Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [41]
NOT THAT CARLIN was ready to be that comic. In early September he appeared on The Tonight Show for the first time in the Johnny Carson era, putting a little extra effort into the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman bit, which he’d been performing on autopilot for some time. As the beatifically spacey Al Sleet, he delivered the forecast without breaking character, while Carson cackled off-camera. Although he didn’t return to Carson’s set at the NBC Studios for two years, it was the start of a long association, with Carlin making more than a hundred appearances.
Less memorable were his spots on The Roger Miller Show and The Hollywood Palace, an old-fashioned ABC variety hour taped at the former Hollywood Playhouse with a rotating pool of guest hosts. The show, notable for introducing the Rolling Stones to an American audience, was a hodgepodge of celebrity sketches, monologues, and performances. In April, appearing alongside the vapid British folk duo Chad & Jeremy, Carlin was introduced by host Martha Raye. In thick-framed glasses and tightly pegged pants, he sat behind a stock-issue desk on an otherwise empty stage and read “The Newscast” from notes. The segment let him roam from mildly Sahl-like wisecracks about current events (“Tonight the world breathes a little easier, as five more nations have signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today’s signers were Chad, Sierra Leone, Upper Volta, Monaco, and Iceland”) to surreal nonsense. “Quickly now, the basketball scores. We are running late. 110-102, 125-113 . . . and an overtime duel, 99-98. Oh, here’s a partial score: Cincinnati, four.”
Safely disguised as the cartoonish Al Sleet, he also dropped a sly reference to his own daily habit as he delivered the weather forecast: “Tonight’s low, twenty-five. Tomorrow’s high, whenever I get up, heh heh heh.”
“George was always a little subversive that way,” says Ken Harris. “When I met George, he was a pot smoker. Being with him on the road, he’d wake up in the morning, and before brushing his teeth, he’d smoke a joint. And throughout the whole day. It didn’t seem to affect him much, except to make him happier.” After the Carlins moved into a rented Spanish villa-style house on Beverwil Drive, Carlin finally convinced his reluctant West Coast manager to try smoking with him. “He was my guide,” says Harris. “I think it was a Peter, Paul and Mary record we were playing—we had just bought new stereo equipment together. And he said, ‘Now just pick out one instrument and focus on it.’ It was the first time I ever got stoned.”
The show business veterans with whom Carlin was rubbing elbows had little idea they had a budding hippie in their midst. “Folks, it’s great to see new comedians come along. If there’s one thing the world can always use, it’s a smile,” said Jimmy Durante, introducing the twenty-nine-year-old Carlin as “one of the best” on another Hollywood Palace episode, taped in late 1966. That particular show must have felt like a real carnival to the clean-cut young stoner, featuring as it did a group of trained elephants and the momentary singing sensation known as Mrs. Miller, a matronly housewife from Claremont, California, who ignored the raucous laughter that accompanied her truly horrendous singing. Carlin did a version of his “Wonderful WINO” routine, poking lighthearted fun at the youthful generation that he was beginning to realize he had more in common with than his own.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that teenagers today are the most powerful group in the country,” he began, explaining the premise of his Top 40 parody. “First of all, there are more of them than ever before, and teenagers are so much better organized today than