The Orwellian year 1984 marked a turning point for Carlin. For one thing, his mother died. She had hovered over him his whole life, and her absence brought a kind of relief. “It was truly like a ton of bricks had been lifted off his shoulders,” his daughter, Kelly, once said. Though Mary had been living on the West Coast since the mid-1970s, she hadn’t seen her second son much in recent years. Eighty-nine at the time of her death, she’d lived long enough to see Reagan go from baseball announcer to B-movie actor to California governor to the leader of the free world.
Reagan’s reelection in 1984 confirmed for Carlin that this wasn’t his decade. Though he rarely resorted to political humor—in part because he felt it dated quickly, in part because he was an independent thinker who could mock liberals as deftly as conservatives—Carlin did indulge himself in a few Reagan quickies. “Don’t you think it’s just a little bit strange that Ronald Reagan had an operation on his asshole and George Bush had an operation on his middle finger?” he joked at the beginning of one of the HBO specials. The tone that Reagan set “just fed your dissatisfaction,” he later remembered. And the sense of entitlement adopted by the yuppie generation irked him long after the country had moved on from horn-rimmed glasses and pastel-colored polo shirts with upturned collars.
The period confirmed for Carlin that he was a lifelong outsider, a man who had no interest in being accepted. “Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group,” he said.
When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.
I don’t really identify with America. I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.
Like Democritus, the ancient Greek known as the “mocker” and the “laughing philosopher,” Carlin saw humor and laughter as the only logical response to a crazy world. When concerned townspeople asked Hippocrates about the philosopher, who seemed to be going mad, Hippocrates pronounced him “too sane for his own good.” Inside the gatefold of Class Clown, Carlin had featured a parable about a country that produced a harvest said to make those who ate it insane. “We must eat the grain to survive,” said the king, “but there must be those among us who will remember that we are insane.”
In 1983 he had taken his first whack at publishing, writing an oversized, thirty-two-page concert-program-style book called Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help. Heavily illustrated and designed like a scrapbook, the book satisfied his chronic urge to categorize and make lists—full pages crammed with pet causes of the Miscellaneous Ailments Foundation (“the creeps . . . the willies . . . the shits”) and People I Can Do Without (“people whose kids’ names all start with the same initial . . . athletes who give 110%”). Other pages of “miscellaneous bullshit” represented the kind of shameless puns Carlin loved as a kid, reading Esar’s Comic Dictionary. (“She was an earthy woman, so I treated her like dirt.”)
Some of the drawings were by Holly Tucker, wife of Corky Siegel, the bandleader from the Summerfest incident in Milwaukee. The centerpiece, a two-page spread of 209 “impolite” words scrawled in calligraphy above a drawing of a urinal, provided the artist and her husband with an unexpected moment of amusement. When they went to pick up an early draft of the artwork at a printer’s shop, there was a little old lady behind the counter. As she was handing the print job to the couple, she leaned in to give it a good read. Siegel and his wife were mortified, until the attendant looked up with a smile. “Oh, this is cute!” she said.
In late 1984 Carlin took another swing at hosting Saturday Night Live, which was in the middle of one of its extended periods without creator Lorne Michaels at the helm. After viewing a brief clip of Carlin on the first SNL episode nearly a decade earlier (“Does anybody know who that was? He sure had a lot of hair”), he joked about the long gap: “They told me if I did a real good job, they’d have me back. . . . I’m really glad that some people live up to their word.” He noted the complaint that NBC had supposedly received from the archbishop’s office about his God monologue, then proceeded to bait the current archbishop, the newly appointed John Joseph O’Connor, with more material about religion.
This time on SNL he was a team player, guest-anchoring the newscast and taking part in a few sketches. He played to type as an Irish fireman, making a guest appearance in Billy Crystal’s parody of The Joe Franklin Show, and he soloed in a mock infomercial for “Ted’s Book of World Records.”
By this time Carlin was like a nutty uncle to the emerging generation of comedians. He gave Bob “Bobcat” Goldthwait, a newcomer by way of the Boston and San Francisco scenes who always seemed on the verge of hysterics, a part in the proposed HBO series Apt. 2C. Garry Shandling, who had mustered up the nerve to approach Carlin for comedy advice when he was still an electrical engineering student at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s, was now a regular Carson guest host and the cocreator of Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Shandling loved to recount his youthful encounter with Carlin, who was performing at a jazz club in Phoenix when he took the time to read the nervous kid’s work.
Carlin’s curiosity about the unexamined side of human life was a huge inspiration for Steven Wright, the molasses-paced surrealist whose breakthrough came with his 1985 debut album of comic koans, I Have a Pony. “I was amazed how he talked about everyday things,” says Wright, “little things people don’t usually discuss. He’d make his comedy about these mundane things, and it was hilarious—the speed of light, and coasters, and lint.” Wright, who recited routines from FM & AM and Class Clown (with proper credit) for his public speaking class at Boston’s Emerson College, says he instinctively gravitated toward Carlin’s “whole approach, like he was an outsider of society, looking in.” Over the years he had several opportunities to speak with Carlin, who sought Wright’s advice on playing certain venues and told the younger comic he was one of the comedians Carlin had on his iPod. The connection was as meaningful for Wright the last time as the first. “It was a big rush for me that he liked what I did,” he says.
