by Richard Crenna, in A Date with Judy) “get into one jam after another, always by accident, never by design. . . . They never try to get into trouble.”
Much more attractive to Carlin’s already wicked sense of humor was the more sophisticated humor of radio’s variety hosts—former vaudevillian Fred Allen, the deadpan improvisational duo Bob and Ray, and the acid-tongued Henry Morgan. The latter was a cantankerous New Yorker who delighted in mangling sponsors’ pitches, for instance, accusing the makers of Life Savers of defrauding their customers out of the candy centers. Between such irreverent ad-libs the announcer played satirical records, many by the comic bandleader Spike Jones, whose City Slickers orchestra was famous for its zany arrangements, with toilet seats, bicycle horns, cap guns, and other props adding to the galloping irreverence. Morgan had a true devil-may-care attitude that earned him the admiration of fellow radio personalities such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny. But it also hastened his exile from the business. “I grew up thinking it was American to be outspoken,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “I’ve since learned it’s un-American. If I was bringing up a kid today, I’d teach him to nod.”
Just as he toyed with advertisers, Morgan couldn’t deliver a simple weather forecast without mocking the format. “Snow, followed by little boys with sleds,” he’d report, or “Dark clouds, followed by silver linings.” Morgan’s irreverence had a clear impact on one listener: Years later, Carlin introduced his own version of a subversive meteorologist to the stoner generation. “Tonight’s forecast: dark,” Carlin’s most enduring stock character, Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman, said countless times in his dope-addled drawl. “Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning.”
Fred Allen, bow-tied and erudite lampooner of American convention, was another of the young Carlin’s exemplars. Unlike most of his gag-dependent counterparts, Allen was a writer first, a comic second. The man of whom James Thurber once said, “You can count on the thumb of one hand the American who is at once a comedian, a humorist, a wit, and a satirist,” the Boston-bred Allen mixed verbal gymnastics and gentle put-downs with parodies of topical events and the mass diversions of the day, most notably his own medium, radio. “He took generous and regular swipes at mawkish soap operas, treacly kid-die shows, noisy quiz programs, talentless amateur hours, insipid husband-and-wife chatfests, banal interviewers, and mindless commercials,” wrote Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio. Not coincidentally, the host of the hour-long Town Hall Tonight was forever grappling with censors, who objected to many of the three-dollar words Allen so loved, such as titillate and rabelaisian. The watchdogs routinely required him to change references to potentially offended parties, including cockneys, hucksters, rodeo fans, and other targets of the announcer’s exasperated wit. “Fifty percent of what I write ends up in the toilet,” Allen complained.
Allen was one of the earliest radio celebrities to mine the daily news for satirical commentary, featuring segments called “Town Hall News,” “Passe News” (a takeoff on the Pathe newsreels of the day), and “The March of Trivia” (which alluded to The March of Time, Time’s long-running newsreel series). For much of his career—from childhood, actually—Carlin created his own mock newscasts: “In labor news, longshoremen walked off the pier today. Rescue operations are continuing.” Those routines, delivered in the clipped nasal tone of an off-the-rack newscaster, typically featured the additional talents of the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman and a rat-a-tat sportscaster the comedian called Biff Burns. Carlin borrowed that character, subconsciously or otherwise, from a character of the same name in the repertoire of Bob and Ray.
Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding—like Fred Allen, Boston natives drawn to New York, around 1950—brought the understated, off-the-cuff humor they’d developed as announcers on WHDH to the NBC network, where they became nationally beloved figures. The pair’s comedy took the wind out of radio’s insufferable windbags, from the exhausting sportscaster Burns to the self-important critic Webley Webster, to Elliott’s standby, the hapless newscaster Wally Ballou. “Our original premise was that radio was too pompous,” Elliott explained.
For Carlin, the nuanced send-up comedy of such vintage radio programs was complemented by the more lawless humor of other period entertainers to whom he was drawn. “I was a hip kid,” he joked. “When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.” There were the Marx Brothers, of course, with their constant peppering of rectitude. Like many of his classmates, Carlin also got caught up in the national craze for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, whose convulsive physicality and audacious pranks seemed like a reaction to the insanity of the Atomic Age. Such wild men “represented anarchy,” Carlin recalled. “They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me.”
