Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [1]
Many comedians have distinctive voices, but only a few are fortunate enough to develop one that’s never been heard. George Carlin’s 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 voice—quintessential New Yorker, representative hippie, reflexive contrarian—spoke for a nation of dissatisfied idealists and for himself alone.
Timing is essential to comedy, and Carlin’s 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 transformation—thirty-three—when 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 halfhour’s 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 creature—a 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 Carlin’s belief in the one thing he truly believed in—the power of reason. Why, exactly, are these few words—out of 400,000 in the English language—off-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