It was the debut of the new Carlin, the self-taught stoner linguist who instinctively recognized that the key to culture lies in how people communicate with one another. Observing that shit is almost always used in the figurative sense, he rattled off a series of common expressions—Get that shit out of here, I don’t have to take that shit, you’re full of shit. Like Bruce before him, Carlin was demystifying a taboo. Soon he would become notorious for it. The routine was called “Shoot,” after the popular euphemism. “They can’t fool me,” he joked. “Shoot is shit with two Os!”
Other material on the “FM” side covered a broad range of hot-button issues, from the “Hair” poem and “Birth Control” to double standards about drug use and sexual innuendo. If it was easy to identify the subliminal messages of so many television commercials, Carlin joked, sometimes the intimations were bizarre: In his favorite dirty-old-man’s voice, he croaked, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”
After the second night of taping, he walked out of the club while Doug and Rodney Dillard and their band prepared to take the stage. Rodney Dillard had watched Carlin’s act closely. The Dillards incorporated plenty of comic banter into their sets, and Cosby and Lily Tomlin were among the comedians who opened for them. Dillard thought Carlin had gone over very well with the group’s audience. Carlin, however, felt otherwise. Aimlessly wandering the streets of Georgetown, he rolled his performance over in his mind and began to cry. He hadn’t quite nailed it, he thought. “They weren’t on my side totally,” he recalled. “They tolerated me.”
Though he may have felt that way about the small gathering at the Cellar Door, the record-buying public responded enthusiastically to FM & AM. The album was released in January 1972, quickly selling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning a gold record certification. Although he wasn’t sure how his makeover would be received, it was suddenly apparent that the audience he was seeking had been looking for a comedian to call its own. Carlin’s new album put him in some good company. Cosby’s records, released at an annual pace, had been consistent top sellers for years, and Newhart’s Button-Down Mind and Vaughn Meader’s The First Family were bona fide landmarks. But whereas those records appealed to the Ed Sullivan audience, FM & AM spoke directly to the next generation. A classic example of an overnight success that was years in the making, the album presented a thoughtful, socially relevant comedian who, with his Christlike hair and beard and his embroidered bell-bottoms, now looked reassuringly like his evolving audience.
When Rolling Stone magazine, the countercultural Bible, interviewed Carlin that year, the comic explained that he understood fans needed to warm up to his new image. “It’s natural for people to distrust what appears to be a change,” he said. “Especially from entertainers. They assume you’re trying to trick them somehow. That’s because they’ve been tricked and shucked so many times already.”
His record sales were undoubtedly boosted by Carlin’s recurring appearances on Carson and The Flip Wilson Show. After an involuntary hiatus from The Tonight Show, he was welcomed back to the set in Burbank with open arms, making a rash of visits in 1971. According to Carlin, Carson and his staff had been reluctant to book him for some time. The comedian’s confrontations were becoming common knowledge, and some in Hollywood knew he’d missed a taping for the game show Beat the Clock. “They’d heard about it in show business—‘It’s the acid,’” he said. At one point he’d gone in to see the mighty Carson to plead his case. He brought a new, tongue-in-cheek press kit that Brenda had prepared for him, which he’d signed with his left hand. Unfortunately for Carlin, as he later admitted, he was high on cocaine at the time, and his manic state didn’t help his cause: “I went over to explain to him that it was a rational choice I had made. . . . The trouble was that I was on a coke run when I went over. I was kind of speedy, I had a tie-dyed T-shirt on, and I think it further distanced them from me.” But Carlin was undoubtedly an entertaining guest, and he could always get a laugh out of Carson.
