Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [105]
By 1988 the outrageous Sam Kinison was the talk of television and the comedy world. With long, frizzy hair sprouting from beneath his ubiquitous beret, the stumpy former evangelist, “discovered” a few years earlier on one of Dangerfield’s Young Comedians specials for HBO, was all over MTV with his celebrity-studded video cover of the Troggs’s “Wild Thing.” Kinison’s comedy was a volcanic outburst, an eruption of grievances with cheating girlfriends, the hypocritical Catholic Church, and the general idiocies of humankind, not necessarily in that order. Nothing was sacred to Kinison, who could even find fault with the starving faces on late-night ads for hunger relief. As the comedian Bill Hicks later said, “Kinison was the first guy I ever saw go onstage and not ask the audience in any way, shape, or form to like him. I found that highly reassuring.”
Carlin evidently did, too, accentuating his exasperation with his fellow Americans in his sixth HBO special in 1988. It opened with a canned segment in which he took a cab from Manhattan to the site of the gig, the Park Theater in Union City. The cab driver was played by Carlin’s old friend Bob Altman, who had recently named his daughter Carlen in honor of his former acid-trip companion and philosophical debate partner. When Carlin runs into a bar for directions, Altman hollers over his shoulder, “Ask ’em about what they think of man’s role in the universe.”
Disgust with the squandered promise of the human race was the overriding theme of the performance, with Carlin adapting for the stage the “People I Can Do Without” concept from the Brain Damage book. He also launched a rant about Civil War reenactors (“Use live ammo, assholes!”) and, ten years after the Supreme Court case, ripped the FCC, which had “all by itself decided that television and radio are the only two parts of American life not protected by the First Amendment.” Going on about the heightened climate of repression of the Reagan eighties, standing on a barbed-wire set designed to look like a threatening back alley, he posed an open question to the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was then on a crusade against immorality in American culture. He wondered whether the reverend was familiar with the function of the knobs on his radio. After joking that perhaps the reverend was “not comfortable with anything with two knobs,” he made a declaration: “I’m pretty sick and tired of all these fuckin’ church people.” This was the first concrete indication that the comic was developing a more confrontational persona onstage, which would lead even some longtime fans to claim they thought he became “angry” in his later years.
When Kinison died in a car crash in 1992, Carlin sent the biggest floral arrangement to his funeral. “We couldn’t get it into the viewing room,” says Bill Kinison, the comedian’s brother, former manager, and biographer. The two comics had met at the Grammy Awards and crossed paths on occasion at the Comedy Store. Though the emotionally raw Pryor was Kinison’s idol, meeting Carlin, his brother says, was a high point for the comic. When Bill Kinison called Carlin to thank him for the flowers, Carlin told him he felt a strange connection to the shooting star. “I feel like Sam is feeding me material from the other side,” he said.
Carlin was less impressed with Andrew “Dice” Clay, another eighties comedian, who got lumped with Kinison and radio host Howard Stern as the clown princes of the era’s in-your-face humor. Though Clay himself noted that his cartoonish act was meant to be “a macho moron . . . juvenile comedy,” Carlin told the psychology professor Timothy Jay that Clay was killing his own livelihood. As he began to attract a skinhead crowd that considered the comic’s bigotry and chauvinism as validation, the mainstream