• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 824 0

on the show were fully committed to the youth movement. The musical guest was the Doors, with their lion’s-mane singer Jim Morrison wearing leather pants. The San Francisco comedy troupe called The Committee featured future sitcom players Peter Bonerz (The Bob Newhart Show) and Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati), whose facial hair was full muttonchop. Even Dick Smothers, who had taken the summer off while his brother worked behind the scenes on the Glen Campbell replacement series, came back for the third Smothers Brothers season with shaggier hair and a mustache. “I was so goddamn envious,” says Tom Smothers. “The following summer I let my hair grow—I thought maybe I’d have curly hair too. It was long and stringy, and I grew a mustache, and it was long and stringy, too.”

On the Smothers’ set at Television City, Carlin was introduced to Lenny Bruce’s old friend Paul Krassner. The Realist, Krassner’s magazine of hardcore sociopolitical satire, was a key voice in the development of the American counterculture. It was launched in the late 1950s as a moonlighting project out of the New York office of Mad magazine, where Krassner was a contributor. Krassner’s sense of outrage was acute, and he had an uncanny ability to drum it up in others. In response to reports that Jackie Kennedy had demanded deletions from William Manchester’s 1967 book The Death of a President, Krassner wrote a notorious, black-comic essay called “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” imagining graphic sexual congress between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the corpse of the assassinated president.

Kurt Vonnegut once lauded the “miracle of compressed intelligence” of a Realist bumper sticker that read “Fuck Communism.” Forcing jingoists into a conundrum—either confront the taboo over four-letter words, or give the Reds a pass—was “nearly as admirable for potent simplicity,” Vonnegut wrote, “as Einstein’s E = mc2. [Krassner] was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.”

The Realist, Carlin wrote years later, was critical to the conversion he was about to undergo. A “rule-bender and law-breaker since first grade,” he’d been leading a double life throughout the 1960s, straining to please “straight” audiences even as his “sense of being on the outside intensified. . . . All through this period I was sustained and motivated by The Realist, Paul Krassner’s incredible magazine of satire, revolution, and just plain disrespect,” Carlin wrote in an introduction to one of Krassner’s books. “I can’t overstate how important it was to me at the time. It allowed me to see that others who disagreed with the American consensus were busy expressing those feelings and using risky humor to do so.”

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was equal parts consensus-bucking and primetime inanity, with singers and dancers in straw hats and mod fashions straight from the department store rack. Following the hosts’ topical opening gag (Tommy in a gas mask and riot helmet) and the Doors’ pantomimed version of “Wild Child,” Carlin dusted off “The Indian Sergeant,” introduced by Tom Smothers as a routine that had “already become a classic.” In a suit and tie, Carlin gamely donned a headband with a single feather sticking out.

Later in the program he joined the hosts—all three dressed in matching red turtlenecks and black slacks—in a peppy rewrite of folk songwriter Tom Paxton’s “Daily News,” interspersed with comic vignettes drawn from newspaper headlines. One, “Church Split on Birth Control,” gave Carlin a chance to appear onstage in a priest’s collar. Dick Smothers, playing a reporter, noted that the priest was liberal, having just gotten married. How did the Father feel about the Pope’s denunciation of birth control? Oh, Carlin replied, he could never contradict the Pope on birth control. But what if he should find out that his wife has been taking the Pill? “Well, I think I’d have to file for divorce,” he joked. Corny, but like Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” sticker,