Just after the album release, he joined Flip Wilson on the Tonight Show panel. Before Carlin was called out, Wilson spoke about Little David’s role in his friend’s new direction. “It’s an opportunity for George to feel freer as an artist, and for me to be a part of maybe, in some way, helping a guy that I admire,” he told Carson. Though the host referred to Carlin as “Crazy George,” the only thing outrageous about the guest was his appearance. His hair was now long enough to be pulled back in a ponytail, his beard was bushier than a lumberjack’s, and he wore a form-fitting pullover over his twiggy frame. After amusing Carson with his advice for Ed Sullivan impressionists and noting that RCA had forbidden him to include the “Birth Control” routine on his first album four years earlier, he thanked his host and his colleague for giving him the television exposure that was easing his transition into the college theaters.
Carlin’s generational appeal was confirmed when John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose him as one of several radical guests for their week in February as guest cohosts on The Mike Douglas Show. The former Beatle and his wife had recently relocated to New York, where they swiftly came under FBI surveillance. The couple knew something about censorship issues: Lennon’s 1972 single “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” so named for a statement Ono once made about woman’s subservient role in a male-dominated society, was widely banned from airplay. Lennon and Ono’s guests for their week on the Douglas show included Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and antiwar activist and Yippie cofounder Jerry Rubin.
On the program Carlin introduced a concept that he would keep in the act for some time. Calling attention to the absurdity of stand-up comedy itself, he came out and greeted the audience like a man inviting a visitor into his corner office. “Welcome to my job,” he joked. It was a quintessential stoner moment—wow, this is weird. Midway through an otherwise straightforward set, he announced that it was time for his break. Sitting down on a stool, he stopped talking and stared off into the distance, stealing a glance at his watch. A seemingly small gesture, it was the kind of “meta” comedy that only became commonplace years later, in the disassociated humor of Andy Kaufman or Mitch Hedberg.
When Carlin joined the cohosts on the panel, Douglas held up a copy of FM & AM and pointed to a sticker on the cover. “It is recommended that the contents of this album are screened carefully before clearing for airplay,” he read. Yoko laughed. Douglas noted that he’d never seen such a warning sticker on a record before: “Are they going to rate albums now, George? Is this an X-rated album?”
Though none of the material was that raunchy, Carlin’s compulsion to challenge prudery with language was evident right on the cover. In a hint at the one-line non sequiturs that would eventually become a staple of both his act and his writing, his photo on the back of the album was framed in fine print with a couple dozen zingers, several of them off-color: “Beer nuts is the official disease of Milwaukee. . . . A car-raising contest is a jack-off.” Although the longhaired hipster in the photo looked nothing like the product of a parochial school education, in such shameless juvenilia it was easy to hear the voice of the class cut-up doing time in Father Jablonski’s detention hall.
The host also wanted to know whether Carlin’s change had made him a better person, a better comic. “I don’t know about ‘better,’” he replied. “It’s made me more efficient.” His old repertoire of silly characters had effectively crowded out the real George Carlin from his own act, he said. “I was hiding behind these things. Television rewarded that. . . . I was not in my act anymore.” This time, it was Lennon who chuckled empathetically.
Carlin may have felt more efficient, but he was again exhibiting some of the erratic behavior the entertainment industry had been leery of a year or so earlier. In the spring he missed a few gigs due to laryngitis. On one visit to The Tonight Show, Carson mentioned that Carlin had almost had to cancel. “I’ve been staying up a little late,” Carlin offered lamely. A few months later he told Rolling Stone that his “
laryngitis” was exacerbated by his new fondness for snorting cocaine. For most of his life, he said, he’d been waking up and getting high. “After twenty years of that, I discovered cocaine and how good that was. And what was scary was that I discovered I could afford it.”
When a “German doctor” advised him to lay off the blow, he and Brenda had a heart-to-heart. “We decided to cut it all out,” Carlin told the magazine. “We said, ‘Well, we’ve been through the first half of our life stoned, let’s try the second half straight.’” Whatever his level of intoxication, Carlin’s career was suddenly flying. At the end of May he recorded a performance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The set became his second album, Class Clown. On July 3 he guest-hosted The Tonight Show for the first time. Five days later he sold out the main auditorium at Carnegie Hall.
