Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  As both sides prepared their arguments, WBAI held a legal fund-raiser in New York, headlined by Carlin himself. The event was hosted by Josephson, who would later correspond with Carlin about Bob and Ray, the old radio comedians, whose work Josephson produced for years.

  The station also prepared an hour-long, news magazine-style recap called The Carlin Case, which aired on March 30. Solemnly issuing a disclaimer at the top of the hour, the station led with a reading of Douglas’s letter of complaint, complete with its unexpurgated report of his hearing the words “cocksucker, cunt, fuck, shit, and a whole list of others.” To provide some context, the producers conducted interviews with the writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and James T. Farrell about their own obscenity cases. Communications lawyer Jeff Cowan noted the absurdity that few Americans knew exactly why Earl Butz, the former secretary of agriculture, had been forced to resign for comments he had made during President Gerald Ford’s reelection campaign in 1976. Asked about the Republicans’ loss of black voters, the cabinet member, notorious within the Beltway for telling off-color jokes, had said, “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.” Under the FCC’s Carlin ruling, Cowan said, a radio station “would risk fine or lose its license” if it simply reported the news.

  Given the Miller test, Tillotson felt certain that the Court would have to agree with Pacifica—that Carlin’s routine, though potentially offensive, did not appeal to the prurient interest, and that it did possess serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. “I think our immediate feeling was that we had a clean First Amendment case,” he says.

  The Court heard the case on April 18. Josephson, for one, was “deeply moved” by Plotkin’s argument. “The Supreme Court is a very magisterial, august, impressive institution, and it’s designed to be that way,” says the man who once joked that WBAI listeners were so loyal, the station could have scheduled several hours a week “of nothing but farting, [and] the program would soon have a large and dedicated following.” But Plotkin wasn’t as sharp as he had once been. During his oral argument, he was asked a hypothetical question. Suppose a radio station played an hour-long recording of someone simply repeating a four-letter word. “Under your definition,” asked one of the justices, “would the FCC be powerless because of the censorship statute to affect that?” Plotkin replied that yes, he thought the commission “would be powerless to tell them to stop doing it.” The attorney’s answer, writes free speech activist Marjorie Hein, was “constitutionally sound but not very politically prudent.”

  Plotkin’s misstep didn’t help, but it wasn’t the deciding factor. Rumor had it that Chief Justice Warren Burger, having lunch on the day before the ruling was announced with Frank Mankiewicz, then the president of National Public Radio, vowed that his court would never allow such language on the airwaves. Schattenfield had been right: Getting nine old men to agree to “pass the fucking salt” was a losing proposition.

  By a 5-4 vote handed down on July 3, 1978, the justices reversed the Circuit Court’s finding and sided with the FCC. The Court’s newest member at the time, Justice John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed by Gerald Ford and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in late 1975, wrote the majority opinion. He emphasized the uniquely pervasive nature of broadcasting and the Court’s belief that children were due full government protection from “indecent” speech delivered over the airwaves. By hewing closely to the facts of the case and acknowledging that the FCC was reserving the formation of broader guidelines in such matters for the unspecified future, the Court passed on an opportunity to clarify which speech, if any, would be subjected to FCC reprimand moving forward, says Tillotson: “They ducked.”

  The veteran liberal Justice William J. Brennan wrote a sharply worded dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Thurgood Marshall. “Surprising as it may seem to some individual Members of this Court,” Brennan wrote, “some parents may actually find Mr. Carlin’s unabashed attitude toward the seven ‘dirty words’ healthy, and deem it desirable to expose their children to the manner in which Mr. Carlin defuses the taboo surrounding the words.” That there might not be huge numbers of such parents “does not alter that right’s nature or its existence,” he wrote. “Only the Court’s regrettable decision does that.” The adult individual’s right to receive information, Brennan submitted, far outweighed the “minimal discomfort” of an offended listener “during the brief interval before he can simply extend his arm and switch stations or flick the ‘off’ button.” Aiming the judicial equivalent of more than a few epithets at his fellow jurors, he lamented their “depressing inability” to appreciate viewpoints outside their own, calling it “an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”

