Seven Dirty Words (8 page)

For the better part of two years Carlin scraped by in New York. Golden found him occasional work outside the city—taking fifty bucks to play Brown’s Hotel in the Catskills, for instance. He went over well at another jazz club in Boston, Paul’s Mall; bombed at a New York bistro called the Sniffen Court Inn; took a quick trip to Bermuda to play the Inverurie Hotel. Still, Café Au Go Go was his real incubator.

For Carlin, a high school dropout who possessed a lively, inquisitive mind, the electric surge of ideas in the Village was intoxicating. “I wasn’t very well-educated, but I saw this beautiful stream of intelligent comedy coming out of those people”—Newhart, Cosby, Nichols, and May—“and it really got to me,” he said. At Café Au Go Go, he befriended an unlikely stockbroker named Bob Altman, a high-IQ, deep-reading dope smoker who’d been owner Howard Solomon’s roommate at the University of Miami.

“I’d hang around the club ’cause I could fuck the waitresses,” says Altman, a discursive firecracker who later had a lucrative, if short-lived, career as a campus comic known as Uncle Dirty. “I’d tell them, ‘I know the owner. I’ll get you a better station.’ George was funny. He was brilliant. He smoked pot, and I smoked pot. Plus I had access to a car. When he had a gig out of town, I’d drive him.” Carlin sometimes brought Brenda and Kelly over to Altman’s place to scrounge up something to eat: “He was broke, really bust-out.” Altman frittered away many nights with Carlin and his old friends from the neighborhood at the Moylan Tavern, playing darts and bumper pool and introducing his friend to the ideas of such radical spiritual thinkers as G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Carlin especially liked the French psychologist Emil Coue’s notion of autosuggestion: “
I
equals
W
squared, where
I
is the imagination and
W
is the will,” explains Altman. “It shows you how powerful the imagination is.”

Altman also turned Carlin on to a new book by Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Stalinist novel
Darkness at Noon
. Called
The Act of Creation
, the book explored the author’s theory of human ingenuity, the ability to integrate previously unrelated ideas. Jokes, as Carlin was well aware, are rooted in incongruities. To Koestler, scientific discovery, mystical insight, and “The Logic of Laughter,” as he named his opening chapter, can each be traced to the unique human ability to make cognitive connections. The author designed a triptych showing a continuum from jester to sage to artist. “Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits,’” he wrote, “and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful back-door entry . . . into the inner workshop of creative originality.” By falling into dream-states or finding other ways to transcend our stagnation, Koestler argued, we can achieve a “spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and elicits a new response to it.”

All this was heady stuff for a young man plumbing the recesses of his imagination in search of his own sense of humor (and smoking considerable quantities of funny cigarettes to get there). Years later Carlin recalled studying Koestler’s triptych:

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet, too.

But it would be some time before Carlin allowed himself to think in terms of wisdom and poetry. For the time being, he was committed to writing unapologetically silly material with no pretenses and potentially broad appeal. Much of it was variations on the characters he’d devised years before on the radio—the absurdist newscaster and his goofy sidekicks in the sports and weather departments. Closer to home, he had created a glib, speed-talking Top 40 disc jockey named Willie West, spinning records for a fictitious station, “Wonderful WINO,” with Carlin adding his own a cappella jingles and mock pop tunes.

On the night before New Year’s Eve, Carlin taped an appearance on another talent show,
On Broadway Tonight
, hosted by the veteran crooner Rudy Vallee. The program aired on the first of January 1964, a harbinger of good things to come in the new year. Coincidentally, it was a summer replacement for
The Danny Kaye Show
, hosted by Carlin’s boyhood hero.

As a student Carlin had been enamored of the comic actor Kaye, who became famous for his dazzling propensity for flawlessly delivered, tongue-twisting song lyrics. When Carlin was ten years old, his hero starred in
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
, an early Technicolor release based on a short story by James Thurber. Mitty is a harried, absent-minded book editor who escapes the stresses of his job and home life through a hyperactive imagination, daydreaming himself into increasingly fantastic scenarios. Kaye, who developed his talent for communicating by contorting his face and singing in gibberish during an extended vaudeville tour of Japan and China in the mid- 1930s, was known for such nonsense songs as “Bloop Bleep,” “The Frim Fram Sauce,” and his rendition of Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill’s breakneck “patter song,” “Tchaikovsky and Other Russians.” One of his most familiar hits, in 1950, was “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts,” and he made Cab Calloway’s scatting “Minnie the Moocher” another signature song, often leading audiences in exuberant call-and-response sing-alongs.

