Having taken Lenny Bruce’s radical moral reassessments to an extreme in Life Is Worth Losing, the next special, It’s Bad for Ya, was Carlin’s nod to the other comic revolutionary of the 1950s, Mort Sahl. Aired live from the arts center in Santa Rosa, California, a stiffer, puffier Carlin, now seventy, padded carefully around a cluttered set designed to look like a cozy den and office, with a thick dictionary on a stand given a place of prominence at center stage. A memorable bit on removing the names of deceased friends from your address book segued into thoughts on the excessive culture of child worship, the misplaced use of the word “pride” (“Being Irish isn’t a skill. You wouldn’t say you’re proud to be five-eleven”), and the “delusional thinking” behind religious and patriotic customs, such as swearing on the Bible and removing your hat for the singing of “God Bless America.” In what would prove to be the last recorded hunk George Carlin ever performed, in what has to be the single most impressive body of solo material ever assembled by an American comedian, he went out, fittingly, with an analysis of the existence of individual rights. There are none, he claimed, breaking the bad news to fans who had come to see him as a beacon of American freedom: “We made ’em up.” And if they can be taken away, they’re not rights: “They’re privileges.”
Between the last two specials, Carlin took part in a tribute to Sahl at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. After the show he made out a big check to his predecessor, who, eighty years old and still performing, was having some financial trouble. Sahl had watched Carlin’s career closely, and the cantankerous elder comic admits he didn’t agree with all of it. “Stuff about white guys playing golf is like throwing fish to a seal,” he says, and he never liked the swearing: “The only time I’ve ever cursed onstage is when I read from the Watergate transcripts.” Still, Carlin was one of the only comedians who followed Lenny and Mort who took the job of social critic seriously. “America has been dying for several years,” says Sahl. “Would you know it from the comedians?” Watching Carlin’s final few HBO shows, you’d have no doubt.
Five years after receiving the Free Speech in Comedy Award at the 2002 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, Carlin returned to Aspen for his last appearance there. Backstage, he casually told John Moffitt he was suffering from heart failure, that he’d recently been in and out of the hospital. “He was so much shorter and frailer. I was really worried about him,” says Moffitt, who pleaded with his old friend to use the oxygen tank the festival had on hand for performers suffering adverse reactions to the altitude. Carlin waved him off, saying he’d resort to it if he needed it. He went onstage with his notes for the upcoming HBO show—working title, The Parade of Useless Bullshit—and he did nearly an hour and a half without a break. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
“He was a tough little guy,” says Moffitt. “The good news is that he was working until the very end.”
In June 2008 the Kennedy Center announced that Carlin would receive its eleventh annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. That it took eleven tries for him to get it was nearly as shocking as the first time he said cocksucker in Milwaukee. Richard Pryor accepted the first Twain Prize in 1998, followed by Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, and Steve Martin, among others. If he felt it was about time, Carlin kept it to himself. He seemed genuinely pleased with the honor. “Thank you, Mr. Twain,” he said in a statement. “Have your people call my people.”
Five days later he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with chest pain. He died late that afternoon, June 22. He had performed the week before at the Orleans, where he was already beginning to organize his thoughts for his next HBO special. In interviews he had been telling a favorite story about the master cellist Pablo Casals, who continued to rehearse three hours a day well into his nineties. Asked why, Casals once replied, “Well, I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”
Bum ticker and all, Carlin made it to seventy-one, defining a half-century in American comedy. “There’s always hope for comedians,” he said near the end. “You notice how long fucking George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, and all these cocksuckers lived? I think it’s because comedy gives you a way of renewing life energy. There’s something about the release of tension that comes from being a comic, having a comic mind, that makes you live forever.”
His daughter and his brother spread Carlin’s ashes outside a few New York nightclubs and then at Spofford Lake, site of his early performing triumph at Camp Notre Dame. Fittingly, the family announced that the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, along with the American Heart Association, would be the recipients of donations.
Shortly after his death Carlin’s partner, Sally Wade, received a proclamation from the U.S. Congress. It accompanied the flag that flew over the Capitol the day after the comedian’s death. He would have been supremely amused: Flags, he once said, are only symbols, “and I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”
KICKER
IN LATE 2003 California Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill into Congress that was intended, once and for all, to make broadcast use of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” punishable by law. Ose’s bill identified as profane “the words ‘shit,’ ‘piss,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘asshole,’ and the phrases ‘cock sucker,’ ‘mother fucker,’ and ‘ass hole’ [sic].” Ironically, writes the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the Clean Airwaves Act was “the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress.” Once again, Carlin’s instincts had been validated. Substituting asshole for tits, the “Milwaukee Seven” were, in fact, the words you couldn’t say.