  The decision was big news in Hollywood. “Court Bans ‘7 Dirty Words,’” ran a banner headline across page 1 of the Los Angeles Times’s final edition that day. A few months later, Norman Lear invited Carlin to join the ACLU’s Southern California affiliate at a dinner called “The Politics of Humor.” Fellow honorees included Lily Tomlin, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, and Lear’s onetime partner Bud Yorkin, with whom he’d produced All in the Family and Sanford and Son. Though Carlin did wear a dark suit—“that’s as far as I go, even for the First Amendment,” he joked—he couldn’t take the event seriously, making faces across the table at his friend Tomlin all night long. “What the hell have two comics and a cartoonist really contributed to the cause of freedom in America?” he wondered.

  Legal scholars were keenly interested, too. Commentator George Will applauded the Court’s action in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post (“Is There a ‘Periphery’ on the First Amendment?”). In response, Nicholas von Hoffman, the Post columnist and onetime 60 Minutes contributor, wrote a mocking piece headlined “Seven Dirty Words: A Cute Form of Censorship.” Von Hoffman, who had been dumped from his television gig by 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt for calling Richard Nixon “a dead mouse on the country’s kitchen floor,” wondered why the Pacifica ruling hinged on the possible presence of children in the WBAI audience at two o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Surely, he reasoned, kids at that hour were “locked up in school taking sex education courses, where presumably Carlin’s Anglo-Saxon terminology is replaced with Latin cognates on whose acceptability for broadcasting neither the commission nor our nine most exalted jurisprudes have yet to rule.”

  Just after Independence Day, the New York Times ran its own analysis of the case. The writer led by noting ABC’s recent broadcast of a news special called Youth Terror: The View from Behind the Gun, which had featured “a good deal of street talk, including words never before spoken on national television.” The fact that twenty-one network affiliates had declined to run the program, which the parent company refused to sanitize, was seen in the broadcasting industry as proof that the airwaves were not in imminent danger of being overrun by foul language, no matter how the Supreme Court decided. “Our network operates by its own set of standards that aren’t affected by the decision,” said the president of ABC-TV. Philosophically, however, the court’s ruling set a bad precedent, he said, “with long-range implications on our freedom of expression.”

  In fact, the FCC stumped everyone by dropping the matter entirely. Incoming chairman Charles D. Ferris, who had succeeded Richard E. Wiley in October 1977, told the Times that he didn’t consider the Supreme Court ruling a mandate to go after broadcasters. When the commission received complaints about Monty Python’s Flying Circus from viewers of WGBH, Boston’s public television station, who were offended by the show’s “scatology, immodesty, vulgarity, nudity, profanity, and sacrilege,” the FCC dismissed them. Incredibly, from the Supreme Court’s “dirty words” decision until well into the Reagan administration, the FCC did not pursue any complaints at all about broadcast indecency. Mark Fowler, the chairman who took over following Ferris’s departure
in 1981, even seemed to agree with Justice Brennan’s advice about the merits of using the “off” button: “If you don’t like it,” he said, “just don’t let your kids watch it.” Controversy over the FCC’s jurisdiction in the wake of FCC v. Pacifica did not come to a head until many years after the decision.

  For Carlin, although the outcome was disappointing, his indirect involvement in a landmark case of American jurisprudence felt like a validation. After all those years of being called in front of the principal, the priest, the barracks sergeant, and the boss, “those transgressions suddenly seemed like small potatoes.” “That these nine men had summoned me into their presence to question my conduct absolutely thrilled the perverse and rebellious side of my nature,” he said. “I thought, Even if I just become a little footnote in the law books, I’ll be a happy footnote forever.”

