Seven Dirty Words (18 page)

Ron De Blasio, his comanager, had booked the show into the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the legendary concert film
The T.A.M.I. Show
, featuring the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and James Brown, had been filmed in 1964. For a time the facility had also been home of the Academy Awards. Other than that, Santa Monica, where the Carlin family was living at the time, was still a lazy beach town. “I called it the last Midwestern town in southern California,” says De Blasio. Though
FM & AM
was doing well at the time of the taping, De Blasio was nervous about his client filling the auditorium’s 3,000 or so seats with a supportive crowd: “But I’ll be a son of a bitch—we got an audience, and a great audience. They loved him. Absolutely loved him.”

Onstage, Carlin reminisced about the endless ways to get laughs out of your classmates—knuckle-cracking, “Hawaiian nose humming,” and, of course, making fart sounds in every way imaginable. The most basic—putting your tongue between your lips and blowing—has a scientific term, he informed the audience: “bi-labial fricative.” “I was so glad when I found out that had a real, official name to it, man,” Carlin said, sounding either genuinely blissful or especially high, or both. “
Bronx cheer
and
raspberry
never made it for me.”

He explained why the act of swallowing happens in two distinct actions (“Your throat knows your mouth is crazy”), and he pointed out the sad symbolism of businessmen buying and selling prop gags such as fake dog crap and fake vomit—a topic, he acknowledged, that had once been explored by Lenny Bruce, who received special mention in the liner notes on the album’s inner gatefold: “Special thanks to Leonard Schneider for taking all the chances.”

The comic also spoke at length, with a surprising amount of fondness, about his Catholic school experience. It could have been any garden-variety parochial school—“Our Lady of Great Agony . . . Saint Rita Moreno . . . Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.” Given the progressive ideals at the Corpus Christi School, however, his was not a stereotypical education by cruelty. Like Bruce, who dug deeply into religion as subject matter, Carlin found his schooling a rich vein of material, and he thanked the nuns and priests by name in the album’s notes. Then, in an abrupt shift, the album closed with his one-two jab at unthinking patriotism—“Muhammad Ali—America the Beautiful”—and the tour de force “Seven Words.”

When the Grammy Award nominees for 1972 were announced,
FM & AM
was on the list, alongside Flip Wilson’s
Geraldine
, an
All in the Family
cast recording, and
Big Bambu
, the second album by a pair of bong-addled character comedians named Cheech and Chong. Carlin took home the Grammy for
FM & AM
, but it was
Class Clown
that really put him over the top in 1972. Club dates at places like the Troubadour and the Cellar Door, for a short time the comic’s bread and butter, were quickly becoming a thing of the past. In November he finished a run of five dates at the venerable Palace Theater on Broadway, totaling a then-considerable box office take of $40,000.

Class Clown
easily earned back the comparatively minuscule outlay of a live comedy recording, virtually carrying Atlantic Records, Little David’s parent company, for a time. One Atlantic salesman told De Blasio that receipts from the Carlin record and from Led Zeppelin’s blockbuster fourth album together were covering the company’s operating costs. “And the recording costs [for
Class Clown
] were probably what the crafts services bill for Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones would have been,” says De Blasio. “Very minimal. They saw profits immediately. You didn’t have to promote anything—he was just out there.”

The acknowledgment of “Leonard Schneider” on the inside cover of
Class Clown
was clear confirmation of what plenty of listeners had been saying for some time: Carlin was the natural successor to “Saint Lenny,” the fallen martyr of fearless comedy. As early as 1967, the newcomer had been making the case himself. Lenny’s “use of obscene language is very simple for me to understand,” Carlin told Judy Stone, “because Lenny was essentially a reporter, and he used the language of the people he was reporting about.” There was, however, a caveat: Bruce, for the most part, preached to the converted.

“Seven Words” hammered away at the deepening wedge between the generations. (“The whole revolution is about values,” as he said on the album.) But the routine, like almost all of Carlin’s self-expressive comedy at the time, also helped explain the counterculture to the mainstream audience. Language, hair, getting high, opposing the war—all could be reduced to trivialities and made more acceptable in the process. For Carlin, the symbolic seven words changed everything. From then on, he would forever be known as the comic who shattered the language barrier, for better and for worse. Lenny, Carlin once observed, “was the first one to make language an issue, and he suffered for it. I was the first one to make language an issue
and succeed with it
.”