Carlin delighted in Kaye’s rubbery faces and vocal gymnastics, knowing that he had a similar knack for both. “Anything that was challenging verbally I liked,” he said. And Kaye “was incredibly adept verbally. He did funny accents, funny faces. All those things appealed to me.” From a young age he looked at Kaye’s career—the Catskills, radio, stage, films, and, eventually, television—as the model for his own ascent in show business. The way he figured it, if he succeeded as a comedian, Hollywood would have no choice but to make him a comic actor.

But Carlin’s boyhood enthusiasm for his favorite performer cooled considerably after a personal episode. Knowing that Kaye was scheduled to make an appearance at Radio City Music Hall, the young fan waited in a doorway on a cold, misty day to ask for an autograph. When a cab pulled up and Kaye hopped out, he strode briskly past the kid holding the pen. “Not even an ‘I don’t sign autographs,’” Carlin recalled. “That was a crushing moment.” Years later, when Carlin was established as a comic celebrity and had an opportunity to meet his onetime hero, he didn’t have the heart to tell him about the snub. “That was my gift to him,” he said.

In 1965 Carlin was still dedicated to the goal of breaking into Hollywood. His “responsible agent” at GAC—the one who coordinated the client’s career and saw to it that the agency’s various departments (television, film, nightclubs) kept his best interests in mind—was a veteran in the nightclub department named Peter Paul, who did his best to keep the young comedian busy. In the new year Carlin played five more weeks of bookings at Café Au Go Go. He also did two stints at another Chicago club, Mother Blues, in the city’s folkie Old Town neighborhood, and he was invited for return engagements at Paul’s Mall in Boston and the Inverurie in the Bahamas. Other gigs were not so notable. At a place called the Blue Dog in Baltimore, he performed without a paying soul in the audience.

Still, he was getting plenty of laughs most nights. He’d been honing one hunk in particular, “The Indian Sergeant,” which was emerging as his surefire crowd-pleaser. The premise involved an Indian warrior who called his troops to order like an army drill sergeant. Carlin introduced the bit by noting that classic Westerns typically spent an hour and a half showing the cowboys getting ready for the climactic Indian attack, but never showed the Indians preparing. “It was a standard fish-out-of-water gimmick, the thing that Bob Newhart was doing so well then,” he once explained. “The idea was that if the Indians were good fighters, they must have been organized, and military organization means N.C.O.s.” Carlin’s Indian sergeant addressed his troops in one of the born mimic’s favorite, and most natural, voices—a posturing Bronx baritone that mangled the word “loincloth” as
lernclot’
. The braves, the sergeant reported, were performing their drills admirably: “Burnin’ settlers’ homes—everybody passed. Imitatin’ a coyote—everybody passed. Sneakin’ quietly through the woods—everybody passed, except Limping Ox. However, Limping Ox is being fitted for a pair of corrective moccasins.” He then made a few scheduling announcements: “There’ll be a rain dance Friday night, weather permittin’.”

In May Carlin landed an audition for a new syndicated talk show set to premiere in July,
The Merv Griffin Show
. Having broken into show business as a singer, the host first found fame as the featured vocalist on popular bandleader Freddy Martin’s 1949 hit version of “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts,” which inspired Kaye’s own version a few months later. Before he got into television, Griffin had a brief film career, including an appearance in a 1953 musical (
So This Is Love
), in which he and costar Kathryn Grayson shared a then-controversial open-mouthed kiss. After hosting several game shows, the affable Griffin lent his name to a short-lived daytime talk show for NBC in 1962. Three years later he launched what would become his long-running syndicated show for Westinghouse Broadcasting. Most affiliates ran the show in the afternoon, though it was seen in some markets in prime time or in a late-night time slot opposite Carson’s
Tonight Show
.

