Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [17]
Within a matter of weeks, Carlin’s career took a serendipitous turn. Arriving unannounced at the station one day was Jack Burns, his short-term Boston roommate, who explained that he was en route to Hollywood, hoping to give the entertainment industry “one last chance at me.” He had an idea that he might become the next James Dean, Carlin recalled. By sheer coincidence, one of the station’s news-casting positions had become available the day before, and Carlin convinced his friend to take it, at least temporarily. Badly in need of new tires for his car, Burns accepted, and he immediately began delivering five-minute news broadcasts during Carlin’s evening program.
They took a place together at the Dorothy Lane Apartments in Fort Worth’s historic Monticello neighborhood, and their conversations picked up where they’d left off in Boston. Mostly they talked about the things that made them both laugh. Comedy in America was undergoing some radical changes at the time. Mort Sahl was already established as the next generation’s politico humorist, an off-the-cuff cold war commentator with a trademark newspaper tucked under his arm. His grad-student analyses of global politics and the American system were a wholesale shift from the broad gags of Gleason and Uncle Miltie. The jokes of the new comedians were crafted for insiders—campus current events connoisseurs and coffee shop intellectuals. “If things go well, next year we won’t have to hold these meetings in secret,” Sahl joked. His humor had a whiff of grad school about it, as he ad-libbed lofty barbs about fleeting political role-players and policy communiqués.
Other comics were bringing Freudian analysis and frank talk about the sorts of things previously reserved for private company onto the spartan stages of San Francisco’s legendary hungry i in North Beach and its big-city counterparts in Chicago and New York. Many guardians of good manners felt affronted, just as the new comedians intended. Lenny Bruce, the onetime strip-club emcee, was fast becoming “the most successful of the new sickniks,” as Time magazine declared in a July article on comedy’s emerging emphasis on previously verboten subjects such as sex, race, religion, and morality. The Compass Players, a group of improvisational comics with ties to the University of Chicago, opened their permanent theatrical home, the Second City, in 1959. One of their alumni, Shelley Berman, debuted his neurotic humor that year on the album Inside Shelley Berman, for which the “onetime Arthur Murray dance instructor with a face like a hastily sculpted meatball,” as one writer put it, won the first-ever comedy Grammy award. And a husky Ohioan named Jonathan Winters, a “roly-poly brainy-zany” whose mountainous head seemed overstuffed with caricatures, had recently become a regular on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, bewildering viewers with his loony menagerie of ordinary people, all nearly as bizarre in their own way as the manic-depressive who channeled them.
For two sharp-witted young men who shared a predilection for subversion, the comedy renaissance of the late 1950s was at least as thrilling as a run-in with a mysterious blonde in Castro’s Cuba. Unlike the old Borscht Belt burlesque men, who were more or less interchangeable—bellyaching, as Carlin often noted, about middle-of-the-road indignities such as crabgrass, “kids today,” wives, and mothers-in-law—the new wave of comics “began to emerge with significant identities of their own. Shelley Berman couldn’t do Mort Sahl’s act. Mort Sahl couldn’t do Lenny Bruce’s act. They were just different.” What each of these men did was to challenge authority, the establishment, “the country itself. We were drawn to that.”
Up to this point Carlin, still only twenty-two, had been effectively apolitical. Though he’d begun questioning the church’s authority from a young age, he’d grown up blindly accepting his mother’s belief in the strict jingoism of newspaper commentators such as Walter Winchell