Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  “I’m doing my best work,” he told interviewer Bob Costas around this time. “I’m thinking better than I ever have.” The next HBO show, Jammin’ in New York, which aired live from the theater at Madison Square Garden (then called the New Paramount), was dedicated to Kinison, who died two weeks before its April 1992 taping. Beginning with an extended riff on the country’s militaristic self-image, with the televised spectacle of the first Gulf War still fresh, the set revolved around three long, writerly pieces, including an exhaustive examination of air-travel jargon (such as final destination: “All destinations are final—that’s what it means!”) that should have retired the subject for stand-up comedians forever, and a rant against the voguish Save the Planet movement that he called “The Planet Is Fine” (but “the people are fucked”). Machine-gunning his way through a long list of natural and man-made disasters, he proclaimed his delight in bad news—the more death and destruction, the better. “I enjoy chaos and disorder, and not just because they help me professionally,” he said in a ludicrous, hyper-articulated announcer’s voice. He’d been “an entropy fan” from the time he had learned the meaning of the word in school.

  Although Carlin was still justifiably famous for pushing the limits of acceptable language and making crude jokes about human biology, his stand-up had taken a pronounced leap from blue to black. In Jammin’ in New York, he came on like an encyclopedia of dark humor, skittering from war, prison, and eating disorders to plane crashes and utter annihilation. In his previous HBO special he had even claimed to prove the point that no subject was out of bounds for comedy by doing a brief bit about rape, which involved Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd.

  He was poking with ever-lengthening sticks into the field of land mines. Even fellow comics often had a difficult time with Carlin’s turn toward dark comedy. “I think you can point out hypocrisy, but you can’t be that pessimistic,” says Franklyn Ajaye, who thought of Carlin, Klein, and Pryor as his inspirational trinity. “He became a curmudgeon. And you can contrast that with Robert Klein, who felt just as disgusted as George, but he could still have fun with it.”

  Others, however, saluted Carlin’s chutzpah. “If people are sensitive about something, that makes it compelling,” says Louis CK, an admirer who dedicated his stand-up special Chewed Up to Carlin. “If your job is to talk about stuff, you’d be irresponsible to stay away from things that upset people. . . . The whole point of comedy is to crash through those things.” Jammin’ in New York was the HBO special that confirmed the whole long haul for Carlin. Working live, with more than 6,000 people in the theater, “I knew I’d found my voice,” he said years later. “It felt like I really graduated that night.”

  For several years he had been augmenting his touring income with an annual commitment to Bally’s Las Vegas. Having grudgingly reconciled with the city, admitting its obvious financial benefits and ready-made marketplace for a headlining comedian, he soon bought a condo in Vegas, so he could drive himself in to work and come home to his dogs. He was about as low-maintenance a performer as they come, says Joel Fischman, who was vice president of entertainment at Bally’s until leaving for Mandalay Bay in 1998. “He’d have his table set up in his room with his tuna fish, his celery stalks and his carrots, his juices and water. You’d go see him before the show, talk a little baseball, maybe.” Carlin stayed without incident until the casino closed its celebrity showroom in the late 1990s. “He was very happy with the audiences,” says Fischman. “I think they changed a little as Vegas changed, but he was so consistent. If you didn’t know what you were getting when you went to see George Carlin, what were you going to the show for?”

  The impact of the HBO specials on his career was apparent. In the waning years of the CableACE awards (1979-1997), cable television’s equivalent of the Emmys, Carlin became a regular recipient, winning honors for Doin’ It Again, Jammin’ in New York, and, in 1997, two more for the retrospective George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy (which also earned two Emmy nods). He also won his first Grammy in more than twenty years for the Jammin’ in New York soundtrack album, beating out a weird field expanded to accommodate audiobooks, including recordings by the humor writers Garrison Keillor and Erma Bombeck and another by the SNL alum (and future Minnesota senator) Al Franken.

  40 Years of Comedy followed closely on the heels of Carlin’s ninth HBO event, Back in Town. Taped in March 1996, a few months after he was relieved of his sitcom duties, the show took place at the 2,800-seat Beacon Theatre in New York, a historic former movie palace on Upper Broadway. Before settling on the location, Carlin had called Steven Wright, who had headlined there, to ask about the room. He kicked off the performance by running in off the street through a side door directly onto the stage, tossing aside his jacket. Prowling his turf, shoulders hunched, he wondered why the pro-life movement was homophobic: “Who has less abortions than homosexuals?” If he sounded on the last special as if he’d been taking elocution lessons, this time there was an obvious vocal residue from his George O’Grady character; he used his salty-cabbie voice throughout the hour.

  The 40 Years retrospective aired from the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. The show featured an onstage interview with Carlin, looking uncharacteristically formal with newly shorn hair and a black cashmere jacket, conducted by a young admirer in a leather jacket named Jon Stewart. The hour also featured a package of clips dating back to Carlin’s earliest days on television, as well as an abbreviated stand-up performance by the honoree, anchored by a new piece called “American Bullshit.” Befitting the nostalgic format of the tribute, Carlin explained what his success in comedy meant to him by equating it with the education he had left behind. Because the nuns gave no grades at Corpus Christi, he told Stewart, resorting to one of his old lines, “the only A’s I got, and this is a little corny—I got their attention, I got their approval, their admiration, their approbation, and their applause. And those are the only A’s I wanted, and I got ’em,” he said. Stewart, looking awestruck, called him sir.

  “I’m gonna keep doing this as long as I can,” Carlin told old friend John Moffitt, who, along with his fellow executive producers of the festival, Stu Smiley and Pat Tourk Lee, served as executive producers of the show with Brenda and Hamza. “I’m gonna look pretty funny, but I’m still gonna be out there.”

  Constantly looming HBO deadlines had forced the comedian to write new material with the rigor of an athlete in training. “He really was a workaholic,” says Moffitt. “I think it kept his mind sharp as he got older.” Just as Joe Monroe had advised him back in Shreveport, he’d been collecting and categorizing his ideas from the start, at first in folders and on index cards, later on a word processor, and then on laptop computers. Lenny Bruce sometimes scribbled down a few notes in his hotel room, but more often than not he treated his gigs as though he were jumping off a ledge into his own brain soup. “Just before he went on, he’d say, ‘Not now, baby, I’m thinking,’” recalls Paul Krassner. Very much unlike his role model, Carlin wrote, rewrote, and self-edited, perpetually calibrating his act to dial up a maximum level of impact.

  Chris Rush liked to tease Carlin that he wasn’t actually Irish—that they’d “found him in a diaper with a swastika on the side. He had the work habits of a commandant, a middle-echelon guy from the Nazi party who was under direct observation.” Rush, as impulsive a comic as Carlin was studious, once watched his friend in his hotel room, walking on a treadmill while working on his laptop. When he needled the older comic about it, Carlin shot back, “Fuck you. You rap out two years of an average comedian’s material in one hour backstage. I write the shit out. I’m not an ad-libber.”

  With the burden of the Fox sitcom lifted, Carlin suddenly landed on a project he’d been preparing for for years. Books by comedians were becoming trendy in the publishing world. Seinfeld’s Seinlanguage was a number 1 New York Times best seller; Cosby and Mad About You star Paul Reiser were also succeeding on the shelves, both with popular titles about marriage and parenting. A
nd Ray Romano, the star of Everybody Loves Raymond, was about to land a seven-figure book deal for his own debut humor collection.

  Carlin’s first crack at publishing, 1983’s Brain Damage, had been a novelty, equal parts Mad magazine and concert program. The new book, Brain Droppings, published in May 1997, was a legitimate transferal of Carlin’s stage act to the page. Opening with expressions of gratitude to his brother Patrick (“who was kind enough to teach me attitude”), his manager and best friend Hamza (whose “inner maniac is even weirder than mine”), and Joe Monroe, he found a corker of an epigraph, credited to Kahlil Gibran: “We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.”

  Brain Droppings was a crash course in the singular worldview of the grown kid from White Harlem. Besides written versions of signature hunks such as “Stuff” and a revision of “The Indian Sergeant” set in primitive times, there were copious random musings, characteristically heavy on the punning and gripes about poorly considered clichés (“If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen one”). The book sold briskly through strong word of mouth, staying on the Times best-seller list for eighteen weeks. Three years after publication, the audiobook version earned Carlin his third Grammy award. The new wing of his comedy empire eventually grew to include two more best-selling books, 2001’s Napalm & Silly Putty (another Grammy winner in audiobook form) and 2004’s When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, the cover of which—a parody of “The Last Supper,” resulted in the title being banned at Wal-Mart, much to Carlin’s amusement.

  But excitement over his first real book publication was sadly fleeting. On Mother’s Day, one day before Carlin’s sixtieth birthday, Brenda died of complications from liver cancer. She was fifty-seven; they’d been married thirty-six years.

  The length of Brenda’s illness had prepared Carlin for life without her. “I’m very much a realist and a practical person,” he said.

  But it was not pleasant by any means. She had been stabilized with chemotherapy, but then things took a rapid turn. They kept her alive an extra twelve or eighteen hours, apparently just for me to get back in from the road. And by the time I got there it was gruesome. So it was no picnic, but my tears were fairly contained. . . . I had kind of rehearsed it in my mind.

  Fellow comedians sometimes speculate that Carlin grew darker, more pessimistic, after Brenda’s death. The truth, however, is that he had already been exploring the limits of dark humor for several years. A month later he was on The Late Show with David Letterman, promoting the book. Sitting with the host, he joked about trying to come up with a classified ad that would be guaranteed not to generate any response: “Elderly, accident-prone, severely depressed, alcoholic coal-miner interested in Canadian food and Norwegian folk dancing seeks wealthy, attractive, sexually starved, well-built woman in her late teens. Must be non-smoker.”

  He could joke, but he missed Brenda’s enthusiastic laughter. After her death, he touched his wedding ring a few times during each of his shows, to remind himself of her presence.

  He kept himself busy, appearing on talk shows with Tom Snyder, Dennis Miller, and Roseanne Barr to plug the book. He told Snyder he had an autobiography in the works with the comic writer Tony Hendra, who, with performing partner Nick Ullett, had been the support act for Lenny Bruce at Café Au Go Go the week of Bruce’s New York busts. Hendra was also a founding editor of National Lampoon and the author of Going Too Far, a history of subversive comedy.

  When director Kevin Smith approached Carlin with a role envisioned expressly for him, he took it. Smith’s micro-budget 1994 debut comedy Clerks had helped jump-start the film industry’s rush toward independent directors. His fourth movie, Dogma, was a heavy-handed satire of the Catholic Church, with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck playing fallen angels and Chris Rock as Christ’s forgotten thirteenth apostle, Rufus. Carlin played Cardinal Ignatius Glick, a crass commercializer of the church who replaces the symbolic crucifix with a smiling, thumbs-up “Buddy Christ.”

  Smith was a Carlin disciple. After devouring the HBO specials as a teenager, he began traveling to see his comic hero perform, beginning with a 1988 set at Fairleigh Dickinson University in his home state, New Jersey. “Carlin replaced Catholicism as my religion,” he recalled. The comedian became an honorary member of Smith’s New Jerseyite universe, making a cameo appearance as a hitchhiker in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and playing a major role as Affleck’s father, a public works employee with a heart of gold, in Jersey Girl (2004). “Listen to the mouth on this one!” he says when he first meets the Affleck character’s bride-to-be, played by Jennifer Lopez. The movie took some lumps, but reviewers were generally impressed with Carlin’s “convincingly gruff and blue-collar” portrayal, which Smith had written for him based on the director’s own father. The comedian’s performance was “so understated and devoid of sentimentality,” said one writer, “that it comes off as the most deeply emotional one in the movie.” Commercial television reruns of the film are notable for the opportunity to see Carlin, liberator of four-letter words, speaking lines overdubbed with euphemistic gosh darns and dirtballs.

  On Back in Town, he had joked about the preponderance of ads for telephone services from MCI, AT&T, and others in the wake of phone industry deregulation: “Are people really breaking their balls to save nine cents on a fuckin’ phone call?” Now, around the time of the Dogma release, some of Carlin’s fans were disappointed to see him in a commercial for an MCI calling plan. As he had a decade earlier, when he did a series of short ads for Fuji videocassettes, the comic renowned for his relentless antiestablishment attitude found himself obliged to address the issue of “selling out.” (Carlin also once filmed an unused commercial for Jell-O, a gig that Cosby would eventually make famous.) The complaints, he noted, probably came from a guy wearing “a Gucci shirt or a McDonald’s hat. . . . He doesn’t live in the woods and eat bark and make his own clothing out of vines. So no one is really pure.” Everything in modern life is a kind of compromise, he believed: “Even Ted Kaczynski, who hated technology, used a typewriter to type his manifesto.” Carlin’s own decision to do the phone ad, besides the fact that MCI (as had Fuji before it) let him gently lampoon his pitchman role with what amounted to a miniature stand-up routine, was based on his understandable desire to retire the remainder of his IRS debt.

  The reason: He was committed to a new live-in relationship. The comic who had kicked off his sitcom by scoffing at optimism—“Hope sucks”—had found romance with a woman named Sally Wade. She was a comedy writer who had worked on several episodes of the 1970s sitcom What’s Happening. They met at a bookstore. “He and Sally had their first date at our house,” says Orson Bean, the veteran television personality, who was Wade’s neighbor near Venice Beach. “We invited her to a party. She said, ‘Can I bring a date?’ and it turned out to be George.” Carlin soon moved into Sally’s home, where he and Bean would swap jokes when they met in the alley, taking out the trash. Though they apparently never took out a marriage license, Carlin was with his second “wife” for ten years, until the end of his life. “I think Sally kind of saved him,” says Dennis Blair. “The first thing he’d do after the show every night was call her.”

  Carlin had been a career loner. The old delicatessen guys, the Dangerfield protegés, and the Comedy Store regulars typically lived for the camaraderie, the one-upmanship, and the old war stories. Carlin was content to travel light, with his laptop and his reading material. When he wanted to air out some new jokes, he usually drove south, to the Comedy and Magic club in Hermosa Beach, where the crowd was less saturated with agents, talent scouts, and other guest-list types than the rooms in LA.

  Having hit sixty, however, he was beginning to appreciate his place in the comic pantheon. He joined Robert Klein, Alan King, Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and others to film a mock opening sequence for Jerry Seinfeld’s HBO special I’m Telling You for the Last Time, in which the comedian holds a funeral for his old routines. Carlin was honored for lifetime achieveme
nt at the American Comedy Awards, and Comedy Central ranked him the second-greatest stand-up comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor. Though he was flattered, “It was a little embarrassing to be placed ahead of Lenny Bruce,” he admitted.

  At the American Comedy Awards, Carlin posed for a photo with Pryor and Robert Klein. Klein leaned down to Pryor, in a wheelchair due to his battle with multiple sclerosis, and whispered in his ear, “You were the best I ever saw.” When they walked away, Carlin said out of the corner of his mouth, “That guy’s fucked up!”

  “I knew he wasn’t meaning to be cruel,” says Klein. “George was sardonic about it. He actually made me laugh.” Even in the most dispiriting situations, for Carlin there was no such thing as no laughing matter.

  Together with Hamza, he agreed to join the founders of a new comedy venture, Laugh.com, as a limited business partner. Marshall Berle, Milton’s nephew, who went from managing Spirit to handling pop metal acts such as Van Halen and Ratt, launched the Laugh.com Web site in the mid-1990s as an outlet for his uncle’s vast archive of Friars Club roasts. “I sold one to a guy named Bob Kohn, who lived in Pebble Beach,” says Berle. “He turns out to be the guy who comes in and saves the company.” Kohn was an Internet entrepreneur who founded the subscription download site eMusic. Together the two men enlisted a who’s who of comedy legends, including Red Buttons, Bill Dana, Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Norm Crosby, and Rich Little, as founding partners. Besides Kohn, another of Berle’s earliest customers was one Rev. Warren Debenham, a comedy historian from the Bay Area who donated a sizable portion of his massive collection to the San Francisco Public Library. After lending his name to the company, Carlin often called Berle with special requests from the Debenham collection, looking for obscure recordings by the Two Black Crows, an old blackface vaudeville act, or the Canadian duo Wayne and Shuster. “He’d come up with guys I never heard of,” says Berle.