7

SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION

W
alking in her Morningside Heights neighborhood one day, Mary Carlin stopped to speak with a couple of nuns from the Corpus Christi School, who were out on their own daily walk. How wonderful George’s career was going, said the sisters. Mary put her fingertips to her lips. But what about the dirty language? she asked. She couldn’t understand why her son had to talk like that.

The nuns, trained in the progressive policies of the Sinsinawa Dominicans—whose home base, ironically, was in Wisconsin, Carlin’s bugaboo state—were quick to explain that they felt the comedian was doing a social service by underscoring the harmlessness of mere words. There was a method to his apparent madness, they said. For the first time, Mary Carlin began to feel that her son’s peculiar brand of creativity might be something for her to celebrate, not lament. “She’d gotten the imprimatur from the church,” Carlin once said. From then until the end of her life, Mary Carlin exulted in being the mother of the famous comedian, stopping people on the crosstown bus to tell them that George Carlin would be on
The Tonight Show
that week. Joining her son on the
Mike Douglas
set for a taping a few years after his breakthrough, she claimed to have told him from a young age, “Insist on being yourself always, in all ways.”

“Mother, eat your words,” the boy had replied.

He did insist, and he still had to fight for it. In the summer of 1973 Carlin was in New York filming segments for his first network special, to be called
The Real George Carlin
. Revisiting old neighborhood haunts—Grant’s Tomb, the Columbia University campus—and taping some material at the Bitter End, he spoke openly about the conundrum of trying to get exposure without sacrificing integrity. Standing next to a life-sized cardboard cutout of his formerly clean-cut self, the ponytailed comedian told his audience that he’d just begun to let his true self into his act.

The program itself was a compromise, sponsored by Monsanto, the chemical company known as the leading manufacturer of Agent Orange and, until the chemical was banned, a top producer of DDT. The company, looking to improve its public image, was investing heavily in television showcases, producing an ongoing series of variety specials under the title
Monsanto Night Presents
. Henry Mancini, Jose Feliciano, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, and Jack Jones were a few of the performing hosts.

A homecoming of sorts,
The Real George Carlin
featured music by B. B. King and Kris Kristofferson with Rita Coolidge, and several monologues shot on location by the host. It was produced by Jack Sobel, Lenny Bruce’s onetime agent. Sitting in a trailer parked at Columbia, waiting for a camera to be repaired, Carlin told a reporter that he didn’t expect to get more than 50 percent of his planned material approved for the show, even though he had been promised broad leeway. “Let’s face it,” he said. “TV is controlled by government and paid for by private industry. Certainly with that combination the result is bound to be mostly junk.” He had recently received offers to host his own talk show and variety show, he claimed, but they weren’t right for him. “I work best in an auditorium with 2,500 people,” he said. “That’s really where I belong.” Taking the Monsanto offer was a test case: How much freedom would he truly enjoy? If it went well, he thought he might like to do a series of similar specials, maybe one a year.

Carlin felt a compulsion to question every convention. He entered each new business venture with suspicion, fully expecting that the freedoms he was promised were, on some level, contingencies. Smoking pot had unquestionably affected his worldview. “I take a perverse delight in knowing that I never did a television show without being stoned,” he said shortly after guest-hosting for Carson the first time. But although marijuana may have heightened his already highly developed sense for detail, cocaine was affecting his performance in other, more insidious ways.

He began to stumble through some performances, occasionally missing them altogether. Scheduled to play the University of Bridgeport, he bailed out at the last moment, claiming that he just wasn’t up to it. During a run at the 3,000-seat Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, he mumbled distractedly, several times losing his place and asking, “Where was I?” At the Westbury Music Fair, an in-the-round theater on Long Island, Carlin allegedly antagonized the audience, claiming that “its suburban life was a forfeit on legitimacy.”
Newsday
reported that a hundred or so patrons stormed out of the theater demanding refunds, “and a number of others just stormed out.” The problem wasn’t the content of his material, the paper suggested, so much as the fact that the audience simply couldn’t understand what he was saying.

