Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  Carlin had always looked to the farthest frontiers of comedy. Some of his earliest routines with Jack Burns deliberately trampled the line marking the no-man’s land of tastelessness. The “Seven Words,” of course, were a direct challenge to commonly accepted notions of propriety. As he reached what he felt was his pinnacle as a writer and performer, however, Carlin pushed harder than ever to make his audience contemplate the verboten. “I find out where they draw the line, then I deliberately step across it,” he said. “I try to bring them with me, and make them happy they came.”

  “Our Last Best Angry Man Takes on God, Children, and Testosterone,” read the sticker on the CD version of Carlin’s next HBO special, the charmingly titled You Are All Diseased. He had looked around and decided that children were the last sacred topic in America, and he directed his attention accordingly. Kids are overprotected, overscheduled, and overrated, he fulminated, when they’re really just like other people—“a few winners, a whole lotta losers.” He quickly dispensed with any potential criticism: “I know what you’re thinking—you say, ‘Jesus, he’s not gonna attack children, is he?’ Yes, he is. And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking. I know what I’m talking about.”

  One segment of the “Kids and Parents” bit featured Carlin’s rant about school shootings and the grief counseling that follows. Two months after You Are All Diseased had its HBO premier, two students at Columbine High School in suburban Colorado went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and injuring twenty-one before committing suicide, in the deadliest such incident in an American high school.

  E-mail in-boxes were soon filled with forwarded messages attributed to Carlin (or, alternately, to a Columbine student who witnessed the attack). On first glance, “The Paradox of Our Time” read like it could have been Carlin, with its rhythmic reliance on juxtapositions: “We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. . . . We’ve added years to life, not life to years.” But Carlin had nothing to do with it. The homily was eventually revealed to have been written by a Christian pastor from Seattle named Dr. Bob Moorehead, who was subsequently dismissed from his post in the wake of sexual assault allegations. Carlin, who had concluded his latest performance with a long diatribe about the awesome bullshit propagated by organized religion, was vehement in denying his connection to the Internet chain letters, which spread exponentially. For one thing, he pointed out in a post on his Web site, he was emotionally divorced from the future of mankind. Besides, he wrote, “It’s not only bad prose and poetry, it’s weak philosophy.”

  For some time Carlin’s name remained an Internet sensation, with anonymous e-mailers attributing various jokes and lists to him. One hoax involved an inane manifesto from “a BAD American . . . George Carlin.” Misleading information about Carlin on the Internet was understandable for one very good reason: He had earned a reputation, and not just among devoted fans, for profundity. Even in his thirties and forties, he had been comedy’s wise man. Now, officially entering his senior years, his white hair and beard made him seem that much more a comic philosopher. “Life is a festival only to the wise,” wrote Emerson. Carlin saw his country as a never-ending festival for his own amusement. When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show, he said. “If you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat. And some of us get to write about it and talk about it.”

  Carlin “had an instinctive knowledge of how persuasion, propaganda, and influence work, from all directions, by all parties,” says Jello Biafra, former frontman for the punk-rock group Dead Kennedys. The comedian’s punk attitude—his insistence on telling his audience the truth as he saw it, regardless of its popularity—was ahead of its time, says Biafra, who was a candidate for the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2000 and has since campaigned vigorously on behalf of Ralph Nader.

  Though Carlin was occasionally asked whether he would ever consider a third-party candidacy, his response was always the same. He had no faith in the voting process. He hadn’t voted in a presidential election since 1972, when he voted for George McGovern; he had volunteered in 1970 on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Jesse Unruh, the California Democrat who opposed incumbent Ronald Reagan, but found the experience discouraging. It was senseless to blame the politicians, he said on one of the specials: “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, then you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant politicians.”

  Not only did he distrust liberals as much as conservatives—he wasn’t interested in third parties, either. The “fashionable” and “faintly dangerous”-sounding Libertarianism was, for him, “just one more bullshit political philosophy.” He sided only with H. L. Mencken, who declared, “I belong to no party: I am my own party.”

  Carlin’s extensive history of expressing his distrust of religion made him an unofficial spokesman for nonbelievers. “When it comes to God’s existence,” he joked in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, “I’m not an atheist and I’m not an agnostic. I’m an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me.” Science, logic, and reason were his religion. Despite his disdain for New Age ideas, he told one magazine that he felt like a “star child.”

  I read somewhere that every atom in us—because we’re all made mostly of heavier elements—came from the inside of a star. Had to be. Couldn’t come from any other place. So we’re all star children, and we’re all identical in that sense. We have identical atoms. And they’re just rearranged differently. You’re the same thing as a Coke machine down the hall in your office, and a cigarette butt in the Buffalo airport.

  He sincerely tried to believe in God, Carlin said at the end of You Are All Diseased. But there were these nagging little clues to the contrary, such as “war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. . . . If this is the best God can do,” he said, “I am not impressed.”