  True to form, while the lawyers and commissioners were busy parsing the differences between obscenity and indecency and debating the true intentions of the Radio Act of 1927, Carlin cut to the heart of the matter. “All I want is a list,” he said. “When I was a kid, nobody would tell me which words not to say. I had to go home and say them and get hit. As a result of the WBAI case, the Supreme Court has put the FCC in the same position as the parent. It can punish you after the fact, but it can’t tell you beforehand exactly what the restricted areas are.”

  So he took it upon himself to collect them all, like a kid filling a binder of buffalo nickels. By the time his HBO special Carlin on Campus aired in 1984, the comic featured in his act “An Incomplete List of Impolite Words” that numbered 350. Two decades later, he was selling posters and T-shirts at his concert appearances featuring small-print lists of “2,443 Dirty Words.” By then, he said, he was just the repository for this extended exercise in creative language. The credit was due to the hundreds of fans who’d sent him their suggestions, and to the anonymous coiners of words and phrases, from “butterbags” to “buzzing the Brillo”—“folk poets, all.”

  Timothy Jay, a professor in the psychology department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, has the unusual distinction of being a scholar of swearing. He befriended Carlin several years after FCC v. Pacifica, often providing the comic with his own lengthy lists of debatable words and their offensiveness ratings. The author of Cursing in America, Jay saw how Carlin grew quite serious about his role as the custodian of potty talk.

  In Jay’s opinion, the Supreme Court decision was simply “bad law.” “One of the real weaknesses is that the government offers no evidence that there’s anything harmful about this speech,” he says. “We presume harm to children, when in fact they know all this shit before they get into school. It’s not realistic. Anybody with a good sense of parenting knows that kids know all this stuff.”

  Shortly before the Supreme Court heard the Pacifica case, Carlin made a sly reference to the juvenile nature of his comic mind. Making a brief appearance on a celebrity-stocked salute to “Mr. Television,” Milton Berle, he brought out his prized copy of Berle’s joke book, Out of My Trunk, which an uncle had given him when he was a boy. Carlin had been a fan, he said, since the origins of Texaco Star Theater, when he was ten. “Thanks to your influence, there are still people who think of me as ten years old,” he joked.

  The attention given the case didn’t quite carry over into his career. On the Road, Carlin’s seventh album—the sixth in five years—had come out in 1977. It was the second in a row that didn’t go gold. The album came with an eight-page insert, a “Libretto,” which combined transcriptions of the album’s routines with cartoon illustrations. The cover was stamped with an R rating—“Recommended for Adult Listening.” There were some pedestrian bits on dogs and supermarkets, but Carlin was strangely preoccupied with death, from the cover image—the comic caught in the act of drawing a smiley face on a chalk outline at an accident scene—to a prolonged bit on “Death and Dying.”

  The exposition on dying (“It’s one of the few fair things in life. Everybody catches it once”) featured an observation that would become almost as much a staple of the comedy club explosion of the 1980s as the two-drink minimum: the prevalence of dying metaphors in comedy. Comics die. They bomb. An unreceptive room is like a morgue. On the other hand, when their jokes hit the mark, they kill. “Laugh? I thought I’d die.”

  Despite having done versions of this bit, with segments on funerals, suicide, and the afterlife, on the road for a year or more, Carlin was unprepared for the crisis he faced on St. Patrick’s Day in 1978. Driving his daughter to school, he was bothered by an ache in his jaw and the feeling that the pain reliever he’d taken had gotten stuck in his throat. When the pain didn’t subside, he drove to his doctor’s office, where blood tests confirmed he was suffering a heart attack.

  Besides the obvious abuses of his drug habits, Carlin hadn’t exactly been diligent about his diet. “He’d come home after a gig and cook up half a pound of stove-top macaroni with a brick of butter,” says one friend. “That was his midnight snack.” Even after disciplining himself in the kitchen, the comedian lived with the prospect of further heart trouble for another thirty years. His father’s first symptom of heart disease, as he sometimes pointed out, had been “a trip to the cemetery.”

  Within a few months of the first heart incident Carlin was back onstage in Phoenix, reworking much of the material from On the Road for his second HBO special. Taped in the round at the Celebrity Star Theater, the performance took place a few weeks after the Supreme Court decision. When it aired, George Carlin Again! opened with a scrapbook-style slide show of the comic as a schoolboy and teenager, posing with various neighborhood friends and his dog, Spotty.

