Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  Try again.

  As Wiggins remembers it, Carlin finally abandoned the film project after a lengthy series of negotiations with the Canadian Film Board. He called his writing partner into the office to deliver the bad news. He couldn’t get an agreement on the level of control he wanted. “Wigs,” he said, “remember—if you ain’t got control, you ain’t got shit.”

  At the end of 1978 Little David put out what would prove to be its last Carlin album, a compilation intended to capitalize on the notoriety of the Pacifica case. Smartly titled Indecent Exposure, it was a best-of collection specifically focused on the comic’s taboo topics and forbidden language, with routines including “Sex in Commercials,” “Bodily Functions,” and “Teenage Masturbation,” bookended, of course, by “Seven Words” and “Filthy Words.” The cover pictured Carlin in another pose connecting his comedy to crime—wearing a pair of running shoes and a flasher’s overcoat. As much as the dirty words had made him a household name, he was ready to move on. “Frankly, I feel dated, because I’ve continued to do that material for so long that I feel a bit of a prisoner,” he said.

  For Carlin, the next couple of years were wilderness years, a time for regrouping. “It was like a breathing-in period,” he reflected. “Everything can’t be constantly on an upswing. Nature shows you there’s inhale and exhale. . . . Other people would call it ‘His career was going in the shithouse.’”

  Gradually weaning himself off his cocaine habit, he was emotionally drained. His continued use strained his relationship with Brenda, who was working hard to stay sober. Their relationship was not always a happy one. Carlin admitted on occasion to physical altercations with his wife during his drug years. Even so, their love for each other was apparent. “They had this wonderful rapport,” says Bob Kurtz, who watched the couple hug like honeymooners during the recording sessions he conducted for Carlin’s voiceover.

  Carlin also learned that he had major problems with the IRS. He had seriously neglected his taxes, which he blamed on bad advice and his own cocaine habit. “By the time 1980 arrived,” he recalled, “I believe I was about two million dollars upside down with the IRS, and it got to be another million before the saga was finished.” He had a new manager, a regional promoter named Jerry Hamza, a native of Rochester, New York, who had booked some of Carlin’s shows before agreeing to handle the comic’s career. Before handling Carlin, Hamza had specialized in country music, organizing appearances by iconic artists such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn. With Hamza’s help, the comedian began the long, grueling task of paying off his enormous debt.

  His personal problems were affecting his ability to see where his career was headed. He knew it, but he was philosophical about it. “My album career had faded, and I didn’t have a personal vision of myself anymore,” he said. “I’d gone through my autobiographical stage. Then I started to get into what they call ‘observational’ comedy—these things that have no importance at all, but they’re universal. . . . It was a casting about, a wallowing in the backwater of this career success I’d had.”

  He agreed to a guest appearance on Welcome Back, Kotter, the ABC sitcom starring the former Village comic Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher returning to his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Carlin played Wally “The Wow” Wechsel, a popular disc jockey who was once one of the Sweathogs, the remedial students who were the stars of the show. Somewhat more intriguing was the gig he took narrating Americathon, a weirdly prescient futuristic scenario written by the Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, who had established their loony brand of sketch comedy on Pacifica’s KPFK. With an ensemble cast including John Ritter, Fred Willard, a young Jay Leno, and the new wave rock ’n’ roller Elvis Costello, the movie imagined the United States two decades down the road, in the year 1998. Having run out of oil and on the verge of bankruptcy, the government sponsors a telethon. Not only did this now out-of-print film predict a rash of eventualities (such as China’s compromise with capitalism) that seemed ludicrous at the end of the 1970s, it also neatly predicted the gleeful doomsday prophesies of the latter years of Carlin’s own career.

