Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [108]
At first Carlin was excited to work with the show’s cocreator, Sam Simon, who had written for Taxi and Cheers and developed The Simpsons with Groening and James L. Brooks. Simon was also a fellow dog nut; one of the first plots was about George using his little lap dog as a pawn in his shy courtship of a woman running a neighborhood pet shop. Initially scheduled at 9:30 on Fox’s powerhouse Sunday night, which included The Simpsons and Married . . . With Children—“Get ready for the only guy funny enough to follow Al Bundy,” one promo promised—the show earned some respectable, if not exactly enthusiastic, early notice. “Carlin’s aging hipster character translates well to the sitcom stage,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “This is the comic without much of the acid that frequently flows in his stand-up routines. It’s a half-hour that’s easy to take, and Carlin fans won’t be disappointed.” But the reviewer also noted the obvious comparisons to Cheers, which was similarly set in a bar, and Seinfeld, which was becoming extraordinarily popular with its famously “lightweight” scripts. “Show may require more coddling than Fox is used to giving its other, better comedies,” the writer concluded, with some prescience.
Though Carlin got to indulge a few whims (in the second episode, for instance, his character insisted he’d seen a UFO, much as the comic himself was then intrigued by the concept of extraterrestrial activity), he soon realized that Simon, the show’s executive producer and occasional director, had the real allegiance of Warner Bros. Television, where the show originated. Though media mogul Les Moonves, then the company’s president, made Carlin feel welcome—“He was my kind of guy,” Carlin recalled, “seemed like a street guy”—the company, he felt, was more interested in protecting Simon, who was “the property they could count on. Sam will do another show.” In the end, Simon and Carlin couldn’t work together. “Sam will tell you himself,” Carlin said, “his reputation in the business is that he’s difficult.”
In fact, few in the cast and crew felt comfortable with Simon, who was going through a divorce and suffering from chronic back pain and often brought big, aggressive dogs onto the set. “He used to whip Chinese throwing stars at his office walls during pitch meetings,” says one participant. “George used to drop by and the meetings were . . . testy. They were both big personalities and Sam, having come off The Simpsons , wasn’t used to having to debate dialogue and scene structure with an actor.” After twenty-seven episodes spread across parts of two seasons, Carlin couldn’t wait to leave. When a Fox executive called him on the set to let him know they’d decided to cancel the show, he had already checked out mentally. He was just glad they hadn’t waited until the season ended to make the decision.
The responsibilities of the sitcom brought an end to his streak of delivering a new HBO special every two years. Beginning in 1982, when he had regained his health and hit his stride with the network, he had had an hour or so of new material on the air every other year for a decade. In 1990’s Doin’ It Again, taped in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Carlin focused on language, declaring the performance free of namby-pamby New Age lingo: “I will not share anything with you,” he said, handling the operative word as if it were a dead mouse he was removing from the stage with a stick. “I will not relate to you, and you will not identify with me.”
For Carlin, political correctness was just another form of oppression and rule-making, inevitably to be disobeyed. This special was one of the few times in his career when he addressed a specific category of potentially offensive words—ethnic and racial slurs. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves,” he said. “They’re only words. . . . It’s the context.” No one flinched when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy said nigger, he reasoned, “because we know they’re not racists. Why? They’re niggers!”
In the credits Carlin thanked Rutgers Professor William