Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [26]
Burns and Carlin went on with the Kennedy-Nixon bit. “It was very current and timely, a month before the election,” Carlin recalled. “I think that’s how we got the job.” In their dark suits and Brylcreem, they seemed like fine young gentlemen. “My mother would say, ‘You look reasonable,’” Carlin recalled.
They may have looked reasonable, but for a moment they felt euphoric. It was, however, a brief moment. For the next year, other than an unmemorable spot on Hugh Hefner’s short-lived syndicated program Playboy’s Penthouse, the agents at GAC had no luck returning their young comedy team to television. In Chicago, where Mort Sahl was playing Mister Kelly’s, he bumped into Murray Becker at Eli’s Delicatessen. Sahl says he and his best friend, the late Herb Sargent (who later became a writer and producer for Saturday Night Live), “made every effort to get ’em going.” He convinced his San Francisco friend Enrico Banducci, the avuncular, beret-wearing proprietor of the hungry i, the experimental nightclub, to give the team a trial run. Without a lot of high-profile gigs, they did more than their share of “one-nighters,” corporate parties for salesmen’s associations and other business groups.
They played the Tidelands in Houston, where Bob Newhart had recently recorded his Button-Down Mind album. They did the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, the Embers in Indianapolis, the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., and Freddie’s in Minneapolis. They played Storyville in Boston’s Kenmore Square, where Billie Holiday and Dave Brubeck had recorded. Many of the club dates they landed, though, fell short of glamorous. “Some really great toilets,” Burns recalled wryly. Drinking on the job, they sometimes found themselves challenging hecklers to step out into the alley. At a cinderblock club outside Akron, they took the stage on the first night of a weeklong engagement, to discover that their audience consisted solely of the softball team sponsored by the bar. “They had their cleats on, and their uniforms,” Burns recalled. “And George and I are up there doing political satire.” Five minutes into the set, with the room barren of laughter, one of the ballplayers got up, strode over to the jukebox, and punched a few buttons. Show over. The owner pulled the act aside and threatened to take the week from them if they didn’t cut the jokes about government agencies. “Don’t you work dirty?” he demanded. So they went out to a Woolworth’s and brought back a few ridiculous props—a yo-yo and a fright wig—for the second show. Burns, addressing his partner as “Georgina,” asked him how he was feeling. “Pretty shitty,” Carlin replied. “And we just started doing crap jokes for about fifteen minutes,” Burns said, “and that got us through the week.”
In Dallas Carlin stopped in to pick up some shirts he’d left at a dry cleaner. While the attendant dawdled, police officers suddenly materialized and ordered Carlin up against the wall. Burns was rounded up, too, and the partners were detained at the local precinct. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: Carlin had a newspaper clipping in the pocket of one of his shirts that described a stickup by two armed men in Chicago. On a tip from the cleaner, the cops were convinced they’d found the perpetrators. The comedians were released when they explained they’d saved the page because of the story on the other side of the police log.
Sahl, a good friend of Hugh Hefner, helped the team make their way onto the Playboy Club circuit, the fast-growing network of lounges dedicated to the magazine’s bon vivant lifestyle of sports cars, fashionable accessories, and smart-set entertainment, with chicks on the side. “Playboy itself and I personally were very interconnected with what was going on in the clubs and the comedy scene in Chicago in the late 1950s,” says Hefner, who first became interested in publishing a magazine as an aspiring cartoonist. “We did profiles on almost all the major new