The Congressman’s bill was a response to conservative outrage over the FCC’s decision not to fine NBC for its live broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, during which the rock singer Bono said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC had been maddeningly inconsistent on the issue, slapping a small PBS affiliate in the San Francisco area with a fine for indecent words heard in the Martin Scorsese documentary series The Blues. The Bono episode and others, including a notorious example of “visual indecency”—Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, when one of her breasts was momentarily exposed on national television (for which CBS was fined $550,000, since overturned)—gave the culture the enduring concept of the “fleeting expletive”: a one-time instance of profanity, indecency, or obscenity that occurs during live programming.
Given the rise of cable television, satellite media, and the Internet, taboo words about sex acts and bodily functions are more widespread than ever, as Pinker points out in The Stuff of Thought. Yet the government continues to hold radio stations and broadcast television networks accountable to another standard. Comically, the author notes, another piece of legislation, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, was passed on the same day that Vice President Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor “to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.”
Upon Carlin’s death, reporters took the opportunity to examine all the ways their newspapers continued to dance around the seven words that apparently will still infect your soul and curve your spine. Carlin’s “heavy seven” were conspicuously incessant (if bleeped) on Comedy Central’s South Park and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. They were half the dialogue on HBO’s The Sopranos, and they were permitted unchecked on broadcast networks in a documentary, 9/11, and the commercial television debut of Saving Private Ryan. Even The Today Show let slip with “the word that’s probably the Queen Mother of all obscenities, an unflattering reference to female nether regions,” when guest Jane Fonda uttered it. “NBC apologized, to be sure,” wrote one TV critic, “but the sky didn’t fall.”
In April 2009 the Supreme Court once again heard a case involving the FCC’s jurisdiction over Carlin’s magic words. By another 5-4 vote, the court upheld the commission’s sanctions against “fleeting expletives.” The case featured the spectacle of the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia provi
ding a dramatic, expurgated reenactment of the singer Cher’s acceptance of a lifetime achievement honor at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, seen live on Fox: “People have been telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So f-word ’em.” Legal scholars pointed out that the decision sidestepped the First Amendment issue, and they predicted further litigation. That would ensure that Carlin’s lexical evangelism—Lenny Bruce’s legacy—would have still more days in court.
“What can I say about George Carlin that hasn’t already been argued in front of the Supreme Court?” joked Bill Maher when he kicked off the Kennedy Center’s posthumous tribute for the Mark Twain Prize. The late comedian’s friend Lily Tomlin, his fellow Greenwich Village alum Joan Rivers, and next-generation devotees Jon Stewart and Lewis Black were among those on hand to celebrate the life and career of the comic wordsmith.
In his lifetime, Twain had much to say about censorship and taboo. “Nature knows no indecencies,” he wrote. “Man invents them.”
At the end of his own life, George Carlin was working on a one-man show he was planning for Broadway. One of his working titles was Watch My Language.
NOTES
All direct quotes attributed in the present tense have been drawn from author interviews. Quotes from television appearances are identified in the text, except where noted.
Warm-up
1 “a lawless element”: Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 9.
1-2 “a scofflaw . . . who could be charged with breaking and entering”: Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (Beacon Press, 1995), 252-53.
2 “If you’re clothed, you have clothes”: George Carlin, Brain Droppings, (Hyperion, 1997), 13.
2 “Every comedian does a little George”: Jerry Seinfeld, “Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder,” New York Times, June 24, 2008.
2 “kids, pets, driving, the stores”: Charles Taylor, “Dirty Old Man: George Carlin on Obscenity in the Age of Ashcroft,” Salon, April 3, 2004.
3 “The comic comes into being”: Quoted in Rourke, American Humor, 22.
4 “I found out that it was an honest craft”: Appearance at the National Press Club (C-SPAN), 1999.
4 “I prefer seeing things the way they are”: National Press Club, 1999.
5 “No matter how you care to define it”: Carlin, Brain Droppings, xii.
5 “How he stood above and apart”: Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (Perennial/HarperCollins, 2002), 35.
5 “the privilege of the dead”: Mark Twain, quoted in “The Privilege of the Grave,” The New Yorker, December 22, 2008.
1. Heavy Mysteries
8 He “hid behind the government”: Taylor, “Dirty Old Man: George Carlin on Obscenity in the Age of Ashcroft.”
9 “He had a real line of shit, boy”: Interview, Archive of American Television December 17, 2007.
10 “Let’s get out of here, Pat”: Interview, Archive of American Television
10 “The Irish call it the curse”: Interview, Archive of American Television
10 “We ran for four years”: Interview, Archive of American Television
11 “all these As that I never got in school”: Carlin on Comedy (audio recording), Laugh.com, 2002.
