Seven Dirty Words (27 page)

A
Bill & Ted’s
sequel and a made-for-television quickie about two Wall Street janitors, called
Working Tra$h
(costarring a young Ben Stiller), provided little indication that Carlin would suddenly blossom as an actor. His breakthrough came in the 1991 film version of Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel,
The Prince of Tides
. Producer-director Barbra Streisand picked Carlin to play the role of Eddie Detreville, the gay neighbor of one of the movie’s main characters, calling him over to her home to audition privately. Carlin worked tirelessly to capture the role, says his acting coach. Taking walks with Book around his LA neighborhood, Carlin stayed in character as the wispy Eddie. According to Book, some of the people Carlin encountered while preparing for the role had no idea they were speaking with the famous comedian: “To this day, my neighbor wants to set him up with her brother, Doug.”

Book felt that his acting student reached a peak with his work on
Prince of Tides
—that he might have earned himself an Oscar nomination if he’d only been in another scene or two. The Grammys were more familiar territory. Carlin was nominated for the awards three times during the decade, for
A Place for My Stuff
,
Playin’ with Your Head
, and the album version of his sixth HBO special, 1988’s
What Am I Doing in New Jersey?
Late bloomer Rodney Dangerfield won the comedy Grammy in 1980, and Carlin contemporaries Pryor and Cosby won in 1982 and 1986, respectively.

By 1988 the outrageous Sam Kinison was the talk of television and the comedy world. With long, frizzy hair sprouting from beneath his ubiquitous beret, the stumpy former evangelist, “discovered” a few years earlier on one of Dangerfield’s
Young Comedians
specials for HBO, was all over MTV with his celebrity-studded video cover of the Troggs’s “Wild Thing.” Kinison’s comedy was a volcanic outburst, an eruption of grievances with cheating girlfriends, the hypocritical Catholic Church, and the general idiocies of humankind, not necessarily in that order. Nothing was sacred to Kinison, who could even find fault with the starving faces on late-night ads for hunger relief. As the comedian Bill Hicks later said, “Kinison was the first guy I ever saw go onstage and not ask the audience in any way, shape, or form to like him. I found that highly reassuring.”

Carlin evidently did, too, accentuating his exasperation with his fellow Americans in his sixth HBO special in 1988. It opened with a canned segment in which he took a cab from Manhattan to the site of the gig, the Park Theater in Union City. The cab driver was played by Carlin’s old friend Bob Altman, who had recently named his daughter Carlen in honor of his former acid-trip companion and philosophical debate partner. When Carlin runs into a bar for directions, Altman hollers over his shoulder, “Ask ’em about what they think of man’s role in the universe.”

Disgust with the squandered promise of the human race was the overriding theme of the performance, with Carlin adapting for the stage the “People I Can Do Without” concept from the
Brain Damage
book. He also launched a rant about Civil War reenactors (“Use live ammo, assholes!”) and, ten years after the Supreme Court case, ripped the FCC, which had “all by itself decided that television and radio are the only two parts of American life not protected by the First Amendment.” Going on about the heightened climate of repression of the Reagan eighties, standing on a barbed-wire set designed to look like a threatening back alley, he posed an open question to the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was then on a crusade against immorality in American culture. He wondered whether the reverend was familiar with the function of the knobs on his radio. After joking that perhaps the reverend was “not comfortable with anything with two knobs,” he made a declaration: “I’m pretty sick and tired of all these fuckin’ church people.” This was the first concrete indication that the comic was developing a more confrontational persona onstage, which would lead even some longtime fans to claim they thought he became “angry” in his later years.

When Kinison died in a car crash in 1992, Carlin sent the biggest floral arrangement to his funeral. “We couldn’t get it into the viewing room,” says Bill Kinison, the comedian’s brother, former manager, and biographer. The two comics had met at the Grammy Awards and crossed paths on occasion at the Comedy Store. Though the emotionally raw Pryor was Kinison’s idol, meeting Carlin, his brother says, was a high point for the comic. When Bill Kinison called Carlin to thank him for the flowers, Carlin told him he felt a strange connection to the shooting star. “I feel like Sam is feeding me material from the other side,” he said.