  He continued to make a handful of Tonight Show appearances each year, working out his new material on the national stage. (Carlin would claim to have done the show 105 times by the time Carson retired in 1992,) He and Muhammad Ali were two of the guests on an episode guest-hosted by Diana Ross; he appeared with Richard Pryor not long after Pryor’s infamous freebasing accident. During one guest-hosting spot in early 1981, he sat at a desk during the monologue and trotted out the latest version of his old standby, the mock newscast. One item involved the “Gay Liberation Front, who along with the Tall People’s Association have announced they will oppose the Army Corps of Engineers next week when it attempts to destroy a fifty-foot dike.” With Debbie Reynolds once again a guest, as she had been on his first guest-hosting night in 1972, Carlin rounded out the episode by discussing sexual fantasies and men’s beards with Dr. Joyce Brothers.

  At the end of the 1970s, comedy in America was on the verge of its own kind of gold rush, with thousands of prospectors and a fortunate few who would cash in. The folk clubs of the sixties, with their regular showcase opportunities for comedians, were almost a thing of the past. The momentary heat of the disco scene was also fading fast. The vast disillusionments of the 1970s—war, political corruption, garbage strikes, hostage situations—left a gaping opportunity for comic relief, and nightclubs devoted to comedy soon began popping up in cities across the country. In LA, the Improv and the Comedy Store faced fresh competition with the opening of the Laugh Factory in 1979. Two years later Caroline Hirsch opened the original Caroline’s in New York, where the Improv, Catch a Rising Star, and Comic Strip were already fixtures. Boston, another fertile breeding ground that would produce Leno, Steven Wright, and Paula Poundstone, among many others, had the Ding Ho, Nick’s Comedy Stop, and the Comedy Connection.

  In San Francisco’s financial district, the entrepreneur behind a rock venue called the Old Waldorf converted the room’s former backstage area into an English pub for the lunch crowd, then asked a local promoter to turn the space into a comedy club at night. That place became the Punch Line. With Cobb’s Comedy Club just up Columbus in Fisherman’s Wharf and a hovel called the Holy City Zoo out in the Richmond district, San Francisco soon renewed its reputation as a comedy mecca. Homegrown talent such as Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, and Bobby Slayton crossed paths nightly with carpetbaggers like Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres.

  The rise of Saturday Night Live was often credited as one reason for the resurgence of interest in comedy. Another was HBO, which was reminding home viewers of the pleasure of seeing a comic craftsman work in long form, as opposed to the six-minute allotments of talk show appearances. “If you were in Birmingham, Alabama, and said ‘stand-up comedy,’ people would think Bob Hope,” said one veteran standup. “It took cable to expose America to comedy as an art form.”

  Carlin, of course, was well beyond the nightclub stage by this time. Having established that the rock ’n’ roll crowd would pay to see a comedy star in a concert setting, he had helped clear the path for major concert draws such as Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy. Ironically, the new emphasis on club comics had the effect of pushing Carlin off into his own realm.

  He was a hero to many of the new generation of comics, who loved the twisted recesses of his mind and his insistence on concise language. “There are so many comedians that wanted to be a comedian because of him,” says Steven Wright. “What a brain he had.” But Carlin was also considerably older than the new breed, turning forty-four in 1981. He’d been too young for Lenny’s generation and too old for SNL, and now he was too successful to join the fraternity of the clubs. He had become an island—a creature of show business who would just as soon have nothing to do with show business. His record sales had dropped off, his movie had fallen through, and he didn’t know where the HBO affiliation would lead. It would be so
me time before he realized that his unique voice had only begun to develop.

  9

  AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

  Carlin’s resurrection began, funnily enough, just after his second heart attack in the summer of 1982. Scheduled to tape his third HBO special, this time at Carnegie Hall, Carlin suffered a much more serious heart attack than the first, while watching a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. After checking into the hospital, he was flown to Atlanta, where an Emory University Hospital surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig was experimenting with balloon angioplasty, at that time an innovative method of opening obstructed arteries. Carlin was an early recipient of the treatment.