One particularly high-profile television gig was nearly disastrous. Dick Clark asked Carlin to host the second annual installment of
New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
. The first, ringing in 1973, had featured the red hot band Three Dog Night, along with Blood, Sweat & Tears, Al Green, and Helen Reddy. For the second year Clark chose to go with a comedian host. With the event expressly designed to appeal to a generation that had no use for Guy Lombardo’s long-running dinner-jacket celebration from the Waldorf-Astoria, the hippie-dippy Carlin seemed the perfect choice. The performers, including musical guests Linda Ronstadt, Billy Preston, Tower of Power, and the Pointer Sisters, were prerecorded from the ballroom of the
Queen Mary
. Only the countdown to midnight was produced live.

Prerecording turned out to be the show’s salvation. Though Carlin ran flawlessly through his material during dress rehearsal, he returned from his stateroom for the taping all jacked up—“on air,” according to one crew member. In his overloaded frame of mind, the reeling comic attempted to do his act by muscle memory. It was ugly: He lost his place again and again, haphazardly mixing setups from one routine with kickers from another. In a panic, director John Moffitt, who knew Carlin from his days with
The Ed Sullivan Show
, transcribed the routines as they appeared on Carlin’s records, then hurried into the editing room. Somehow he managed to splice together a reasonably coherent whole from the puzzle pieces he had to work with. Years later Carlin admitted that his only recollection of the show was a frantic Dick Clark, desperately pleading with him to do an acceptable lead-in to a commercial break.

Once he’d gleaned as much insight as he was going to get from dropping LSD and peyote, Carlin knew he was finished with them. “Cocaine was different. It kept saying, ‘You
haven’t
had enough.’ I became an abuser almost instantly. . . . I started doing coke to feel open, but by that time, the hole had opened so wide that I’d fallen through.” By his own admission, he often went four or five days before crashing, then slept nearly all day for a week or more to recuperate. The manic facial expressions and bodily contortions he struck for the cover of his next album,
Operation: Foole
, were the spitting image of a coke fiend, he later admitted. He had made the same faces for the cover of
Take-Offs and Put-Ons
, but those appeared in black and white, with Carlin clean-shaven, short-haired, and in a suit and tie. For
Occupation: Foole
he wore a multicolored tank top, letting down his hair from its now-customary ponytail. He was becoming the unreliable freak the industry had suspected a few years earlier.

Occupation: Foole
was recorded over two nights in March 1973 at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, south of San Francisco. Opening with several minutes on his occupation—foole (“I’d spell it with a final
e
just to piss ‘em off”)—he joked about how no one goes right to work: “You might get there on time, but screw the company. Those first twenty minutes belong to you.” Much of the material picked up where
Class Clown
’s autobiographical reminiscing left off, with the comedian showcasing his knack for mimicry as he described the ethnic makeup of his childhood neighborhood. He got some of his biggest laughs the easy way, with fart jokes. And he wrapped up with a lengthy (nearly twelve-minute) update on the “Seven Words,” beefed up by what was essentially a rerun of the
FM & AM
routine “Shoot.” The original seven words you could never say on television should be expanded by at least three more, he suggested on the new track, “Filthy Words”—
fart
,
turd
, and
twat
. Yet
fart
, as he’d already noted in the earlier bit, was too cute to be harmful. “
Turd
you can’t say, but who wants to?”
Twat
, he claimed, is “the only slang word applying to a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn’t have another meaning. . . . Even in a Walt Disney movie you can say, ‘We’re gonna snatch that pussy and put him in a box.’”

Stand-up comedy now belonged to the rock ’n’ roll era, and Carlin was suddenly the leader of the band. Still a few years before Steve Martin would become wildly popular for walking onstage with a fake arrow through his head and the cast of
Saturday Night Live
would debut in bee suits, the comedians of the early 1970s were working with their most basic commodity—their words. And they were taking a stand over the words they’d previously been denied. Nearly ten years after Mario Savio’s dramatic, impromptu speech at a University of California-Berkeley sit-in galvanized the free speech movement, a raggedy band of clever stooges were staging their own protest, of a sort. In Miami, Cheech and Chong faced four cops positioned at the lip of the stage, waiting to pounce the first time the dopers said the word
fuck
or any of its variations. Three of the officers couldn’t help themselves and soon began laughing at the comics’ material. During a bit called “The Dogs,” with the two comedians crawling around on all fours, Cheech bounded over to the one cop who hadn’t broken character and lifted his leg. “I ‘peed’ a long time on him,” the comedian recalled.

