Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [33]
“I’d hang around the club ’cause I could fuck the waitresses,” says Altman, a discursive firecracker who later had a lucrative, if short-lived, career as a campus comic known as Uncle Dirty. “I’d tell them, ‘I know the owner. I’ll get you a better station.’ George was funny. He was brilliant. He smoked pot, and I smoked pot. Plus I had access to a car. When he had a gig out of town, I’d drive him.” Carlin sometimes brought Brenda and Kelly over to Altman’s place to scrounge up something to eat: “He was broke, really bust-out.” Altman frittered away many nights with Carlin and his old friends from the neighborhood at the Moylan Tavern, playing darts and bumper pool and introducing his friend to the ideas of such radical spiritual thinkers as G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Carlin especially liked the French psychologist Emil Coue’s notion of autosuggestion: “I equals W squared, where I is the imagination and W is the will,” explains Altman. “It shows you how powerful the imagination is.”
Altman also turned Carlin on to a new book by Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon. Called The Act of Creation, the book explored the author’s theory of human ingenuity, the ability to integrate previously unrelated ideas. Jokes, as Carlin was well aware, are rooted in incongruities. To Koestler, scientific discovery, mystical insight, and “The Logic of Laughter,” as he named his opening chapter, can each be traced to the unique human ability to make cognitive connections. The author designed a triptych showing a continuum from jester to sage to artist. “Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits,’” he wrote, “and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful back-door entry . . . into the inner workshop of creative originality.” By falling into dream-states or finding other ways to transcend our stagnation, Koestler argued, we can achieve a “spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and elicits a new response to it.”
All this was heady stuff for a young man plumbing the recesses of his imagination in search of his own sense of humor (and smoking considerable quantities of funny cigarettes to get there). Years later Carlin recalled studying Koestler’s triptych:
The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet, too.
But it would be some time before Carlin allowed himself to think in terms of wisdom and poetry. For the time being, he was committed to writing unapologetically silly material with no pretenses and potentially broad appeal. Much of it was variations on the characters he’d devised years before on the radio—the absurdist newscaster and his goofy sidekicks in the sports and weather departments. Closer to home, he had created a glib, speed-talking Top 40 disc jockey named Willie West, spinning records for a fictitious station, “Wonderful WINO,” with Carlin adding his own a cappella jingles and mock pop tunes.
On the night before New Year’s Eve, Carlin taped an appearance on another talent show, On Broadway Tonight, hosted by the veteran crooner Rudy Vallee. The program aired on the first of January 1964, a harbinger of good things to come in the new year. Coincidentally, it was a summer replacement for The Danny Kaye Show, hosted by Carlin’s boyhood hero.
As a student Carlin had been enamored of the comic actor Kaye, who became famous for his dazzling propensity for flawlessly delivered, tongue-twisting song lyrics. When Carlin was ten years old, his hero starred in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an