Seven Dirty Words (16 page)

Though none of the material was that raunchy, Carlin’s compulsion to challenge prudery with language was evident right on the cover. In a hint at the one-line non sequiturs that would eventually become a staple of both his act and his writing, his photo on the back of the album was framed in fine print with a couple dozen zingers, several of them off-color: “Beer nuts is the official disease of Milwaukee. . . . A car-raising contest is a jack-off.” Although the longhaired hipster in the photo looked nothing like the product of a parochial school education, in such shameless juvenilia it was easy to hear the voice of the class cut-up doing time in Father Jablonski’s detention hall.

The host also wanted to know whether Carlin’s change had made him a better person, a better comic. “I don’t know about ‘better,’” he replied. “It’s made me more efficient.” His old repertoire of silly characters had effectively crowded out the real George Carlin from his own act, he said. “I was hiding behind these things. Television rewarded that. . . . I was not in my act anymore.” This time, it was Lennon who chuckled empathetically.

Carlin may have felt more efficient, but he was again exhibiting some of the erratic behavior the entertainment industry had been leery of a year or so earlier. In the spring he missed a few gigs due to laryngitis. On one visit to
The Tonight Show
, Carson mentioned that Carlin had almost had to cancel. “I’ve been staying up a little late,” Carlin offered lamely. A few months later he told
Rolling Stone
that his “laryngitis” was exacerbated by his new fondness for snorting cocaine. For most of his life, he said, he’d been waking up and getting high. “After twenty years of that, I discovered cocaine and how good that was. And what was scary was that I discovered I could afford it.”

When a “German doctor” advised him to lay off the blow, he and Brenda had a heart-to-heart. “We decided to cut it all out,” Carlin told the magazine. “We said, ‘Well, we’ve been through the first half of our life stoned, let’s try the second half straight.’” Whatever his level of intoxication, Carlin’s career was suddenly flying. At the end of May he recorded a performance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The set became his second album,
Class Clown
. On July 3 he guest-hosted
The Tonight Show
for the first time. Five days later he sold out the main auditorium at Carnegie Hall.

Over the years, guest hosting
The Tonight Show
became a semi-regular occurrence for Carlin. Carson routinely used substitutes, taking most Mondays off and going on frequent vacations. Rat Pack sidekick Joey Bishop was the primary fill-in for much of the 1960s; Jerry Lewis was another regular replacement. Later, John Davidson and Joan Rivers, among others, served stints as Carson’s regular guest hosts. Carlin, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing an airbrushed long-sleeve T-shirt, was an unorthodox-looking guest host, to say the least.

When he was offered the gig, he put in three requests for the guests he wanted to interview: Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and Lenny Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr. All three were turned down. Fonda was preparing for the release of the documentary
F.T.A.
(alternately identified as “Free the Army” and “Fuck the Army”), an account of her “antiwar road show” with fellow actor Donald Sutherland, a sort of pacifists’ version of Bob Hope’s USO tours. Fonda would make her infamous trip to Hanoi a little later, in July. Nader, who was briefly considered as a third-party presidential candidate for 1972, was denied because of his relentless criticism of the automotive industry’s safety standards;
The Tonight Show
was heavily supported by advertising from U.S. car manufacturers.

The disagreement over Sally Marr, Carlin recalled, was especially disappointing. “That was really the capper,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “I had to call Sally and say, ‘Sally, you won’t believe this. [Lenny’s] been dead for six years and they’re still scared of him.’” Carson’s producers did make a few concessions, booking the Committee, the hippie sketch-comedy troupe that had been on the
Smothers Brothers
show with Carlin; former pro football linebacker Dave Meggyesy, known for his 1970 exposé
Out of Their League
, which blew the lid off the inhumane culture of the NFL; and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, led by a psychedelic gypsy-jazzbo born in Little Rock but shaped by San Francisco’s Summer of Love. (At the time Hicks and his band were in talks with Monte Kay to become the next Little David act, though it never panned out.)