Carlin was less impressed with Andrew “Dice” Clay, another eighties comedian, who got lumped with Kinison and radio host Howard Stern as the clown princes of the era’s in-your-face humor. Though Clay himself noted that his cartoonish act was meant to be “a macho moron . . . juvenile comedy,” Carlin told the psychology professor Timothy Jay that Clay was killing his own livelihood. As he began to attract a skinhead crowd that considered the comic’s bigotry and chauvinism as validation, the mainstream of Clay’s audience was dropping out, intimidated.

Still, Carlin saw that the culture was changing, and he was changing accordingly. “I realized I had to raise my voice literally and in a figurative sense,” he recalled, “to raise the stakes a little bit onstage in order to compete with a very noisy culture. There’s a lot of din in the culture, and to get attention, you have to raise your voice.” Voluble, hotheaded comedians such as Kinison and Bill Hicks felt compelled to address the things that infuriated them. Though other great comedians’ moments were yet to come—Jerry Seinfeld and his jeweler’s eye for trivialities, Chris Rock’s intrepid social surgery, Jon Stewart’s instantaneous deflation of the hot-air newsmakers of the day, all of them owing a distinct, and routinely acknowledged, debt to Carlin—the late 1980s were the last time the comic, who was entering his autumnal season as the “Grand Old Man of the Counterculture” (as the
New York Times
called him), looked to the current crop to gauge his own place in the field.

10

SQUEAMISH

I
’ll be watching you, ya prick, so you better be good.” That was how Carlin introduced himself to his new opening act, Dennis Blair, at a 1988 gig in Omaha. Blair, a Rodney Dangerfield protégé who earned a writing credit and a bit of screen time in Dangerfield’s 1983 comedy with Joe Pesci,
Easy Money
, is a daffy musical comedian in the Steve Martin mold. He first saw Carlin perform in the early eighties in Atlantic City, where Carlin was opening for Suzanne Somers. He went with Dangerfield, who admired Carlin’s very different style. The feeling was mutual.

“I know George loved Rodney’s humor, and Rodney thought George was hysterical,” Blair recalls. “Rodney really liked guys who made people uncomfortable.” For a few years, after Chandler Travis and Steve Shook had set aside their own musical comedy act to start a good-time bar band called the Incredible Casuals, Carlin toured with an opening act named Glenn Super, a genially cranky club guy in jeans and suspenders who called himself Mr. Microphone, after his favorite prop. By 1988 Carlin was ready for a new warm-up act, and he and Jerry Hamza gave Blair a three-month trial. Blair ended up sharing the bill with the older comic for nearly two decades.

Over the years Blair came to think of his employer as comedy’s version of the Beatles’ John Lennon: “He started with goofy three-minute pop songs, and he ended with ‘Cold Turkey,’” he says. “He grew, just like a great musical artist.”

Carlin took the place of another Beatle, Ringo Starr, in one of the more unusual roles of his life. When Ringo stepped aside as the voice of the storytelling sprite “Mr. Conductor” on the popular PBS kids’ show
Shining Time Station
, featuring Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow toy trains, Carlin took over the role. (He was, he joked, the “anti-Pete Best,” the drummer who lost his place in the Beatles to Ringo.) Searching frantically for a replacement, cocreator Rick Siggelkow played a recording for his partner, Britt Allcroft, without identifying the voice. “The first word I heard, ‘stuff,’ won me over,” Allcroft recalled. New to America—she was born in South Africa and had created the original
Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends
for Children’s ITV in the United Kingdom—she was unfamiliar with Carlin’s warm grumble. She didn’t hear the voice that had nearly blown a gasket on his last cable show: “I get pissed, goddamn it!” “I heard a sound that, for children, could be intimate, lyrical, sometimes spooky, soothing and, most important, kind,” she recalled.

Even when he was swearing, Carlin’s performing voice “always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child,” Jerry Seinfeld once suggested. “It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.” For the next few years—by his count, forty-five episodes—Carlin provided the narration for the adventures of Thomas and friends, and he appeared onscreen whenever the miniature Mr. Conductor materialized from inside the station house wall in a burst of pixie dust. Tickled by the irony that the Thomas stories were adapted from a series of children’s books written by a clergyman, he also delighted in the opportunity to reveal another side of himself. According to Allcroft, Carlin got over his initial nervousness, which hit on his first day in the sound booth. Realizing he was unaccustomed to having no audience, he brought in a teddy bear to tell the stories to. The stuffed bear stayed by his side throughout his work on the series. Still, he couldn’t resist alluding to his better-known image, sending Allcroft a T-shirt printed with the words “Britt Happens.”