  If God was the cause of so much catastrophe and cataclysm, he was happy for the spectacle. His working title for the next HBO special was I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die. For the cover of the compact disc, he began working with the San Francisco punk collage artist Winston Smith, who has done artwork for Playboy and the bands Green Day and Dead Kennedys. A man with an apocalyptic vision of American folly, who took his assumed name from the protagonist of Orwell’s 1984 and still wears a fedora, Smith is another example of Carlin’s kind of guy. When Carlin explained his idea for the cover art, Smith knew they were simpatico. Among the reams of images from old magazines he clips and saves for his work, “I’ve got volcanoes, earthquakes, you name it—I’ve got all kinds of disasters,” he says.

  The HBO show date was set for November 2001, with the CD to come out a month later. Smith was fast approaching his deadline for the cover art when, on the morning of September 11, he got a call from Carlin. Both men were watching the live footage of the collapse of New York’s two World Trade Center towers. “He was hastily getting me to get our stories straight,” says Smith, who was not surprised when Carlin said he’d have to change the name of the show. (Carlin eventually settled on Complaints and Grievances.) “I thought, under the circumstances, that was probably a wise decision,” says Smith. “His reaction was, ‘Yeah, the record company—they got no balls.’”

  For weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the country was paralyzed by a collective sense of disbelief, and humor seemed to many commentators like an unacceptable extravagance. Comedians fretted publicly about their role at a time when few felt like laughing. A teary David Letterman told his audience, “I don’t trust my judgment at a time like this.” When Bill Maher agreed with a guest’s contention that the Al Qaeda hijackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center could not reasonably be called “cowards,” as President George W. Bush had suggested, the host of ABC’s Politically Incorrect was widely denounced. Declining advertising support soon led to the show’s cancellation.

  A little over two months after the 9/11 attacks, Carlin took the stage at the Beacon Theatre for his third HBO special th
ere. After acknowledging the unavoidable topic—the “turd in the punch bowl”—he vowed to plow ahead with the job he was paid to do, ensuring that his audience had fun. “Otherwise, the terrorists win,” he said, sucking on the words like expired milk. “Don’t you love that stuff? It’s our latest mindless cliché.” Having trimmed nearly ten minutes of material that applied to the old working title, he did a segment of gross-out humor on scabs and “lip crud” and a lengthy bit about rubbernecking at traffic accidents that he’d done as a warm-up on a recent Tonight Show. The centerpiece, however, was a long list of “People Who Oughta Be Killed,” including those who use credit cards for small purchases and “guys named Todd.” He ended by resurrecting an old idea, a carefully reasoned explanation of how to pare the Ten Commandments down to two. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, he argued, is really just harmless fantasizing; without it, “what’s a guy gonna think about when he’s waxing his carrot?” The dirty old man was not about to temper his audacity according to the terrorism alerts—though he did show solidarity with his hometown by pulling on a New York City T-shirt as the end credits ran, to the carnivalesque tune “The Sidewalks of New York.”

  Shortly after Winston Smith finished his work on the Complaints and Grievances album art, he was invited to see Carlin perform at his new venue in Vegas, the MGM Grand, where several patrons mistook the white-bearded collage artist for the headlining comedian as he made his way through the casino. Midway through the show, Carlin grew frustrated with a woman who was talking loudly to her companion, ignoring the performer. “Lady, would you shut the fuck up?” Carlin finally blurted, followed by “other, much ruder things,” according to Smith. “People realized he wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the laughter kind of died down.”

  It was by no means Carlin’s only incident at the MGM, where he’d been performing since finishing his decade-long run at Bally’s. For four years he stuck to his contract at the MGM Grand, but it was a mutually disagreeable association. He’d been inciting walkouts for years—one reviewer of a show in Topeka described a scene including “picketers and counter-picketers” outside the theater and “perhaps a dozen folks” who walked out during the performance. At the MGM, Carlin perfected the art of driving faint-hearted ticket holders toward the exits. The constant complaint was that the show was too dark. “Riffs included suicide and beheadings,” wrote one local reviewer. At the end of the run, Carlin took the opportunity to renew his contempt for the city and the mindless escapism it stood for: “People who go to Las Vegas, you’ve got to question their fuckin’ intellect to start with,” he said. “Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fuckin’ moronic.” A woman in the audience reportedly yelled, “Stop degrading us!”

  Facetiously, Carlin thanked her, indicating he hadn’t actually heard what she said. “I hope it was positive. If not, well, blow me,” he said.

  Just after leaving the MGM in late 2004, Carlin announced that he was voluntarily checking himself into an exclusive rehab facility for an addiction to the pain killer Vicodin, which, compounded with his taste for fine wine, was becoming a problem. He’d never been in rehab before, as he took care to mention, quitting cocaine completely on his own and cutting down his pot smoking to an occasional hit or two (mostly to “punch up the writing,” as he told High Times magazine).