“I remember thinking, Wow, they got some pretty hip people on the show,” says Meggyesy. He had interviewed a year earlier with a
Tonight Show
producer who, he says, was a “flaming right-winger”; only when Carlin agreed to host did the show find time for the radical linebacker. The singer and actress Debbie Reynolds was the sole representative from traditional show business, but even she brought along a bit of political baggage: She had recently been in the news for her quarrel with NBC over its use of Big Tobacco sponsors for her short-lived sitcom,
The Debbie Reynolds Show
.

In his opening monologue, Carlin spoke frankly about his transformation, attributing his newfound self-awareness to his experiences using acid. Not surprisingly, the admission was omitted from the tape of the show.

With
FM & AM
selling like a hit rock album, the comedian was no longer scrambling for gigs. On the eighth of July he headlined a sold-out Carnegie Hall. Stand-up comedy had some select history in the old Italianate auditorium, onetime home of the New York Philharmonic: Lenny Bruce had played there in February 1961, recording a charged set at midnight during one of the fiercest snowstorms ever to paralyze Manhattan. Brother Theodore, a legend of underground comedy who called his warped stream-of-consciousness “stand-up tragedy,” had a standing engagement of midnight performances in the building’s Recital Hall during the mid-1950s, billed as a “One Man Show of Sinister Humor.” In 1961 the foul-mouthed comedienne Belle Barth, whose recordings included one called
I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable
, headlined; legend has it that her show was a failure, because she’d been warned to clean up her act for the billing. Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Jackie Mason, and Dick Gregory all appeared at Carnegie Hall during the 1960s, and Bill Cosby made his debut there in 1971.

It was prestigious company for Carlin. After a dozen years of hustling, alternating real achievements such as
The Tonight Show
and Sullivan with the disappointments of the supper clubs and the game shows, Mary Carlin’s mischievous younger son was set to command the stage at the symbolic top of the show-business heap. He’d known how to get to Carnegie Hall all his life: He practiced.

In sharp focus, he did an hour and a half, relying heavily on new material about his parochial school upbringing, aversion to big business, and disdain for authority. Backstage at the reception, Mary appeared stricken. Elated that her “sensitive” son had earned a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall—Carnegie Hall!—she was nevertheless deeply conflicted that they were applauding his blasphemy and vulgarity. “She didn’t know it had reached this level. She didn’t know it had this force,” Carlin remembered. “It was dawning on her that this tough, irreverent thing was OK in many people’s eyes.”

At the heart of the matter was a particular segment Carlin had been working on for months, recording it during the Santa Monica Civic show at the end of May. The piece was an expansion of the ideas about language that had caused him so much trouble in Vegas. Plenty of potentially offensive words, he reasoned, could be safely uttered on television, depending on their context. An
ass
could be a biblical donkey, a
bitch
a female dog, a
bastard
an illegitimate child, and so on. What, then, were the words that had no redeeming meaning whatsoever? The resulting routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” was destined to become a landmark not only for stand-up comedy, but for the history of free speech in America.

There are 400,000 words in the English language, he reasoned, “and there are seven of them you can’t say on TV. What a ratio that is! Three hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety three . . . to seven.” Carlin’s “heavy seven”—
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker,
and
tits
—were the ones that would “affect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.” (When
Class Clown
came out later in the year, the album arrived with a front-cover “warning” that repeated this line.) Far from being a provocation, “Seven Words” was Carlin’s attempt to expose the absurdity of outlawing words. His tone was playful, not confrontational: “
Tits
doesn’t even belong on the list, ya know? . . . Sounds like a nickname, right? ‘Hey, Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits.’”

Even the mainstream media recognized the gentleness in the approach. “He takes seven expletives and analyzes the meaning and use of each of them with the wit and skill of the most compelling professor of linguistics,” wrote a
New York Times
contributor. “In the process, the
verboten
is rendered suitably ludicrous. It is an energized, intense, though never strident, and frequently hilarious turn.”

Carlin wasn’t alone. Adult language was becoming increasingly common in comedy by 1972. Lenny Bruce had left behind a small army of comic imitators who carried on the business of liberating four-letter words, and then wondered why they had difficulty getting booked on talk shows. Pryor, after radicalizing himself to the Black Power movement while living in Berkeley, had released an album the previous year called
Craps (After Hours)
, which not only made ample use of most of the words on Carlin’s list, but also featured bits on masturbation, farting, and the mysterious legend of the “Snappin’ Pussy.”

