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and Westbrook Pegler. Pegler, a featured writer for the sensation-minded Hearst syndicate, was a Roman Catholic sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, a prominent foe of labor unions, communism, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. “In my home Westbrook Pegler and Joe McCarthy were gods, and I picked up a lot of that,” Carlin once explained. For him, Burns “opened the door” to political enlightenment. “I began to realize that the right wing was interested in things and the left wing was interested in people, that one was interested in property rights and the other was interested in human rights. I began to see the error of what was handed to me through the Catholics, through the Irish-Catholic community, through my mother, through the Hearst legacy in our family.”

Burns recognized an opportunity to affect Carlin’s unexamined way of thinking. “At that time George was fairly conservative,” he later told the writer Richard Zoglin. “I always had a progressive agenda. I thought it was the duty of an artist to fight bigotry and intolerance. We had long, interesting conversations, good political discussions.” They also, by Carlin’s account, spent plenty of time sitting around the apartment in their underwear after their radio shifts, drinking beer (Jax, or Lone Star), listening to long-playing comedy records, and watching Paar on The Tonight Show. Their “comedy affinity,” as Carlin put it, naturally led to the makings of an act together, as they impersonated the voices on the comedy albums they spun endlessly and improvised mock interviews, Bob and Ray style, with a repertoire of oblivious blowhards.

By the time they felt ready to go public with their act, Burns and Carlin had developed a stable of wrongheaded, inflexible stock characters of the kind that would later achieve infamy with All in the Family’s Archie Bunker. As local radio personalities, the pair went from fantasy comedy duo to actual stage time almost literally overnight. The place to be in Fort Worth in 1959 was the Cellar, a basement-level “coffeehouse” just opened beneath a hotel at 1111 Houston Street. Serving vodka and whiskey on the sly in paper cups, the Cellar was the open-mike playroom of Pat Kirkwood, a race car driver who, according to local legend, won the room in a poker game, and Johnny Carroll, a true rock ’n’ roll lunatic who was good friends with rockabilly star Gene Vincent and had once been signed by Sun Records. Thrashing at his electric guitar while seated behind a drum kit, stomping on the kick drum and the high-hat pedal, Carroll was a howling, overstimulated one-man band. Fueled by Desoxyn tablets hidden in a metal ashtray stand, the rockabilly wildcat ran the club as an anything-goes showcase, paying amateur dancers with booze and frequently giving the stage over to “King George Cannibal Jones,” an eccentric junk percussionist named George Coleman who later recorded as Bongo Joe. “You must be weird or you wouldn’t be here,” read one scrawl on the blackboard-style wall of the club.

Into this den of iniquity Burns and Carlin brought their makeshift comedy team, performing excessively raunchy routines—“dirty, filthy things,” as Carlin himself admitted. Some took the form of imaginary interviews with their television hero, the silly sophisticate Paar, which they often sprang on each other in the apartment: “How did you two meet?” Burns, playing Paar, would ask Carlin, representing the duo. “Well, I was fucking Jack’s mother, and. . . .” Other sketches, deliberately steamrolling into the realm of bad taste, would within a year end up on the duo’s only album together, including a manic routine that proposed a mail-order “Junior Junkie” kit for “hip kiddies” from those lovable corrupters of children, Captain Jack and Jolly George. (Besides the “U.S. Army Surplus 12cc hypodermic needle” and other supplies, they joked in aggressively gruff voices, the first 250 buyers would also receive an eight-by-ten glossy of Alexander King, then a Tonight Show regular who’d written a book about his struggle with morphine addiction.)

Burns and Carlin were