Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [49]
In the strange brew of 1960s culture, at the intersection of thread-bare vaudevillian showmanship and staged Laugh-In-style anarchy, there might have been no other way for him to advance his craft. “The art’s gotta be out there before you can put the content in,” says Tom Smothers. “If you’re singing protest songs, you better be a fuckin’ good singer. And you better be funny if you’re gonna do social commentary.” Hollywood had accepted the thirty-one-year-old Carlin as a funny guy. Now he was ready to let his hair down.
5
THE CONFESSIONAL
It was simple, solipsistic advice, useful nevertheless: “The more you know about yourself, the more you stand to learn.” As Carlin strained to balance his fast-moving career with his growing impulse to be true to his comedy, he heard this axiom on, of all places, a game show. On a short-lived Chuck Barris creation called The Game Game, ordinary people matched wits with a celebrity panel, answering a series of questions designed to illuminate their personal psychologies. How do you vote: by party, issues, candidates, or the advice of friends? What traits, if any, do the people you’ve dated share? How do you choose your toothpaste?
Sitting alongside actor Andrew Prine and Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann, his slicked hair curling at the edges, Carlin strained for geniality as he endured the excruciating twenty-three-minute taping. Answering a weird question about how the contestants would handle a potential housemate accused of “unruly behavior,” he replied that it wouldn’t bother him. “I’m not very ruly,” he explained.
His unruly urges were beginning to show. Making his second appearance on the Gleason show in January 1969, Carlin managed to attract the attention of the FBI. Introduced by the host as “a real oddball,” Carlin wondered why incidental television programming—the test pattern, or the sign-off hour “Star-Spangled Banner”—was never nominated for Emmy Awards. Having laid out the premise, Carlin imagined that the FBI’s late-night “Most Wanted” report had a production budget like The Tonight Show’s. His mock host, “J. Edgar Moover,” then performed a monologue of aggressively bad jokes: “Did you hear the one about the two guys planning to rob a bank? So did we. We put ’em in jail.”
Several days after the broadcast, Gleason’s office received two letters of complaint. “The crime wave is not a subject for levity or humor,” wrote the first aggrieved viewer, from Dallas, “and the Department of Justice is not a subject to be made fun of, any more than it would be proper to make light of the U.S. Constitution. The hippies and the yippies might be taking serious things lightly but the majority of the people in the United States are law abiding citizens and do not appreciate anyone making fun of crime.” The second letter, sent from Connecticut, referenced the appearance by “an individual named George Carlin. I believe he was supposed to be a comedian.” Carlin’s spoof, wrote the viewer, “was shoddy, in shockingly bad taste, and certainly not the sort of thing one would expect on your show.” The correspondent then noted that he was a former special agent of the FBI.
In the field of law enforcement there are no more respected names than the Federal Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover. In the field of entertainment there is no greater personality than Jackie Gleason. It’s a shame that a third-rate hanger-on would use the generosity of one to belittle the reputation of the other.
An internal FBI memorandum ultimately determined that the appearance of this “third-rate hanger-on” “was in very poor taste,” and that “it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance.” The author of the memo proceeded to (clumsily) document part of Carlin’s routine, bringing to mind Lenny Bruce’s exasperation when he