At the dawn of network television, Carlin often went downstairs to a neighbor’s apartment to watch “Uncle Miltie,” Milton Berle, on The Texaco Star Theater. Fascinated with the new medium, he sometimes traveled to the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center to walk in front of the closed-circuit cameras in the showroom, where visitors could watch themselves in real time on television screens overhead. Mary soon purchased a TV console for the Carlins’ apartment.
The kid made time for Jackie Gleason’s parade of characters on Cavalcade of Stars and on Sundays for Toast of the Town, the original name of The Ed Sullivan Show. Even better, however, was the short-lived Broadway Open House, the prototypical late-night variety show starring veteran comedian Jerry Lester, “The Heckler of Hecklers,” whose trademark was twisting his glasses into uncomfortable angles on the bridge of his nose. The show also featured accordionist Milton DeLugg and a vapid bombshell known to viewers as Dagmar. With its antic mix of vaudeville routines and slapstick gags, “That one really got my attention,” said Carlin. “I never missed Broadway Open House.” One of the guests during the show’s short run was a twenty-four-year-old comedian named Lenny Bruce.
All of this input worked on the young boy like an electric shock. He took the gags into his classrooms and onto the streets, where he found an eager audience. By telling jokes he was discovering his innate gift for language. Mary recognized it and introduced him to the dictionary, encouraging him to look up a word whenever he was unsure of its meaning, a habit he retained throughout his life. Carlin often said his parents had heightened instincts for storytelling: “Both of them could hold the center stage in any room.” With his mother’s professional colleagues and then the neighborhood children rewarding his affinity for the spotlight, he found himself drawn to performing “like a flower [to] the sun. . . . I had some tools for it from my genetic package, but now the environment was inviting me to develop them.”
Carlin could trace his love of words to his mother’s father, a retired New York City cop, a man dedicated to self-improvement who, during his off-duty hours, liked to copy the works of Shakespeare in long-hand. As a boy Carlin was also intrigued to learn about his namesake, his mother’s troubled brother George Bearey, who insisted on being called “Admiral” and once took his clothes off on a trolley car. “I was impressed, not that he was an admiral, but that he was nuts,” he said.
Carlin’s youth would soon become a lengthy experiment in tweaking authority. It didn’t take long for him to recognize that he had no use for the practices of the Catholic Church. He traced the realization back at least as far as his first communion, when he was disenchanted to find that he felt nothing—no transcendence, no oneness with God, no miraculous visitation, as he’d been led to believe he would. Maybe, just maybe, these church people were clinging to beliefs they couldn’t prove.
He attended grammar school at Corpus Christi School on West 121st Street, a progressive Catholic school that would paradoxically in-still in the young
student just the inquisitive tools he needed to reject the religious education he was in line to receive. Founded in 1907, the school was run by the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, who had been invited to New York by Father George Barry Ford, the second pastor of Corpus Christi, in 1936. His church had a reputation for encouraging liberal thinking, particularly because of its association with the writer and activist Thomas Merton, who was baptized there while a graduate student at nearby Columbia University. The pastor was a disciple of the educational reformer John Dewey, who was a professor of philosophy for years at Columbia’s Teachers College, just across the street. Father Ford “talked the diocese into experimenting in our parish with progressive education,” Carlin later explained in a routine called “I Used to Be Irish Catholic,” “while whipping the religion on us anyway, and seeing what would happen.”
Classrooms at Corpus Christi were unorthodox for the time, with movable desks and relaxed seating arrangements. Classes were coed, and there was no uniform requirement. There was also no formal grading system, and the students were encouraged to ask questions of all kinds. The setting served Carlin well. Years later he would often acknowledge the role the nuns of Corpus Christi played in shaping his mindset. (Several priests and nuns, including Father Ford, are sincerely thanked in the liner notes to his 1972 album Class Clown. “This album would not have been possible,” Carlin wrote, without their “loving help.”) “The church part and the neighborhood part were typical, but the school was not,” he told his audiences. The students at Corpus Christi had so much freedom, in fact, “that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. Because they made questioners out of us, and they really didn’t have any answers.”
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 2