Bob Shanks, the former
Tonight Show
talent coordinator, had joined the Griffin program as a producer. When Peter Paul urged him to take a look at this new comic, Carlin, Shanks agreed. “I had sort of forgotten George from
The Tonight Show
,” says Shanks, though his memory was refreshed when they were reintroduced in his office. On cue, Carlin performed “The Indian Sergeant” for his private audience. “I was falling out of my chair,” says Shanks. “I booked him right away.”

Carlin became one of
The Merv Griffin Show
’s earliest guests, along with another smooth-shaved product of the Bleecker Street scene, Peoria’s Richard Pryor, who sometimes did impromptu improv sketches with Carlin when they introduced each other at Café Au Go Go. “It was a gift to me to have both Carlin and Pryor walk in,” Shanks says. With the nightclubs beginning to move away from folk and comedy in favor of British Invasion-style rock ’n’ roll, Shanks felt fresh comic talent was becoming tougher to find: “I was looking hard for new comedians, and suddenly these two geniuses appear.”

“The Indian Sergeant” went over so well with both Griffin’s audience and the host himself (“Oh, Lord,” says Shanks, “he loved him”) that Carlin was invited back for regular weekly spots. In all, he did sixteen appearances with Griffin in 1965, and four more the following year. The success led directly to a high-profile booking at Basin Street East, one of the few midtown jazz clubs then still thriving in the decline of the bop era. He opened for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, who were “hot as a pistol then,” he recalled. “I didn’t get a lot of attention, but I didn’t care.” Carlin’s first few appearances on the Griffin show included encore performances of “The Indian Sergeant.” At first he was reluctant to do it again, but Shanks convinced him not to worry about overexposure: “I told him, not everyone watches the show every day. That’s the reason they repeat commercials. If we ask you to do a routine, then do that. They want to hear it again—it’s funny.”

Carlin also scored with several segments mocking the various conceits of television advertising—detergent and aspirin companies grandly exaggerating their significance in the daily lives of American families. “Our young Irish friend George Carlin is about to bite the hand that feeds us all,” Griffin said, introducing the comic at one taping. Carlin, Griffin claimed, had recently done his commercial jokes for a group of advertising copywriters. They cried, he said, but only from laughing so hard.

Standing in front of the set’s glittering curtain in an extra-skinny tie and a sharkskin jacket two sizes too big, a small spit curl dangling over his forehead, Carlin looked as though he was pledging a fraternity as he worked the Griffin audience. The commercial bits gave him a golden opportunity to showcase his growing repertoire of stock media characters—hale-fellows-well-met, pursed-lipped housewives, apple-cheeked little Jimmys at the dinner table—and his Jerry Lewis-like ability to screw his facial muscles into the daffiest expressions. In a prim, motherly voice, Carlin teased his audience by alluding to a bit of blasphemy, mouthing the middle word in the phrase “for Christ’s sake.” Then he took a moment to imagine what would have happened if the marketers had instead hired a profane longshoreman to vouch for the aspirin company. The censors would’ve needed to erase so many words from the guy’s commentary, Carlin said with an impish grin, there would hardly be any sentence left at all: “Well, when I get a ____ headache the ___ ___,” he rasped, lapsing into a Tourette’s-like string of staccato consonants and hiccups. It was the first nationally televised flirtation with four-letter words for the man who would become comedy’s most widely recognized authority on the subject.

Already he was reaching his hand into the snake-charmer’s basket. On another Griffin appearance, Carlin got big laughs when he joked about the fact that many cough syrups contained codeine, “a class-B narcotic referred to by junkies as Pepsi-Cola.” Yet he was also eager to please. Invited to sit at Merv’s desk with the chain-smoking host after wrapping up his six-minute hunk, he was introduced to the celebrity grab-bag of the day’s guests idling on the couch, including professional panelist Kitty Carlisle, the pint-sized singer of the British rock ’n’ roll act Freddie and the Dreamers, and Griffin’s announcer and sidekick, Arthur Treacher. Carlin’s regular spot on the show had been a boon to his nightclub career, he told Merv, nervously attempting some unscripted banter. “There’s a level you want to get to, a place you want to work, finally some day if you can,” he said. “And I made it.” With mock pride, he announced that he’d just been booked into Angie’s Roman Numeral Restaurant in Batavia, New York. It was a nice joint, he reported after the laughter died down, even if it did sound “like a real knucklebuster.”