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motherly voice, Carlin teased his audience by alluding to a bit of blasphemy, mouthing the middle word in the phrase “for Christ’s sake.” Then he took a moment to imagine what would have happened if the marketers had instead hired a profane longshoreman to vouch for the aspirin company. The censors would’ve needed to erase so many words from the guy’s commentary, Carlin said with an impish grin, there would hardly be any sentence left at all: “Well, when I get a ____ headache the ___ ___,” he rasped, lapsing into a Tourette’s-like string of staccato consonants and hiccups. It was the first nationally televised flirtation with four-letter words for the man who would become comedy’s most widely recognized authority on the subject.

Already he was reaching his hand into the snake-charmer’s basket. On another Griffin appearance, Carlin got big laughs when he joked about the fact that many cough syrups contained codeine, “a class-B narcotic referred to by junkies as Pepsi-Cola.” Yet he was also eager to please. Invited to sit at Merv’s desk with the chain-smoking host after wrapping up his six-minute hunk, he was introduced to the celebrity grab-bag of the day’s guests idling on the couch, including professional panelist Kitty Carlisle, the pint-sized singer of the British rock ’n’ roll act Freddie and the Dreamers, and Griffin’s announcer and sidekick, Arthur Treacher. Carlin’s regular spot on the show had been a boon to his nightclub career, he told Merv, nervously attempting some unscripted banter. “There’s a level you want to get to, a place you want to work, finally some day if you can,” he said. “And I made it.” With mock pride, he announced that he’d just been booked into Angie’s Roman Numeral Restaurant in Batavia, New York. It was a nice joint, he reported after the laughter died down, even if it did sound “like a real knucklebuster.”

With his success on the Griffin show, gigs like Angie’s soon became a thing of the past. “The Griffin deal became, I remember rather clearly, like every Tuesday for weeks and weeks,” says Golden. “They signed him to a massive deal, they loved him so much.” But the comic soon encountered a problem: He was running out of new material. “Every Tuesday morning he’d call me up—‘You gotta come over, I got nothing,’” recalls his former manager. “We’d spend the afternoon making each other laugh. It was a panic. He couldn’t be doing ‘The Indian Sergeant’ every week.” One sneaky solution was to write spontaneously updated versions of “The Newscast” (“It’s the third divorce for the fifteen-year-old film queen”), which he could read on-air from notes.

Despite the TV breakthrough, Carlin still struggled for recognition within his own agency. A small-time stand-up comedian could be on the clients’ list at the agency, says one former employee, “and that and twenty cents wouldn’t get you on the New York subway.” After one Griffin taping, Carlin was approached by a young agent from GAC’s television department named Ken Harris. “I went up to say ‘Hi’ after the show,” Harris recalls. “I said, ‘Gee, I thought you were terrific. Do you have an agent?’ He said, ‘Yeah. GAC.’ I felt stupid.” At the office, Harris approached Peter Paul and expressed his interest in working with Carlin.

Harris was a good match for Carlin, an energetic, easygoing young guy who’d been hired in the agency’s mailroom straight out of college. When he was made an agent, he had no idea what he was doing, he says with a laugh, so he flew by the seat of his pants. One thing he knew was that he wanted to work with talent that spoke to his generation. “When I got the job, I asked, ‘Who’s our biggest star?’ When they said Steve and Eydie, I was very depressed.” By contrast, the young wiseguy with the arch take on the modern world seemed like someone Harris could sell.

In September the agency booked Carlin on The Mike Douglas Show, another talk show hosted by a onetime big-band singer. Originating in Cleveland in 1961, the show’s success in syndication precipitated a move to Philadelphia a few years later. The show, produced by future media