James Sullivan - 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

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Table of Contents

Also by James Sullivan

The Hardest Working Man:

How James Brown Saved the Soul of America

Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon

For Jim Sheehan, who taught his kids the most offensive words are shut up .

I have believed all my life in free thought and free speechup to and including the utmost limits of the endurable.

H. L. MENCKEN

WARM-UP

YOU HAD TO LAUGH.

In twentieth-century America, he went looking for the sublime and found only the ridiculous. How could any thinking person see it otherwise? Born on the eve of World War II, he lived the Atomic Age up close, working on bomber jets while serving in the U.S. Air Force. He experienced the cultural upheaval of the 1960s from its epicenter, and he lived long enough to experience the absurd excess, and the inevitable, colossal hangover, of the end of the American century.

Its called the American Dream, he said, because you have to be asleep to believe it. In his lifetime, laughter seemed like the only sane response. So George Carlin set about studying it and creating it. For fifty years he may well have produced more laughs than any other human being.

He also rubbed his share of people the wrong way. If he hadnt, he wouldnt have been doing it right. Carlin knew that comedy is meant to shock. Funny doesnt happen without a sense of surprise. And audacitythe courage to say what you meanis critical to the art of making people laugh. Whether speaking truth to the powerful or telling fart jokes, comedians, by their very nature, deal in taboo.

Comedy bends the rules. Humor, wrote an early scholar of American popular culture, is a lawless element. Every comedian is a scofflaw, wrote another, who could be charged with breaking and enteringwith breaking societys rules and restrictions, and with entering peoples psyches.

George Carlin was a natural born transgressor. He saw where the line had been drawn, and he leaped. If he spotted a sacred cowGod, country, childrenhe went cow-tipping. Raised on Spike Jones anarchy and Beat Generation rebellion, he heard it every time he got into hot water, with the nuns and priests, the owner of the corner drugstore, his commanding officers: What are you, a comedian?

Yes, he was. Wholly devoted to the craft, he made every kind of comedy his own. Some comedians do self-deprecation. Some do surrealism. Some do political humor or dick jokes, impressions or observations. Carlin did it all. He questioned everything, from the existence of God and the authority of government, to the military and the police, to the accuracy of the phrase shelled peanuts: If youre clothed, you have clothes, so if youre shelled, you should have shells. Every comedian does a little George, Jerry Seinfeld wrote in the New York Times upon Carlins death. Ive heard it my whole career: Carlin does it, Carlin already did it, Carlin did it eight years ago.

Carlin often said there were three main elements to his comedy: the little world of everyday experience (kids, pets, driving, the stores, television commercials); the big, unanswerable questions, such as race, war, government, big business, religion, and the mysteries of the universe; and the English language, with all its quirks and frustrations (lingo and faddish trendy buzzwords and catch phrases and Americanisms). In fact, that covers just about everything under the sun.

Just as no topic was off-limits for Carlin, no style of comedy was beyond his grasp. He was equally enamored of hokey puns (My back hurts; I think I over-schlepped) and sly brainteasers. (If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?) He did street corner insults and Zen non sequiturs. He changed voices, made sound effects, whistled, sang, stuck out his tongue and blew raspberries. He was an outstanding physical comedian, too, with enough rubbery faces and herky-jerky gestures to do an entire set in mime.

Many comedians have distinctive voices, but only a few are fortunate enough to develop one thats never been heard. George Carlins voice was unmistakable. In his younger years he had the mellow, quizzical tone of a perpetually amused pot smoker. Later it aged into a hard-earned rasp. Throughout his various stages, this one-of-a-kind voicequintessential New Yorker, representative hippie, reflexive contrarianspoke for a nation of dissatisfied idealists and for himself alone.

Timing is essential to comedy, and Carlins personal timing could not have been more precise. The comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art, wrote Henri Bergson in his famous essay on laughter. Born during the Golden Age of Radio, Carlin devoted more time to reading Mad magazine (established 1952) than to his Latin and algebra lessons. The stand-up comedy rebirth of the 1950s, when performers including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Gregory demolished the old order of vaudevillian shtick, gave his early career its context. And Carlin was at that crucial age of transformationthirty-threewhen he found he could no longer ignore the lure of the countercultural revolution. Comedy, as the proud autodidact knew better than anyone, is a constant voyage of discovery.

Picking up the baton from the martyred Lenny Bruce, he remade stand-up, once the trade of strip-club flunkies in cheap tuxedos, for the rock n roll crowd. He took it to theaters, turning the art of the joke into a concert event. Then he brought his provocative routines into the home, rejuvenating his career with an association with HBO that would last three decades. Some comedians can stretch a halfhours worth of one-liners to last a lifetime. Carlin wrote an hour of new material for each HBO show, roughly every two years. Younger comedians are awestruck by the sheer vastness of his productivity. No one else came close.

For most comics, stand-up is a means to an end. In the 1980s, ten solid minutes got more than a few their own sitcoms. In the age of television, Carlin was a rare creaturea comedian for whom stand-up comedy was the mountaintop. I found out that it was an honest craft, and in fact, that art was involved, he said.

Like a master craftsman, Carlin worked with words. He held them up to the light. He inspected them, rubbed them, and whittled them. He worshipped them, in a way that he felt precious few products of the human mind deserved to be worshipped.

His most famous routine, Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, branded him as a vulgarian, a foul-mouthed comic who worked dirty. But the routine was much more than mere titillation. It was an airtight example of Carlins belief in the one thing he truly believed inthe power of reason. Why, exactly, are these few wordsout of 400,000 in the English languageoff-limits? Who are they hurting, and how? When Carlin reserved the right to use the whole language, he sparked a debate about censorship that brought his seven magic words shit , piss , fuck , cunt , cocksucker , motherfucker , and tits into the halls of the Supreme Court. Decades later, his questions are more relevant than ever in our media-saturated culture.

In his later years, the unruffled hippie became known for a certain irascibility. As he pointed out, laughter is our response to injustice. (The human race has one really effective weapon, said Mark Twain, and that is laughter.) The old shpritzers who played the Catskills told zingers about their mothers-in-law. He took the longer view. His targets were the massive institutions that supposedly have civilized the species.

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