Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [119]
Five days later he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with chest pain. He died late that afternoon, June 22. He had performed the week before at the Orleans, where he was already beginning to organize his thoughts for his next HBO special. In interviews he had been telling a favorite story about the master cellist Pablo Casals, who continued to rehearse three hours a day well into his nineties. Asked why, Casals once replied, “Well, I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”
Bum ticker and all, Carlin made it to seventy-one, defining a half-century in American comedy. “There’s always hope for comedians,” he said near the end. “You notice how long fucking George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, and all these cocksuckers lived? I think it’s because comedy gives you a way of renewing life energy. There’s something about the release of tension that comes from being a comic, having a comic mind, that makes you live forever.”
His daughter and his brother spread Carlin’s ashes outside a few New York nightclubs and then at Spofford Lake, site of his early performing triumph at Camp Notre Dame. Fittingly, the family announced that the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, along with the American Heart Association, would be the recipients of donations.
Shortly after his death Carlin’s partner, Sally Wade, received a proclamation from the U.S. Congress. It accompanied the flag that flew over the Capitol the day after the comedian’s death. He would have been supremely amused: Flags, he once said, are only symbols, “and I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”
KICKER
IN LATE 2003 California Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill into Congress that was intended, once and for all, to make broadcast use of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” punishable by law. Ose’s bill identified as profane “the words ‘shit,’ ‘piss,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘asshole,’ and the phrases ‘cock sucker,’ ‘mother fucker,’ and ‘ass hole’ [sic].” Ironically, writes the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the Clean Airwaves Act was “the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress.” Once again, Carlin’s instincts had been validated. Substituting asshole for tits, the “Milwaukee Seven” were, in fact, the words you couldn’t say.
The Congressman’s bill was a response to conservative outrage over the FCC’s decision not to fine NBC for its live broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, during which the rock singer Bono said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC had been maddeningly inconsistent on the issue, slapping a small PBS affiliate in the San Francisco area with a fine for indecent words heard in the Martin Scorsese documentary series The Blues. The Bono episode and others, including a notorious example of “visual indecency”—Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, when one of her breasts was momentarily exposed on national television (for which CBS was fined $550,000, since overturned)—gave the culture the enduring concept of the “fleeting expletive”: a one-time instance of profanity, indecency, or obscenity that occurs during live programming.
Given the rise of cable television, satellite media, and the Internet, taboo words about sex acts and bodily functions are more widespread than ever, as Pinker points out in The Stuff of Thought. Yet the government continues to hold radio stations and broadcast television networks accountable to another standard. Comically, the author notes, another piece of legislation,