classical piano.
(George, by the way, spent most of his life in the nuthouse. He
had taken all his clothes off on the crosstown bus and they said don't
do that, but he did it again two years later. So they put him in Rockland State Hospital, Building 17, diagnosed with dementia praecox.
He would come home at Thanksgiving and Christmas and play the
piano. One Thanksgiving he turned to me and said, "I'm an admiral. I sail out of Port Said." He pronounced "Said" as the past tense of
"say," not with the vowels separated. I thought it was wonderful that
he'd spent his life in Rockland and claimed to be an admiral. But he
never told me any more about his seafaring days.)
Part of my mother's strategy for advancing her life-agenda and
realizing her material dreams demanded careful control of the development of her children. I don't mean moral guidance or practical life-advice but a code that would make her look good and feel
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HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GEORGE
comfortable. "Everything you do is a reflection on me." She was
obsessed with appearances, utterly dependent on the approval of the
outside world, in particular that segment of society for whom she
worked and that met her approval, the ruling class. Her vocabulary
was full of tripe like "A man is judged by his wife," "When you speak
you judge yourself," "You are judged by the company you keep."
Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment of others, judgment by
others.
The other control factor was guilt—how our behavior made her
feel. She turned everything into a test of how considerate or inconsiderate we were being. She carried it to melodramatic l e n g t h s infused it with a sense of martyrdom. It wasn't just "I give you
everything." It was "I trudge home night after night, my arms loaded
with bundles for you boys, my poor arms loaded with bundles and
the doctor says I may drop on the spot because my blood pressure is
185 over 9,000 and the garbage isn't even out." I know lots of people
heard that shit but there was some extra dimension for me—it was
frightening. I had the normal need to differentiate from the parent,
especially one of the opposite sex, but she was repelling me with
these aspects of her behavior and of her dreams for me.
When her marriage broke up, her living with a maid on Riverside
Drive and having nice crystal and all that shit went away. It was unfinished business. I think she wanted me to finish the job. On one
occasion I overheard her saying to Patrick that he would amount to
nothing because he was a Carlin and so on, but. . . "I'm going to
make something out of that little boy in there." It gave me steel. It
made me determined that she wouldn't make something out of me.
I would be the one that would make something out of me.
And yet she was my mother, so she's deep in my art, both for what
she gave me—especially that love of words—and for what I rebelled
against in her. And she made me laugh, she had a way with a punch
line. Once she told Pat and me about coming home on the bus that
day. A big fat German man plonked down beside her. "A big Hun
sat next to me," she said, "a big mess! He was taking up far too much
room. So I took out my hatpin and showed it to him and said: 'Condense yourself!' "
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I'll never forget the moment when I made my mother laugh for
the first time. That I actually took an idea and twisted it and she
laughed. And it was real—not just cute-kid stuff. I provoked a laugh
in her by means of something I thought of. How magic that was, the
power it gave me.
Even after I'd made the break—made it pretty clear that I wasn't
going to let her make something of me—she hung on. She'd find
excuses to come visit me on the road when I was playing these little nightclubs in the early sixties. She'd show up in Boston or Fort
Worth or Shreveport. "I just want to see if you have nice linens." By
then I'd begun to claim my independence and my manhood and
was able to accommodate that—we hadn't wound up killing each
other after all.
But then she showed up on my honeymoon! My partner, Jack
Burns, and I were working at the Miami Playboy Club, and my
brand-new wife, Brenda, and I were living at the motel next door—
and I get a call: "I'm coming down with Agnes" (Agnes was her
sister). My mother and my maiden aunt on my fucking honeymoon!
Mary got on well with Brenda. Almost too well. A little later when
we lived with her in New York—I was getting started on my own
by now and things were pretty tight—she would often try to drive
a wedge between Brenda and myself. I would go out drinking with
the guys from the old neighborhood, and while I slept it off in the
morning, she'd give Brenda twenty bucks and say, "Go on downtown, and go shopping—don't let him know where you are." Antiman, anti-husband stuff. It was the diametric opposite of the old
mother-in-law joke.
As Shannon says, Victorian standards of niceness could be cruel.
It wasn't just that the linens had to be nice. And while Mary must
have been dismayed that her son chose the career I did, she made
the most of it. When I was a regular on Merv G r i f f i n in the midsixties, she came on the show and upstaged everybody—including
me. In a way I hadn't yet made a break with Mary's niceness. The
sixties were my nice years, my nice suit, my nice collar, my nice tie,
my nice haircut—and my nice material.