He was similarly proud of his work on a made-for-television miniseries adapted from Larry McMurtry’s book
Streets of Laredo
, the last installment of the
Lonesome Dove
series. Working for Joseph Sargent, who directed the original New York City subway thriller
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
, Carlin played Billy Williams, a grizzled old Texas knockabout with a pronounced limp, a fringed jacket, and a thin layer of grime that wouldn’t wash off. Billy has a soft spot for Maria Garza, whose estranged son, a ruthless bandit, is sought by the bounty hunter Captain Call, played by James Garner. In a cast that included Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, and Ned Beatty, Carlin played a role he could understand—a free agent, a man born genetically incapable of lying down for authority figures. “I despise them lawmen,” he says. “I just hate their stinkin’ hearts.” When a young officer tells him to watch his mouth—“You old-timers got rough tongues”—Billy shoots off the tip of his ear.

Streets of Laredo
was Carlin’s “favorite project of all, and the one he did the best in,” says Stephen Book, his acting coach. “He really hit his stride as an actor in that.” Carlin agreed. “I just felt terrific in that role,” he said.

When the offer came, Carlin also felt pretty good about the prospect of finally taking on his own sitcom. With a half-dozen or so years of legitimate acting work under his belt since he had started taking roles again, he was intrigued when the upstart Fox network made him an offer. Launched in 1986, the network quickly established a reputation for taking chances on comedy.
The Simpsons
, Matt Groening’s long-running animated series, was one of Fox’s first ratings successes. The sketch show
In Living Color
debuted in 1990, quickly propelling comic actors such as Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey to stardom. The network even tried Kinison in a sitcom in 1991. “They’re new on the scene, they’re making noise, and they’ve got this word—
edgy
,” Carlin recalled. “I thought, fine, maybe I fit that.” He owed it to himself, and to his family, he figured, to give the sitcom a shot. Having suffered a third heart attack in early 1991 while driving to Vegas for a gig, he was thinking seriously about scaling back on the road work. Seinfeld had a show, Rosanne Barr had a show, Newhart had his sitcoms,
The Cosby Show
was a blockbuster. Why not him?

Playing George O’Grady, an underemployed cabbie who gleefully flaunts his ponytail (“It pisses people off,” he says in the first episode of
The George Carlin Show
), Carlin holds court at the Moylan, a recreation of the real-life Morningside Heights watering hole he’d frequented for years. The cast of regulars included Alex Rocco, the veteran actor who had parlayed his purported underworld connections in his native Boston into a tough-guy film and television career, most notably in the role of casino owner Moe Greene in
The Godfather
. The show, as Carlin said on the eve of its debut in January 1994, revolved around “nice, controlled anger. . . . It’s a combination of indignance and indifference. Basically, I don’t give a fuck about the world. I’m pissed that we’ve wasted our potential on such moronic things as religion and profit.” Not surprisingly, he concluded, “This character shares some of the attitudes and feelings that I have.” Despite his dyspepsia, he was optimistic about the show, at least for the moment: “If they said I could never do stand-up again in exchange for ten years of this,” he told a reporter, “I’d choose this.”

At first Carlin was excited to work with the show’s cocreator, Sam Simon, who had written for
Taxi
and
Cheers
and developed
The Simpsons
with Groening and James L. Brooks. Simon was also a fellow dog nut; one of the first plots was about George using his little lap dog as a pawn in his shy courtship of a woman running a neighborhood pet shop. Initially scheduled at 9:30 on Fox’s powerhouse Sunday night, which included
The Simpsons
and
Married . . . With Children
—“Get ready for the only guy funny enough to follow Al Bundy,” one promo promised—the show earned some respectable, if not exactly enthusiastic, early notice. “Carlin’s aging hipster character translates well to the sitcom stage,” wrote
Variety
’s reviewer. “This is the comic without much of the acid that frequently flows in his stand-up routines. It’s a half-hour that’s easy to take, and Carlin fans won’t be disappointed.” But the reviewer also noted the obvious comparisons to
Cheers
, which was similarly set in a bar, and
Seinfeld
, which was becoming extraordinarily popular with its famously “lightweight” scripts. “Show may require more coddling than Fox is used to giving its other, better comedies,” the writer concluded, with some prescience.