11 “The thing is, I never really had issues”: T. J. English, “George Carlin Is Still Tossing Out the Good Stuff,” Irish America (June/July 2006).
11 “I had to fight her off ”: Interview, Archive of American Television
12 “a man’s salary”: “What I’ve Learned: George Carlin,” Esquire (January 2002).
12 “wonderfully alive and vibrant”: Interview, Archive of American Television
12 “Home alone after school”: “Proust Questionnaire: George Carlin,” Vanity Fair (May 2001).
13 “a man bored with sinning”: Evan Esar, Esar’s Comic Dictionary (Harvest House, 1943), 69, 100, 113.
13 Mad “was magical, objective proof to kids”: Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis, “The ‘Mad’ Generation,” New York Times Magazine, July 31, 1977.
13 “a way of thinking about a world”: Robert Boyd, “Born Under a Mad Sign,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2007.
14 “That was my family”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
14 “There aren’t any Huck Finns in radio”: Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (University of California Press, 2000), 212.
15 “You can count on the thumb of one hand”: Nachman, Raised on Radio, 98.
15 “Fifty percent of what I write”: Nachman, Raised on Radio, 105.
16 “Our original premise”: Nachman, Raised on Radio,125.
16 “I was a hip kid”: Carlin, Brain Droppings, 224.
16 “They took things that were nice and decent”: Interview by Marc Cooper, The Progressive (July 2001).
16-17 “that one really got my attention”: Interview, Archive of American Television
17 “like a flower [to] the sun”: Interview, Archive of American Television
17 “I was impressed, not that he was an admiral”: A&E Biography: George Carlin: More Than 7 Words (2000).
18 “To laugh was to mock heaven”: Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History, (Beacon Press, 1995), 129.
20 “That was her big thing”: A&E Biography: George Carlin.
21 “It was called ‘How Do You Spend Your Leisure Time?’”: Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: George Carlin,” Playboy (January 1982).
22 “The older I got, the more apparent it became”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview.”
2. Class Clown
25 “I’d make fun of the authority figures”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
26 “fly over the area”: Appearance on Dennis Miller Live (HBO), January 13, 1997.
27 “a voluntary nigger”: Mark Goodman, “George Carlin Feels Funny,” Esquire (December 1974).
27 “They would plant cultures”: Tony Hendra, Going Too Far: The Rise and Demise of Sick, Gross, Black, Sophomoric, Weirdo, Pinko, Anarchist, Underground, Anti-Establishment Humor, (Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987), 161-62.
28 “colorful, reachable, human”: George Carlin, “An Old Underdog Finds Himself on Top,” New York Times, October 12, 1986.
28 “When my tech sergeant expressed his displeasure”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview.”
29 “I left my gun on the ground”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview.”
31 “I grew up with real rhythm and blues”: “George Carlin: How Radio Changed My Life,” Harp (September/October 2007).
31 “nothing short of a revolution”: Hendra, Going Too Far, 169.
32 “I had to play that”: Dean Johnson, “At 55, Carlin’s Sharp Wit Keeps on Cutting,” Boston Herald, December 11, 1992.
33 “I was staying at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba”: Dick Lochte, “Natty and the Beanbag: Burns and Schreiber Owe a Lot to a Taxicab,” TV Guide, August 18-24, 1973.
35 “one last chance at me”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
36 “the most successful of the new sickniks”: “The Sickniks,” Time, July 13, 1959.
36 “Shelley Berman couldn’t do Mort Sahl’s act”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
37 “In my home Westbrook Pegler”: Hendra, Going Too Far, 163.
37 “At that time George was fairly conservative”: Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, (Bloomsbury, 2008), 22.
38 “How did you two meet?”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
39 “no troublemakers, no queers”: Joe Nick Patoski, “The King of Clubs,” Texas Monthly (April 2000).
40 “We became very inventive and creative”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
41 “We’re not gonna park cars”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
41 “the leading Negro and foreign-language station”: John A. Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (Schirmer Books, 1991), 296.
41 “trying anybody and everybody”: Jackson, Big Beat Heat, 296-97.
42 “We were insane”: Goodman, “George Carlin Feels Funny.”
43 “We took positions”: George on George (interview program), 2003.
44 “He didn’t have a lot of connections”: Archive of American Television interview.
46 “a duo of hip wits”: Hendra, Going Too Far, 163.
47 “We didn’t know the legendary quality”: Hendra, Going Too Far, 163.
47 “We felt that was an omen”: Interview, Archive of American Television.
48 “Brenda and I clicked on all levels”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview.”
48 “a night light to the bathroom”: Jack Paar, P.S. Jack Paar: An Entertainment (Doubleday, 1983), 100.
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 27