Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [120]
Upon Carlin’s death, reporters took the opportunity to examine all the ways their newspapers continued to dance around the seven words that apparently will still infect your soul and curve your spine. Carlin’s “heavy seven” were conspicuously incessant (if bleeped) on Comedy Central’s South Park and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. They were half the dialogue on HBO’s The Sopranos, and they were permitted unchecked on broadcast networks in a documentary, 9/11, and the commercial television debut of Saving Private Ryan. Even The Today Show let slip with “the word that’s probably the Queen Mother of all obscenities, an unflattering reference to female nether regions,” when guest Jane Fonda uttered it. “NBC apologized, to be sure,” wrote one TV critic, “but the sky didn’t fall.”
In April 2009 the Supreme Court once again heard a case involving the FCC’s jurisdiction over Carlin’s magic words. By another 5-4 vote, the court upheld the commission’s sanctions against “fleeting expletives.” The case featured the spectacle of the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia providing a dramatic, expurgated reenactment of the singer Cher’s acceptance of a lifetime achievement honor at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, seen live on Fox: “People have been telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So f-word ’em.” Legal scholars pointed out that the decision sidestepped the First Amendment issue, and they predicted further litigation. That would ensure that Carlin’s lexical evangelism—Lenny Bruce’s legacy—would have still more days in court.
“What can I say about George Carlin that hasn’t already been argued in front of the Supreme Court?” joked Bill Maher when he kicked off the Kennedy Center’s posthumous tribute for the Mark Twain Prize. The late comedian’s friend Lily Tomlin, his fellow Greenwich Village alum Joan Rivers, and next-generation devotees Jon Stewart and Lewis Black were among those on hand to celebrate the life and career of the comic wordsmith.
In his lifetime, Twain had much to say about censorship and taboo. “Nature knows no indecencies,” he wrote. “Man invents them.”
At the end of his own life, George Carlin was working on a one-man show he was planning for Broadway. One of his working titles was Watch My Language.
NOTES
All direct quotes attributed in the present tense have been drawn from author interviews. Quotes from television appearances are identified in the text, except where noted.
Warm-up
1 “a lawless element”: Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 9.
1-2 “a scofflaw . . . who could be charged with breaking and entering”: Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (Beacon Press, 1995), 252-53.
2 “If you’re clothed, you have clothes”: George Carlin, Brain Droppings, (Hyperion, 1997), 13.
2 “Every comedian does a little George”: Jerry Seinfeld, “Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder,” New York Times, June 24, 2008.
2 “kids, pets, driving, the stores”: Charles Taylor, “Dirty Old Man: George Carlin on Obscenity in the Age of Ashcroft,” Salon, April 3, 2004.
3 “The comic comes into being”: Quoted in Rourke, American Humor, 22.
4 “I found out that it was an honest craft”: Appearance at the National Press Club (C-SPAN), 1999.
4 “I prefer seeing things the way they are”: National Press Club, 1999.
5 “No matter how you care to define it”: Carlin, Brain Droppings, xii.
5 “How he stood above and apart”: Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (Perennial/HarperCollins, 2002), 35.
5 “the privilege of the dead”: Mark Twain, quoted in “The Privilege of the Grave,” The New Yorker, December 22, 2008.
1. Heavy Mysteries
8 He “hid behind the government”: Taylor, “Dirty Old Man: George Carlin on Obscenity in the Age of Ashcroft.”
9 “He had a real line of shit, boy”: Interview, Archive of American