  A year before the heart attack, he’d had an accident behind the wheel. Driving from Toronto to Dayton, where Brenda was visiting family, he hit a utility pole in the early morning hours in downtown Dayton, breaking his nose and suffering cuts on his face. Taxes, heart scares, car crashes: Still, he muddled through. In January 1981 Carlin stepped up as the first guest host of a year-old sketch comedy show on ABC called Fridays. An unabashed attempt to elbow in on some of the audience NBC had amassed for its wildly popular Saturday Night Live, Fridays enjoyed a honeymoon season with its ensemble cast before reformatting to accommodate a weekly guest host. As he had been on SNL, Carlin was the guinea pig. This time, though, the connection was stronger: The show’s writing staff was headed by old friend Jack Burns, who also served as the on-air announcer.

  Fridays was a curious blend of old school and new, with a cast and crew of TV neophytes, several of whom would later reconvene on Seinfeld (co-creator Larry David, writer Larry Charles, actor Michael Richards), and a hip selection of musical guests including the Pretenders and the Jim Carroll Band. (Carlin’s episode featured meat-and-potatoes rockers George Thorogood and the Destroyers.) The week after Carlin was on, Shelley Winters was the guest host; the Methuselan Henny Youngman followed her.

  The show, which was soon doomed by ABC’s decision to expand its popular Nightline news program to include Friday nights, had a short-lived reputation for especially risqué political and drug-related humor. One memorable recurring sketch featured the Three Stooges as heavy pot smokers. A month after Carlin hosted, Andy Kaufman made a notorious appearance in which his refusal to act in a live sketch precipitated a skirmish with Burns, who charged onto the set from offstage. Only a few cast members knew about the ploy in advance, and for years many viewers believed they’d witnessed an actual brawl on TV.

  The Carlin episode featured a mockumentary-style short film purporting to be a behind-the-scenes look at the real source of the comedian’s observational humor—a writing team of ordinary folks, including a retired drill-press operator and a part-time beautician, plucked from the street. The bit had Bob and Ray written all over it. “I figured out early on that if I was going to stay in tune with the public, well, I’d better have a writing staff that was representative of the public,” Carlin tells the camera.

  His style was so familiar to fellow comics that Carlin became a target of parody on another SNL knockoff, SCTV, the sketch show of Toronto’s Second City. New cast member Rick Moranis began doing a wicked impression of him. In absurd scenarios—Carlin playing Biff in Death of a Salesman, for instance—Moranis portrayed the comedy veteran as an incessant one-track mind, taking notes for bits during ordinary conversations, prefacing every comment with “Didja ever notice? . . .” and exhaling “Weeeeird!” after every inane observation. When someone gets knocked out and then comes to, Moranis wondered, why don’t we say he’s knocked in?

  If Carlin’s observational phase constituted a bridge between the self-expression of his boom years and the social criticism he would soon undertake, it hit a sudden high point with the title hunk of his next album, A Place for My Stuff. His first in four years, it was released on Atlantic, the parent company of Little David. (By the time of his next recording, Carlin on Campus, Carlin and Jerry Hamza had a deal in place with Atlantic for distribution of their new boutique label, Eardrum Records, which bore the motto “Stick it in your ear.” Eventually the partners purchased the Little David catalog and reissued Carlin’s early albums, individually and in the boxed set The Little David Years.) Stuff was an anomaly in the Carlin catalog, featuring live tracks alternating with studio-recorded commercial and game show parodies. The seven “Announcements” tracks were the same kind of fast-moving, jack-of-all-trades radio parodies—book club promotions (“How to Turn Unbearable Pain into Extra Income”), an ad for a television movie about a guy who wants to be an Olympic swimmer (“Wet Dream”)—that he’d created as a schoolboy with his Webcor tape recorder.