Though Carlin got to indulge a few whims (in the second episode, for instance, his character insisted he’d seen a UFO, much as the comic himself was then intrigued by the concept of extraterrestrial activity), he soon realized that Simon, the show’s executive producer and occasional director, had the real allegiance of Warner Bros. Television, where the show originated. Though media mogul Les Moonves, then the company’s president, made Carlin feel welcome—“He was my kind of guy,” Carlin recalled, “seemed like a street guy”—the company, he felt, was more interested in protecting Simon, who was “the property they could count on. Sam will do another show.” In the end, Simon and Carlin couldn’t work together. “Sam will tell you himself,” Carlin said, “his reputation in the business is that he’s difficult.”

In fact, few in the cast and crew felt comfortable with Simon, who was going through a divorce and suffering from chronic back pain and often brought big, aggressive dogs onto the set. “He used to whip Chinese throwing stars at his office walls during pitch meetings,” says one participant. “George used to drop by and the meetings were . . . testy. They were both big personalities and Sam, having come off
The Simpsons
, wasn’t used to having to debate dialogue and scene structure with an actor.” After twenty-seven episodes spread across parts of two seasons, Carlin couldn’t wait to leave. When a Fox executive called him on the set to let him know they’d decided to cancel the show, he had already checked out mentally. He was just glad they hadn’t waited until the season ended to make the decision.

The responsibilities of the sitcom brought an end to his streak of delivering a new HBO special every two years. Beginning in 1982, when he had regained his health and hit his stride with the network, he had had an hour or so of new material on the air every other year for a decade. In 1990’s
Doin’ It Again
, taped in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Carlin focused on language, declaring the performance free of namby-pamby New Age lingo: “I will not
share
anything with you,” he said, handling the operative word as if it were a dead mouse he was removing from the stage with a stick. “I will not
relate
to you, and you will not
identify
with me.”

For Carlin, political correctness was just another form of oppression and rule-making, inevitably to be disobeyed. This special was one of the few times in his career when he addressed a specific category of potentially offensive words—ethnic and racial slurs. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves,” he said. “They’re only words. . . . It’s the context.” No one flinched when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy said
nigger
, he reasoned, “because we know they’re not racists. Why? They’re niggers!”

In the credits Carlin thanked Rutgers Professor William Lutz, who had recently published a book called
Doublespeak: From “Revenue Enhancement” to “Terminal Living”: How Government, Business, Advertisers, and Others Use Language to Deceive You
. The linguist’s work had inspired the comic to develop another strain of his humor, which would remain a part of his show until he died (or, rather,
expired
, “like a magazine subscription”). Like a true New Yorker, he couldn’t tolerate indirect language. That pet peeve became a part of the act. The CIA no longer kills people, he griped—they “neutralize” them. The attempt to reclassify the handicapped as “handi-capable” sent him off the deep end: “These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you’ll change the condition,” he said. Few comics ever become skilled enough in the art form to make a didactic line like that sound funny. He’d never been much of a punch-line comic, anyway. Now, as he headed toward his sixties, the humor wasn’t so much about his observations as his opinions.

“I’m doing my best work,” he told interviewer Bob Costas around this time. “I’m thinking better than I ever have.” The next HBO show,
Jammin’ in New York
, which aired live from the theater at Madison Square Garden (then called the New Paramount), was dedicated to Kinison, who died two weeks before its April 1992 taping. Beginning with an extended riff on the country’s militaristic self-image, with the televised spectacle of the first Gulf War still fresh, the set revolved around three long, writerly pieces, including an exhaustive examination of air-travel jargon (such as
final destination
: “All destinations are final—that’s what it means!”) that should have retired the subject for stand-up comedians forever, and a rant against the voguish Save the Planet movement that he called “The Planet Is Fine” (but “the people are fucked”). Machine-gunning his way through a long list of natural and man-made disasters, he proclaimed his delight in bad news—the more death and destruction, the better. “I enjoy chaos and disorder, and not just because they help me professionally,” he said in a ludicrous, hyper-articulated announcer’s voice. He’d been “an entropy fan” from the time he had learned the meaning of the word in school.

Although Carlin was still justifiably famous for pushing the limits of acceptable language and making crude jokes about human biology, his stand-up had taken a pronounced leap from blue to black. In
Jammin’ in New York
, he came on like an encyclopedia of dark humor, skittering from war, prison, and eating disorders to plane crashes and utter annihilation. In his previous HBO special he had even claimed to prove the point that no subject was out of bounds for comedy by doing a brief bit about rape, which involved Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd.