Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [0]
Also by James Sullivan
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
WARM-UP
Chapter 1 - HEAVY MYSTERIES
Chapter 2 - CLASS CLOWN
Chapter 3 - ATTRACTING ATTENTION
Chapter 4 - VALUES (HOW MUCH IS THAT DOG CRAP IN THE WINDOW?)
Chapter 5 - THE CONFESSIONAL
Chapter 6 - SPECIAL DISPENSATION
Chapter 7 - SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION
Chapter 8 - WASTED TIME
Chapter 9 - AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Chapter 10 - SQUEAMISH
KICKER
NOTES
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Copyright Page
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 speech—up 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.
It’s 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 hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been doing it right. Carlin knew that comedy is meant to shock. Funny doesn’t happen without a sense of surprise. And audacity—the courage to say what you mean—is 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 entering—with breaking society’s rules and restrictions, and with entering people’s psyches.”
George Carlin was a natural born transgressor. He saw where the line had been drawn, and he leaped. If he spotted a sacred cow—God, country, children—he 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 you’re clothed, you have clothes, so if you’re shelled, you should have shells.” “Every comedian does a little George,” Jerry Seinfeld wrote in the New York Times upon Carlin’s death. “I’ve 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.