Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [112]
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