Over the years, guest hosting The Tonight Show became a semi-regular occurrence for Carlin. Carson routinely used substitutes, taking most Mondays off and going on frequent vacations. Rat Pack sidekick Joey Bishop was the primary fill-in for much of the 1960s; Jerry Lewis was another regular replacement. Later, John Davidson and Joan Rivers, among others, served stints as Carson’s regular guest hosts. Carlin, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing an airbrushed long-sleeve T-shirt, was an unorthodox-looking guest host, to say the least.
When he was offered the gig, he put in three requests for the guests he wanted to interview: Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and Lenny Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr. All three were turned down. Fonda was preparing for the release of the documentary F.T.A. (alternately identified as “Free the Army” and “Fuck the Army”), an account of her “antiwar road show” with fellow actor Donald Sutherland, a sort of pacifists’ version of Bob Hope’s USO tours. Fonda would make her infamous trip to Hanoi a little later, in July. Nader, who was briefly considered as a third-party presidential candidate for 1972, was denied because of his relentless criticism of the automotive industry’s safety standards; The Tonight Show was heavily supported by advertising from U.S. car manufacturers.
The disagreement over Sally Marr, Carlin recalled, was especially disappointing. “That was really the capper,” he told Rolling Stone. “I had to call Sally and say, ‘Sally, you won’t believe this. [Lenny’s] been dead for six years and they’re still scared of him.’” Carson’s producers did make a few concessions, booking the Committee, the hippie sketch-comedy troupe that had been on the Smothers Brothers show with Carlin; former pro football linebacker Dave Meggyesy, known for his 1970 exposé Out of Their League, which blew the lid off the inhumane culture of the NFL; and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, led by a psychedelic gypsy-jazzbo born in Little Rock but shaped by San Francisco’s Summer of Love. (At the time Hicks and his band were in talks with Monte Kay to become the next Little David act, though it never panned out.)
“I remember thinking, Wow, they got some pretty hip people on the show,” says Meggyesy. He had interviewed a year earlier with a Tonight Show producer who, he says, was a “flaming right-winger”; only when Carlin agreed to host did the show find time for the radical linebacker. The singer and actress Debbie Reynolds was the sole representative from traditional show business, but even she brought along a bit of political baggage: She had recently been in the news for her quarrel with NBC over its use of Big Tobacco sponsors for her short-lived sitcom, The Debbie Reynolds Show.
In his opening monologue, Carlin spoke frankly about his transformation, attributing his newfound self-awareness to his experiences using acid. Not surprisingly, the admission was omitted from the tape of the show.
With FM & AM selling like a hit rock album, the comedian was no longer scrambling for gigs. On the eighth of July he headlined a sold-out Carnegie Hall. Stand-up comedy had some select history in the old Italianate auditorium, onetime home of the New York Philharmonic: Lenny Bruce had played there in February 1961, recording a charged set at midnight during one of the fiercest snowstorms ever to paralyze Manhattan. Brother Theodore, a legend of underground comedy who called his warped stream-of-consciousness “stand-up tragedy,” had a standing engagement of midnight performances in the building’s Recital Hall during the mid-1950s, billed as a “One Man Show of Sinister Humor.” In 1961 the foul-mouthed comedienne Belle Barth, whose recordings included one called I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable , headlined; legend has it that her show was a failure, because she’d been warned to clean up her act for the billing. Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Jackie Mason, and Dick Gregory all appeared at Carnegie Hall during the 1960s, and Bill Cosby made his debut there in 1971.
It was prestigious company for Carlin. After a dozen years of hustling, alternating real achievements such as The Tonight Show and Sullivan with the disappointments of the supper clubs and the game shows, Mary Carlin’s mischievous younger son was set to command the stage at the symbolic top of the show-business heap. He’d known how to get to Carnegie Hall all his life: He practiced.