The Carlin on Campus HBO special, which aired in 1984, was Carlin’s best yet. On an eccentric set designed by Brenda—a landscape of oversized geometric shapes—he crafted a kind of comic poetry by blessing the performance with a mock recitation, jumbling lines from the Lord’s Prayer with the Pledge of Allegiance (“Give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail”). He also offered an updated, well-polished version of “Baseball and Football” and, in a long hunk about “Cars and Driving,” the astute observation that everyone who drives slower than you is an “idiot,” whereas those who drive faster are invariably “maniacs.” The closing credits were accompanied by a brief taped performance of the star of the show playing an original composition called “Armadillo Blues” on piano while wearing a nun’s habit.
The hour was interspersed with several minutes of completed material from the work he had done with animator Bob Kurtz and his staff for The Illustrated George Carlin. “It
’s No Bullshit” was a cartoon parody on amazing-facts features like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with fake news items and a compendium of fanciful sporting events, like a blind golf tournament. The music over the end credits was provided by Kurtz’s friend Joe Siracusa, a veteran of Spike Jones’s anarchic orchestra, who, much to Carlin’s delight, improvised a one-man band of cuckoo sounds—bells and whistles and hiccups and washboard percussion.
Kurtz entered the short film, packaged as Drawing on My Mind, in several festivals, and it won first prize in its category at an animation festival in Canada. In New York a woman asked the director whether he felt the “Blind Golf ” bit was offensive to blind people. “Not anybody who saw it,” he replied. At another festival in France, the print with the French translation didn’t arrive in time, so the audience watched it in English. Despite the language barrier, “People were laughing so hard they thought they were going to die,” Kurtz recalls. “For five days, people would yell at me, ‘It’s No Bullshit!’ We didn’t win an award, but it was the hit of the festival.”
As had Kurtz, comedian Chris Rush got a call out of the blue to help Carlin work on a script for his proposed HBO series Apt. 2C. Rush, a motor-mouthed, high-IQ Brooklynite whose comedy has always reflected the peculiar mix of his instinctive perversity with his clinical training as a molecular biologist, says he got started in comedy while still a toddler, performing ersatz opera with made-up dirty lyrics at family gatherings. He was Carlin’s kind of guy. In fact, though, it was Brenda who turned her husband on to the shaved-headed, philosophically inquisitive potty-mouth. She was the first of the two to hear Rush’s headlong debut album, First Rush, recorded for Atlantic in 1973 while Rush was writing for the fledgling National Lampoon. One day Carlin called his fellow New Yorker and asked him to fly to LA for a meeting. “It was a stunning fucking thing,” says Rush. “Here was a guy I idolized. . . . He was the guy that softened the beach for the rest of us.”
They hit it off and began writing together. At one point Rush stayed at Carlin’s house in Brentwood for the better part of a week while Brenda was away. Officially, Carlin was also writing with his good friend Pat McCormick, a longtime Tonight Show contributor whose association with the show went back to the Paar years. McCormick was a hulking, anything-goes comic presence who had recently starred as Big Enos in the Smokey and the Bandit films. Also involved were the British-Canadian comedy writing duo of Andrew Nicholls and Darrell Vickers, who later became Johnny Carson’s head writers, until his retirement in 1992. They were introduced to Carlin by his brother Pat, who met the writing team while all three were working under the table for Alan Thicke on his short-lived late-night show, Thicke of the Night. (Carlin sometimes helped set up his older brother with writing work, once calling the office of Hustler magazine to get someone to read a submission from Patrick. Pat Carlin kept an office in the same building as Carlin’s for a while, before quitting Hollywood and moving to upstate New York with his wife.)
“George was very healthy at this time—bottled water all around and tofu salads,” says Nicholls. “He used to hug everyone when they got to work and hug them all good-bye at the end of the day. Pretty intimidating for us, just down from Canada, only a few years after listening to his albums at night on headphones under the covers.”
Prefiguring Seinfeld, the premise of Apt. 2C featured an apartment-dwelling writer constantly distracted by the shenanigans of his eccentric friends and neighbors, who included McCormick, Goldthwait, stand-up comic Jeff Altman, and Lois Bromfield (whose sister, Valri, had appeared on the first SNL). Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, played a Girl Scout. Despite the writing talent rounded up for Apt. 2C, Rush could tell that the constraint of working with a writing team was unproductive for Carlin. “If you’re a gunfighter for twenty-five years, and all of a sudden they ask you to be a group leader in an advertising agency—you’re not good at working with people, you know?” says Rush, who had a part in the pilot but backed out. “I told him, ‘I see what you’re trying to do, but it’s falling short.’” At one point an HBO executive gave Carlin some notes on the network’s suggestions for improvement, including a recommendation to tone down the four-letter words. Not surprisingly, that pretty much sealed the show’s fate. Carlin had wanted to push the network on Rush’s own idea for a show, a mind-boggling conceptual thing he called Innertube. “After Apt. 2C lit a bomb,” says Rush, “that was the end of that.”