  The “Stuff” routine, a lighthearted take on the human pack rat—“That’s what your house is—a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get . . . more stuff”—didn’t appear on an HBO special until his fourth, but it was an instant favorite among fans and fellow comedians. When Carlin did the bit on the first American Comic Relief, the HBO fund-raiser hosted by Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billy Crystal, he stole the show. “We all talked about that again and again,” says director John Moffitt. “That was such a big hit. Perfect delivery. Everyone who worked on the show, and I kept in touch with most of them, always talked about George’s ‘Stuff.’”

  Three months after his heart attack, Carlin was at Carnegie Hall for the third HBO special. In a taped opening, he visited the old neighborhood, asking average New Yorkers the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” One guy gives him directions by bus. How about the subway? Carlin asks. “Got a gun permit?” the guy replies.

  At the hall, he strolled across a huge oriental rug covering the venerable stage and led with the kind of deliberately outrageous icebreaker that marked all his HBO specials to come: “Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” It was a calculated rejoinder to Ronald Reagan’s quip about pro-choice activists: “I notice that everyone in favor of abortion has already been born.”

  He’d recently taken six months off, the comic said, only three of them voluntary. Just as Richard Pryor had turned his self-immolating freebasing incident into inspired material for his own act, Carlin joked that it was time to update the “Comedians’ Health Sweepstakes.” He now led Pryor two to one in heart attacks, he said, but Pryor was beating him one to nothing in “burning yourself up.” Though the performance flew by the seat of its pants—there was no opportunity to tape a backup set, as was customary with the On Location series, and they couldn’t even get in to set up until late in the day because of an afternoon recital—the show went a long way toward ensuring that Carlin would remain an HBO fixture for years to come.

  “The orchestra chairs are piled behind Carlin on the stage of the great hall, giving the impression that he and a full house of laughing fans sneaked into the building while none of the authorities were looking,” wrote Tom Shales in a Washington Post review. Though the comedian might have “spent a bit too much of his recuperation staring into his refrigerator or contemplating bowls of Rice Krispies,” overall, the critic found that the performer had not lost his touch, “and his touch is frequently cherishable.”

  “HBO didn’t kick in for me until 1982,” Carlin later suggested. “That’s when I learned who I was in that period.” His first two specials for the network were directed by Marty Callner, who was doing all of the On Location shows at the time, but Carlin at Carnegie was directed by first-timer Steven J. Santos. He’d worked on a crew the previous year for The Pee-Wee Herman Show, which was directed by Callner. Santos stayed with Carlin through Apt. 2C, the comic’s ill-fated HBO pilot, in 1985.

  On the road, Carlin and Hamza were “four-walling” theaters, renting out the venues and then promoting the shows themselves. For the rest of his life Carlin continued to do as many as a hundred dates a year, taking home paychecks considerably larger than he might have drawn from a tour promoter. He’d play anywhere, he joked, as long as it had a zip code. When Jim Wiggins reset
tled in Illinois and revamped an old airline pilot’s bar in Palatine called Durty Nelly’s, he asked Carlin to come bless the place. Planning a trip to New York, Carlin arranged a layover in Chicago and told Wiggins to book two shows on the night he’d be in town.

  Since the comedian had long ago moved off the nightclub scene into theaters, Carlin’s booking was big news for Durty Nelly’s. The club’s big back room, which Wiggins had named the Blarney Stone, held just 180 customers. “I’m sure we stuffed 225 people into each show,” says Wiggins. “They were ass-cheek to ass-cheek in that room.” He made up special “tickets”—bars of soap wrapped in Day-glo sticky paper—and had the audience surprise Carlin by holding them up the first time he swore. Biff Rose, Carlin’s loony old colleague from The Kraft Summer Music Hall, opened the shows, with Wiggins introducing. “There’s me opening for two of my heroes, two of my kids’ godfathers, in a room I had designed and decorated,” Wiggins recalls. “It was a highlight of my life.” En route to the airport the next day, he gave Carlin a briefcase full of cash. Carlin handed it back to Joan, Wiggins’s wife. “That’s your money,” he said. “I did it as a gift for all you guys”—all the comedians still pounding the club circuit.