When I really made the break in 1970, really put that niceness be2 0
HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GEORGE
hind me, she had a remarkable—but typical—reaction. She came to
the Bitter End on Bleecker Street right around the time of the FM &
AM album. I was doing "Seven Words" by then, and so for the first
time she saw me saying "cocksucker" and "motherfucker" on stage
and having people laugh and applaud.
Mary was never a prude. She liked to tell a dirty joke—but she'd
make believe she felt ashamed and embarrassed. She'd give you a
look like "Aren't I awful? Am I the bad girl?" and then tell it. But I
was taking things very far—plus I was attacking two of the things she
held most dear: religion and commerce. She was mortified that I
would be rewarded for these attitudes. But she was incredibly happy
I was successful. It was the payoff. The fulfillment of "Everything
you do is a reflection on me." She was a star's mother. "Hi—I'm
Georgie's mother."
But here's the most telling thing. On the block of 121st Street
where I grew up was our church, Corpus Christi, and Corpus
Christi School. It was run by Dominican nuns and they all knew
Mary. Throughout my nice years the sisters got to know me from
television; they knew I was an alumnus of Corpus Christi, and my
mother would visit with them and it would be "Yes, he's doing so
well," "Yes, I'm so proud of him," "Yes, you should be."
Now comes shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power. So
one day she's walking past the church and runs into a couple of the
nuns and they comment on the new surge in my popularity and say,
"Corpus Christi was all over the Class Clown album." So Mar
y says,
"Yes, but isn't it awful, sisters, the language he's using." And they
say, "No, don't you see? What he's saying is these words are part of
the language anyway and they're kept off in their own little section
and their own little closet. He's trying to liberate us from the way we
feel about these things." My mother says, "Oh yes, yes, of course."
She's okay now. She's fine. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother
Church. Now they're nice words.
When I threw my mother out of my life figuratively as a teenager, I threw out the good with the bad. To make a clean break
you eliminate everything, but I still find her ambitions hidden in
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mine—and they're not necessarily bad. An important goal of mine is
to do a one-man Broadway show. And it was Mary who used to take
me to Broadway shows and in the lobby would point to people and
say: "See that man's hand? Look at that. He's cultured. He's refined.
Look how he holds his cigarette. Look at the angle of his leg. That's
what I want for you." In some way my desire to go to Broadway and
the legitimate stage is to impress the people my mother admired. I
still have this longing to be Mary's model boy. She is hidden in every
cranny of my workroom, requiring me to do things. What I have to
do constantly is to take Mary out of things and leave only myself in
them. Then decide if I want to do them.
My mother wanted me to learn the piano. Like her, like Uncle
George the admiral. And I did take lessons and play at recitals and
shit, but I hated practicing. I had this dream one night not long
ago. I'm trying to learn these piano pieces and I'm very frustrated
because I haven't got time, and I'm trying to learn them. Then right
there in the dream I say to myself, "Hey, I don't even take piano
lessons!"
When I woke up I wrote that down. I stuck it up on the wall of the
room where I work. Whenever I get goofy and my OCD kicks in, I
look at it and say: "Mary, Mary! Get out of the room!"
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3
CURIOUS GEORGE
George Carlin, 1959
(Courtesy o f Kelly C a r l i n - M c C a l l )
One blazing Sunday in July 1941, my mother and I and an
older woman named Bessie, who was our housekeeper,
went to Mass at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. Usually we went to Our Lady of
Lourdes, a gloomy neo-Gothic barn on 143rd Street, but the good
Catholic ladies had been attracted to Corpus Christi by its pastor,
Father George Ford. It wasn't physical attraction, although Father
Ford was, by contemporary Catholic standards, doing something
quite indecent. He was delivering intelligent sermons that credited
his congregation with having minds of their own.
As well as the church he ran an eponymous parochial school
of eight grades—an oasis of enlightenment in the wasteland of
Ascensions, Nativities, Blessed Sacraments and Our Ladies of
Unbearable Maternal Grief, where retrograde clergy routinely hammered on the bodies and minds of the children entrusted to their
care.
After Mass we strolled up the hill toward Amsterdam. There outside 519 West 121st was a sign: "Vacancy—5 Rooms." Just what we
needed! An address my father didn't know about. And only a few
doors from a school I could walk to without crossing the street. Of
course I was only four, so I still had two years to shop for a really cool
pencil box. Mary always was a visionary.
Most people would've considered this a random piece of good
luck, but not Mary Carlin. She pointed out to me many, many times
afterward that God's mother had been directly responsible for find2 5
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ing our apartment, because we moved in on August 15th, the Feast
of the Assumption.