Not long after the pilot disappeared, Carlin called Rush in New York and told him to come by the Ritz-Carlton, where he was staying. After encouraging the younger comic to berate him for not taking his advice—with some reluctance, Rush launched into a private, foul-mouthed, one-man roast of his friend—Carlin, laughing, wrote out a check for $18,000. Write a movie, he said. The script that Rush eventually produced, a gag vehicle called Strange Days, went nowhere.
It had been a decade since Carlin had acted in Car Wash, nearly two since With Six You Get Eggroll. Despite the disappointing experience of the HBO pilot, he was warming to the idea of renewing his acting aspirations. Kelly, too, was thinking about pursuing a career in acting, and father and daughter enrolled together in a workshop class with Hollywood acting coach Stephen Book. “He thought it was time to become knowledgeable as an actor, to have technique and expertise,” says Book. Also in the class were the young actors Tate Donovan and Grant Heslov. In one class, Carlin and his daughter partnered to do a scene. Book gave them Somerset Maugham’s Rain, the story of a prostitute named Sadie Thompson, who arrives on an island in the South Pacific, and the zealous missionary who hopes to reform her. “I thought, This is going to be interesting,” says Book with a laugh.
The first acting that Carlin did after starting the class was in the brief noirish set pieces (“The Envelope”) at the beginning and end of his next HBO special, Playin’ with Your Head. The stand-up performance was taped over two nights in May 1986 at the Beverly Theater. Much as Moranis had spoofed Carlin’s habit of analyzing common turns of phrase, the real Carlin opened with a bit about the odd and annoying ways we say hello and good-bye to each other. He liked to mash them together, he joked: “Toodle-oo, go with God, and don’t take any wooden nickels.” He also did material on why there aren’t more variations on the notion of a moment of silence for the dearly departed (“How about a moment of muffled conversation for the treated and released?”) and, in a hint of the politically incorrect button-pushing that would partly define his later years in comedy, a crass joke about guys who wear earrings. “I’m better than that,” he began to apologize, then recanted: “No, I’m not!”
Playin’ with Your Head was Carlin’s first HBO special with a new director, Rocco Urbisci. Urbisci’s first job in Hollywood had been on the staff of Steve Allen’s last talk show, locally produced at the KTLA studio in Los Angeles and syndicated to several markets in 1970 and 1971. Urbisci had booked Carlin on Allen’s show a number of times during the comic’s transformative period, when bookings were uncertain. Later the two worked together on The Midnight Special. Although they hadn’t seen each other for years when Urbisci showed up backstage at a Carlin set at the Wadsworth Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard, Carlin impulsively asked if the director would like to take on his next HBO project. They collaborated on all of Carlin’s original HBO events until his death more than two decades later.
Coincidental to the acting class, Carlin was offered a supporting role in an upcoming comedy featuring Bette Midler and Shelley Long, who was nearing the end of her five years starring on the NBC sitcom Cheers. Outrageous Fortune was directed by Hollywood veteran Arthur Hiller, who had directed Silver Streak with Pryor and, years earlier, The Out-of-Towners with Jack Lemmon, the man Carlin once suggested was his comic-acting role model. With its title plucked from the famous soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the slapstick-y movie followed the story of a pair of aspiring actresses who end up dating the same man, who turns out to be an agent for the KGB. In a flat-brimmed cowboy hat and sporting an uncharacteristic tan, Carlin played Fra
nk Madras, an old desert drunk who convinces the women to hire him as a tracker. Comically cranky about letting himself get sucked into his new clients’ dangerous escapade, he lends them his clothes as a disguise and spends much of the movie wearing Midler’s print skirt and orange sweater. “There were projects that he really busted his ass on,” says Book. Though it proved formulaic, Outrageous Fortune was one of these.
Carlin brought a bit less desire to Justin Case, an NBC movie for which director Blake Edwards hand-picked the comic as the lead. Carlin played the ghost of a private detective trying to learn the circumstances behind his own murder at the hands of a mysterious “Lady in Black.” Dead detectives, old rascals, fading hippies, corrupt clergy-men, and sage advisors—for the rest of his career, Carlin was nearly always cast to type, usually based on the stock voices he’d been using in his act for years. Even the gratification of being the first choice of Edwards, who’d made not only the Pink Panther films but also Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and (with Lemmon starring) the dramatic Days of Wine and Roses, was not quite enough to convince Carlin that this project was more than a paycheck.
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 23