In sharp focus, he did an hour and a half, relying heavily on new material about his parochial school upbringing, aversion to big business, and disdain for authority. Backstage at the reception, Mary appeared stricken. Elated that her “sensitive” son had earned a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall—Carnegie Hall!—she was nevertheless deeply conflicted that they were applauding his blasphemy and vulgarity. “She didn’t know it had reached this level. She didn’t know it had this force,” Carlin remembered. “It was dawning on her that this tough, irreverent thing was OK in many people’s eyes.”
At the heart of the matter was a particular segment Carlin had been working on for months, recording it during the Santa Monica Civic show at the end of May. The piece was an expansion of the ideas about language that had caused him so much trouble in Vegas. Plenty of potentially offensive words, he reasoned, could be safely uttered on television, depending on their context. An ass could be a biblical donkey, a bitch a female dog, a bastard an illegitimate child, and so on. What, then, were the words that had no redeeming meaning whatsoever? The resulting routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” was destined to become a landmark not only for stand-up comedy, but for the history of free speech in America.
There are 400,000 words in the English language, he reasoned, “and there are seven of them you can’t say on TV. What a ratio that is! Three hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety three . . . to seven.” Carlin’s “heavy seven”—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits—were the ones that would “affect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.” (When Class Clown came out later in the year, the album arrived with a front-cover “warning” that repeated this line.) Far from being a provocation, “Seven Words” was Carlin’s attempt to expose the absurdity of outlawing words. His tone was playful, not confrontational: “Tits doesn’t even belong on the list, ya know? . . . Sounds like a nickname, right? ‘Hey, Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits.’”
Even the mainstream media recognized the gentleness in the approach. “He takes seven expletives and analyzes the meaning and use of each of them with the wit and skill of the most compelling professor of linguistics,” wrote a New York Times contributor. “In the process, the verboten is rendered suitably ludicrous. It is an energized, intense, though never strident, and frequently hilarious turn.”
Carlin wasn’t alone. Adult language was becoming increasingly common in comedy by 1972. Lenny Bruce had left behind a small army of comic imitators who carried on the business of liberating four-letter words, and then wondered why they had difficulty getting booked on talk shows. Pryor, after radicalizing himself to the Black Power movement while living in Berkeley, had released an album the previous year called Craps (After Hours), which not only made ample use of most of the words on Carlin’s list, but also featured bits on masturbation, farting, and the mysterious legend of the “Snappin’ Pussy.”
Carlin found himself ideally suited to have it both ways, with his years of service in the pursuit of innocuous variety-show chuckles cou
nterbalanced by the emergence of his genuinely rebellious nature. He’d once told his friend Bob Altman—the free-associating thinker everyone called Uncle Dirty—that he was going to show him how to perform the kind of subversive, socially incisive comedy they both adored, “and make a million bucks at it.” Larry Hankin, an avowed Bruce admirer, suggests that Carlin’s breakthrough was a matter of emphasis. While others simply complained that their language kept them from landing television bookings, Carlin drew fresh material from the taboo itself. “He turned the mirror on us, on the comedians who were saying ‘fuck,’” says Hankin. “He made a hunk out of it, out of the complaint. . . . He pointed out the holes in the logic. And the best comedians—Mort Sahl, Lenny—they pointed out the holes in the logic.”
ON JULY 21, 1972, Carlin was due to headline the main stage at Milwaukee’s Summerfest, a multiple-day fairground event then entering its fifth season. Inaugurated in 1968 by longtime Milwaukee mayor Henry W. Maier, who envisioned an Oktoberfest-style celebration for his largely Germanic city, the festival was conceived with a distinct ethnic cast, including polka bands and a tribute to King Gambrinus, patron saint of brewers. The original name of the festival, Juli Spass—“July fun” in German—was quickly abandoned when various groups began lobbying city hall for a more inclusive concept. One protester recommended retitling the event the Fantastic Harlequin Kaleidoscope; organizers finally settled on the rather less fanciful Summerfest.
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 15