  The ninety-minute taping was transferred to film for a proposed feature he had been working on for some time, to be called The Illustrated George Carlin. The story would follow his life from birth to death, using a variety of media. “There’ll be a lot of concert footage with some cartooning and little vignettes,” he explained. “As far as I know, no comedian has made a film with his own concert footage.”

  He opened the phone book and found a listing for an animator, Bob Kurtz. “I don’t think anybody had ever found us through the Yellow Pages before,” says Kurtz, laughing. Carlin and Brenda went over to see the artist, who listened to the comic’s ideas for the film, then got up and drew a few frames off the top of his head. “Two minutes [after Carlin and Brenda left], I got a call,” Kurtz recalls. It was Carlin, telling the animator he had the job. In the pre-cell phone era, Kurtz was dumbstruck by how quickly it happened. Where are you? he asked. “I’m across the street in a phone booth,” Carlin responded.

  The Illustrated George Carlin preoccupied Carlin for months. “In his very soul, it was the story of George,” says Jim Wiggins, a comic friend of Carlin’s who worked with him as a writer on the project. “Of course, there were so many layers, it was not really autobiographical.” It was, however, “really silly.”

  Wiggins was the owner of a heating and air conditioning company in the Chicago area when he decided to sell the business and give comedy a try in the early 1970s. Like Carlin, he was a chronic stoner; also like Carlin, he could do a mean radio announcer’s voice. Inspired by FM & AM, he started writing letters to Carlin. To his surprise, the comedian wrote back. When Wiggins took his first phone call from his pen pal, it was a request: Carlin would be flying in to play the Mill Run Theater in Niles. Could Wiggins come by with a bag of grass? Wiggins caught every show that weekend, and a friendship was born.

  For a few years Wiggins operated a Monday night comedy show in the back room of a gay restaurant known as Le Pub, in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. Tim & Tom, the biracial act of Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, were fellow regulars. One winter night Wiggins and his wife, Joan, who was pregnant with their fourth son, drove up to Milwaukee in an unheated Pontiac to bring Carlin another stash. Sitting on the edge of the stage together long after the show had ended, Joan spontaneously asked Carlin to be the baby’s godfather.

 
Shortly thereafter Wiggins packed up his family and moved to Hollywood, where they put $8,000 down on a big old dilapidated house with an extension that had housed a doctor’s examining rooms. Wiggins converted the place, a few blocks northwest of Hollywood and Vine, into a rooming house for aspiring comics trying to break in at Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store and Budd Friedman’s Improv. Several months into the project, strapped for cash, Wiggins asked Carlin for a $1,500 loan to buy drywall. He’d repay it when he got his check for writing gags for Chuck Barris on The Gong Show, he said. Carlin sent a messenger with three grand and told Wiggins not to bother paying him back. Set the money aside, he said, as an emergency fund for the comedians staying in the rooming house. “Then tell them they don’t owe it to you. Tell them to pass it on to somebody else.”

  Working to establish his own comedy career, Wiggins (who now calls himself “The Last Hippie”) had the nagging suspicion that people would think he was deliberately emulating Carlin. “We could do wordplay like ping pong,” he says. “We had the same kind of laugh, the same kind of attitude. It was always in the back of my mind.” Working on a screenplay for The Illustrated George Carlin, they began spending afternoons in an old office Carlin kept in a Santa Monica building right out of a film noir: “Like an old detective’s building, down a corridor with glass-paneled doors,” Wiggins recalls. There they spent countless hours writing gags for the proposed movie. One day Carlin told Wiggins that their shared sensibility was likely to stand in the way of Wiggins ever becoming a well-known act. The death of Lenny Bruce had left a void for him to step into, he said. “You’re not that lucky. I’m not gonna die.” When Carlin was hospitalized, Wiggins sent him a telegram:Dear George,