For Catholics the Feast of the Assumption was a Holy Day of
Obligation, which meant you had to attend Mass on that day or be
guilty of a mortal sin. I certainly hope we found time to attend Mass,
because mortal sins are far worse than venial or "regular" sins. If you
die with a mortal sin on your soul you will burn in inconceivable
torment in hell for all eternity. Dying with a venial sin on your sheet
merely costs you a few aeons of flaming agony in purgatory. There
the fires are as hot as hell but you're consoled by knowing it's only
for a few hundred thousand million years. God hands out these hideous, agonizing punishments because He loves you.
The Assumption of Our Lady by the way doesn't mean she assumed she was going to heaven. That would be a sin of pride and
August 15th would be the Feast of Our Lady's Presumption. Our
Lady could not commit a sin. She was conceived immaculate,
meaning "free of the stain of original sin" (which has nothing to
do with whether your sins display any originality). She was the only
human ever to give birth without being fertilized by a male sperm—
otherwise known as the Virgin Birth—the reason being that the
standard male sperm-delivery system comes very close, in the eyes
of the Church, to mortal sin. We have to assume—there's that word
again—that Mary's husband, Joseph, never came close to getting
into the Immaculate Pants.
Why Mary the Immaculate had so keen an interest in the living arrangements of Mary the Carlin was never explained, but right
around the time the United States was laying plans to sucker Japan
into attacking Pearl Harbor, we three Gypsies (my mother's name
for herself, Pat and me) plus Bessie tucked ourselves safely away in
our Morningside Heights apartment.
We soon discovered we'd moved into one of the greatest neighborhood concentrations of educational, cultural and religious institutions in America. The centerpiece was Columbia University with
its many colleges, including, just a few yards from my front door,
Teachers College, from which it was once said every superintendent of schools in America had been graduated. Across Broadway
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CURIOUS GEORGE
was Barnard, one of the Ivy League's Seven Sisters. Down the street
from our house was Union Theological Seminary, America's foremost training ground for Protestant clergy.
Two blocks farther west, towering over the neighborhood, was
Riverside Church, a twenty-eight-story Gothic cathedral endowed
by the Rockefellers, and known locally as Rockefeller Church (a
sure sign of what Americans really worship). It soared over our heads
at the foot of our street—a three-hundred-foot phallus with seventyfour bells in its head, the largest carillon in the world.
Just around the corner were the Jewish Theological Seminary
and Juilliard School of Music, where I walked in at the age of ten to
ask if I could get piano lessons. Close by was International House,
not of pancakes but of foreign Columbia students; Interchurch Center, HQ of the National Council of Churches, and a few blocks away
Grant's Tomb, where many a night we smoked pot while that old
juicer Ulysses and his wife dozed away inside.
Our neighborhood quickly became a metaphor for my mother's cultural dilemma: the clash between her self-image as a lac
ecurtain businesswoman and the reduced circumstances in which
her shanty-Irish husband had abandoned her. Downtown, up on the
hill, was the intellectual center which embodied her cultural aspirations. Uptown, down the hill, on the Broadway which Jesus tells us
"leads to destruction," lay a mostly Irish neighborhood beginning
around 123rd Street, known back then as White Harlem.
White Harlem was tougher and more crowded than the streets
around Columbia. Its buildings were older and many didn't have elevators. The whole area had a decidedly working-class flavor and, of
course, was a lot more fun. You can guess in which direction Mary
wanted her sons to head. And which direction they wanted to head.
At the beginning she didn't have to worry about me—I was only
four when we moved into 519. The highlights of my life were my
trips to midtown with Bessie, listening to the radio and thumbsucking. I was a world-class thumb-sucker. My specialty at bedtime
was to loosen part of the bottom sheet, wrap it around my thumb
and cram the whole thing into my mouth for extended, overnight
sucking. By morning this would create yet another circular, pleated
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saliva stain in one corner of the sheet, which must have caused some
speculation at the local Chinese laundry: "Aha! Irish form of birth
control! No wonder so many of them!"
The big old Philco radio in the living room fascinated me from
the beginning. I couldn't get enough of it. I didn't care what was
on: quiz shows, soap operas, newscasts, interviews, plays, comedies.
T hat all these voices could magically enter my house fired my imagination and nurtured my obsession with words, inflections, accents.
On a more basic level it provided company. I harbored a distinct
loneliness as a little kid, growing up with no grandparents, no father,
a part-time mother and a hired friend—Bessie, who, kind, sweet and
mothering though she was, wasn't blood. My adored older brother—
the problem child—was away at boarding school. For an embryonic
loner the radio was deeply associated with warm feelings—comfort,
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