  He started with the Vicodin, he said, before Brenda died, when he dipped into the prescription she had been given for fibromyalgia, a mysterious, possibly stress-related condition characterized by extreme fatigue and sensitivity to pain. He felt “almost unworthy” in the program, he later said, with his self-described habit of a bottle or more of wine and four or five Vicodin per day: “Some of the guys in there were taking fifty Vikes a day and burning down their houses and backing into police vans and shit.”

  Even if they didn’t know about his Vicodin habit, Carlin’s friends were well aware that he’d become a wine connoisseur. When Carlin quietly put up five figures of his own money to support Chris Rush’s existential one-man show, Laughter Is the Sound of Bliss, he took the less-known comic to a fancy dinner. Rush wondered how his friend could justify ordering a $200 bottle of red wine. Then he tried it. “I had two sips, and I started rapping like I was on a mix of acid and Scopolamine,” says the former molecular biologist. Carlin looked at Rush and said, “Now you know why all those counts fought over vineyards.”

  His previous habits earned the comedian a voice-over role in the animated Pixar film Cars. Carlin’s character, fittingly, is an aging, daisy-painted Volkswagen minibus named Fillmore, who lives in a Day-glo geodesic dome and talks up the benefits of his “homemade organic fuel.” The character was based on Bob Waldmire, a real-life hippie throwback who travels Route 66, where much of the movie is set, in a VW bus, drawing postcards and maps of the historic road’s icons.

  Carlin’s rehab was timed to give him a clean bill of health before starting a new Vegas engagement, at the Stardust, in early 2005. He and Hamza knew Terry Jenkins, entertainment director for the Stardust’s parent company, Boyd Gaming, which owned a resort in Tunica, Mississippi, where Carlin had performed. Taking over for Wayne Newton, he stayed at the Stardust Theater until it closed in late 2006, in anticipation of demolition. The gaming company then brought the comedian over to the Orleans. He checked it out beforehand by asking Tommy Smothers, who had headlined there with his brother. “Probably the best comedy room in Vegas,” Smothers told him. Situated several blocks off the Las Vegas Strip on Tropicana Avenue, the Mardi Gras-themed Orleans was a welcome change for Carlin, who appreciated the fact that audiences needed to make an effort to find him there.

  Yet he still had plenty of healthy contempt for the town. Vegas, Carlin said not long after the move, remained for him “the most dispiriting, soul-deadening city on earth.” But he couldn’t deny the benefit of working out new material in front of an ever-changing audience, unlike the fixed number of devoted fans he could count on during his periodic visits to medium-sized markets around the country. Though the Vegas audience continually replenished itself, he said, it came with a cost—he couldn’t assume the crowds would be his from the outset. “In Pittsburgh I get the hardcore fans who know what I am about. In Las Vegas often I get people who saw me on Leno or got a coupon. . . . Each night I have to find out how they are going to be and I have to train them.” The Orleans, he knew, was as apt a fit as he was likely to find in Sin City. “He loved it here,” says Jenkins. “Almost every night, George would ask me what percent of the tickets were paid [not comped]. That would always give us an indication about how many people were making that trip from the Strip.” He’d also take note of the cab lines outside after the show. More cabs meant more guests specifically there to see Carlin.

  Jenkins and his colleagues watched the comic prepare for his last two HBO specials at Boyd’s Las Vegas properties. The title of Life Is Worth Losing, Carlin’s fourth show in a row (and last) from the Beacon Theatre, was a parody of Life Is Worth Living, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s inspirational prime-time program from the early days of network television. Carlin’s thirteenth HBO concert, recorded less than a year after his rehab, was relentlessly bleak, the one special that most supports the notion that he grew darker in his final years. Even the stage was designed like a snowy city cemetery at night. After his opening rap, a jargon-filled verse he called “Modern Man” (“I’m a hands-on, footloose, knee-jerk head case, prematurely post-traumatic, and I’ve got a love child that sends me hate mail”), Carlin unleashed a cavalcade of black thoughts, a conversational, almost punch-line-free tour through every macabre subject he could think of, from suicide, genocide, torture, and necrophilia to the beheadings that were recently in the news about Iraq. Such behavior doesn’t say much for the species, he noted drily. For a finale, he imagined “an apocalypse that is part Stephen King, part Quentin Tarantino, and part George Romero,” as one reviewer put it. “In the end, the world is consumed in a mighty conflagration. Only hedonist
ic New York, Carlin’s birthplace, is spared.”

  His harshest show was a gleeful phantasmagoria. Like dreams, jokes originate in the unconscious, said Sigmund Freud. Both “try to outwit the inner censor.” If Carlin were a painter, this would have been his deliberately ugly period. “There are a lot of comics working forty years who might have added ten jokes to their act over that time,” comedian Richard Lewis told the New York Times. “Carlin treats every HBO special like a gallery opening.”