Pryor, no stranger to coarse language, named his 1974 comeback album
That Nigger’s Crazy
. Newcomer Albert Brooks, younger brother of
Smothers Brothers
writer Bob Einstein, was baptized by fire while opening shows for Sly and the Family Stone. He learned that he could command a restless audience simply by uttering one magic, drawn-out word—
shii-ii-it
. “
Shit
has saved my life,” he told author Phil Berger. “I know it sounds like a
National Inquirer
article, but it’s true.” Klein, who riffed on his New York boyhood on his debut album
Child of the 50’s
much as Carlin did on
Class Clown
, examined the typically unexamined use of words such as
homo
and
whore
(pronounced, in outer-boroughs fashion, as
hoo-er
). And he needled his elders for their embarrassing habit of referring to body parts and functions with ridiculous baby names—tu-tus, boom-booms, poo-poos. “They wouldn’t let me say
Jew-boy
on
The Tonight Show
,” he said. “NBC, you know. Uptight. Too many letters from Alabama saying, ‘Why didn’t you say
Jew bastard
?’”

Forceful language was an increasingly newsworthy topic outside of comedy, too. In 1971 the Supreme Court had heard the case of a young war protester convicted of disturbing the peace when he brought a jacket reading “Fuck the Draft” into the Los Angeles Courthouse. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Court reversed the California Court of Appeals’s ruling to uphold the conviction. Veteran Justice Hugo Black, a longtime supporter of freedom of expression, nevertheless agreed with the dissenting opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who suggested that defendant Paul Robert Cohen’s statement in wearing the coat was “an absurd and immature antic . . . mainly conduct and not speech.” With a group of nuns reportedly in attendance at the hearing, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger took pains to ask the lawyers not to “dwell on the facts” of the case. In his majority opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan made an observation that would become infamous in its own right: “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

Just after the release of
Occupation: Foole
, one radio station put that proposition to the test. On October 30, 1973, WBAI disc jockey Paul Gorman hosted a midday show known as
Lunchpail
. His topic that day was an examination of society’s attitudes toward language. The volatile political dialogue of the time “was doing great damage to words, in my view,” Gorman explained a few years later. On the program, he discussed the fact that the government dropped bombs through its “defense” department; meanwhile, the political Left was playing fast and loose with words such as “revolution.” The host read excerpts of George Orwell’s writing on language and invited comments from callers, one of whom wondered (as had Carlin) why the four-letter word for the act of love is also used as an insult.

The question was similar to those posed by a mysterious linguist called Quang Phuc Dong, whose satirical paper, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects,” had been an underground source of amusement on college campuses for some time. The author’s affiliation—the South Hanoi Institute of Technology, or SHIT—gave the parody away. Unlike a simple grammatical construction such as “Close the door,” the author wrote, the phrase “Fuck you” cannot be considered an imperative statement. Saying “Fuck Lyndon Johnson,” he claimed, was an epithet, not necessarily “an admonition to copulate with Lyndon Johnson.” The writer was later revealed to be University of Chicago professor James D. McCawley, who was credited with establishing the fields of “pornolinguistics” and “scatolinguistics.” Carlin, despite his ninth-grade education, was carrying out the professor’s inquiry.

As part of the
Lunchpail
discussion, Gorman played Carlin’s just-released “Filthy Words” routine. He prefaced the broadcast with a warning to listeners that if they were likely to be offended, they might want to change the station and return at the end of the hour. Except for the Carlin routine, the
Lunchpail
discussion was not played for laughs. It was, Gorman recalled, about the power of words—“the moral consequence of words, and the fear we have of words, and the way words arise from the culture and the way the culture redefines itself through its use of words.”