Carlin found himself ideally suited to have it both ways, with his years of service in the pursuit of innocuous variety-show chuckles counterbalanced by the emergence of his genuinely rebellious nature. He’d once told his friend Bob Altman—the free-associating thinker everyone called Uncle Dirty—that he was going to show him how to perform the kind of subversive, socially incisive comedy they both adored, “and make a million bucks at it.” Larry Hankin, an avowed Bruce admirer, suggests that Carlin’s breakthrough was a matter of emphasis. While others simply complained that their language kept them from landing television bookings, Carlin drew fresh material from the taboo itself. “He turned the mirror on us, on the comedians who were saying ‘fuck,’” says Hankin. “He made a hunk out of it, out of the complaint. . . . He pointed out the holes in the logic. And the best comedians—Mort Sahl, Lenny—they pointed out the holes in the logic.”

ON JULY 21, 1972, Carlin was due to headline the main stage at Milwaukee’s Summerfest, a multiple-day fairground event then entering its fifth season. Inaugurated in 1968 by longtime Milwaukee mayor Henry W. Maier, who envisioned an Oktoberfest-style celebration for his largely Germanic city, the festival was conceived with a distinct ethnic cast, including polka bands and a tribute to King Gambrinus, patron saint of brewers. The original name of the festival, Juli Spass—“July fun” in German—was quickly abandoned when various groups began lobbying city hall for a more inclusive concept. One protester recommended retitling the event the Fantastic Harlequin Kaleidoscope; organizers finally settled on the rather less fanciful Summerfest.

Adopting a something-for-everyone approach, the festival booked Bob Hope and Led Zeppelin, among many other acts, in its early years in scattered locations around the city. By 1970 the lineup had expanded considerably, including appearances at a new lakefront site by James Brown, Sarah Vaughan, and Chicago. An enormous throng, estimated at well over 100,000, gathered that year to see Sly & the Family Stone, whose late arrival fed the crowd’s restlessness, nearly resulting in a riot. The
Milwaukee Sentinel
reported that “marijuana smoke was so thick in the area that if there had been a shift in the wind, a good share of the community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, might have gotten stoned.”

Carlin’s opening act at Summerfest was a blues group called the Siegel-Schwall Band. The group’s cofounders, singer Corky Siegel and guitarist Jim Schwall, had known Carlin for some time. In earlier years, when he was spending a lot of time in Chicago, he’d become a fan of theirs at Big John’s, next door to Second City in Old Town, where Siegel-Schwall became the house act after the Butterfield Blues Band hit the road. By 1972 they were already Summerfest regulars.

“The beer flows pretty freely at Summerfest,” says Schwall. So Carlin was set to address a huge gathering of boisterous Midwestern hippies. Booked elsewhere on the grounds that day were Arlo Guthrie and Brewer & Shipley, the latter still enjoying the residual success of their 1971 hit “One Toke Over the Line.” Despite the like-minded billing, bad omens appeared from the start. Carlin was concerned that the size of the audience might hinder his ability to establish a rapport, and he said so when he hit the stage. At one point during his set his microphone went dead, and the local newspaper reported that a woman climbed onstage twice to holler at the comedian.

As he worked his way through the “Seven Words” material, which had quickly become a signature part of his set, there was a sudden commotion in the wings. A police officer named Elmer Lenz heard the seven words while strolling the fairgrounds, and he was incensed. Hustling over to the main stage, he was about to stride into the spotlight and arrest the speaker on the spot. At the last moment, Lenz was stopped by fellow officers who’d been assigned to the backstage area, who convinced the irate cop to wait until the comedian finished his set.

The backstage patrolmen knew the drill at Summerfest, says Schwall. “They were specifically told, ‘You’re not here to bust the entertainers. You’re here to protect them.’ The stage backed up to Lake Michigan, about forty feet behind, and it wasn’t at all unusual for members of the bands to go out on the breakwater and twist one up.”