Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [5]
Patrick Carlin died of a heart attack in 1945, when his youngest son was eight years old. It isn’t difficult to infer that his father’s absence helped shape the son’s lifelong skepticism about authority figures. “The thing is, I never really had issues with my father because I was so young,” he once said. “My brother hates his guts. I hate him by proxy, but I also love him by proxy.”
Almost six years older than George, brother Patrick was often out carousing. When Patrick came home at night, the younger Carlin sometimes lay in bed listening to his mother chastise him. Pat, Mary would say, was just like his father. Georgie was different. He had sensitivity. She vowed to “make something” of her youngest. From a young age Carlin recognized that he would have to contend with Mary Carlin’s smothering instinct. “I had to fight her off,” Carlin recalled. “And it made me stronger.”
With their mother working long hours—earning “a man’s salary,” she said—Carlin and his brother were often on their own in the apartment in which the family eventually settled, on 121st Street. Grant’s Tomb lay two blocks to the west. Morningside Heights, ensconced alongside Spanish Harlem to the east and the main economic artery of black Harlem, 125th Street, was an ethnically eclectic neighborhood, “wonderfully alive and vibrant,” as Carlin recalled. “Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Irish.” In warm weather the smells of spicy cooking and the sounds of imported music hung in the air. The area was also home to an impressive array of institutions, including Columbia University, the Manhattan School of Music, the Union Theological Seminary, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, all of which earned it the nickname “the Acropolis of New York.” Carlin and his Irish friends preferred to call the neighborhood “White Harlem,” which sounded tougher than Morningside Heights.
With Patrick out on the streets, George would fix himself a simple dinner, a hamburger or some spaghetti, and exercise his considerable imagination with the radio and his comic books and magazines. Far from being lonely, he had lifelong blissful memories of this youthful independence. Answering a question about when and where he was happiest, he once replied, “Home alone after school, before my mother got home from work.” Like thousands of kids his age at the time, he devoured the humor magazines that were becoming big business by the late 1940s. Ballyhoo was a groundbreaking parody magazine for kids, packed with advertising spoofs that prefigured the content of dozens of wisecracking titles to come. Another favorite, Thousand Jokes, was a monthly collection of single-panel gag cartoons. Carlin’s Aunt Aggie worked for William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, the newspaper company that produced Puck, the weekly funny pages. Each week she brought her nephew the insert that would run four weeks later. His insider status gave him great leverage on the playground, where he convinced gullible schoolmates that he could predict the storylines of their favorite comics.
He dog-eared a copy of Esar’s Comic Dictionary, a collection of punning definitions by the humorist Evan Esar. In the author’s world, a cynic was “a man bored with sinning”; faith was “the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate”; and freedom was “the ability to do as you please without considering anyone except the wife, boss, police, neighbors and the government.”
Then there was Mad, the legendary sarcastic omnibus magazine, which Carlin started reading in its original comic book format. “Humor in a Jugular Vein,” read a banner on the cover of the debut issue in August 1952. With its direct appeals to kids’ inherent skepticism, Mad “was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren’t alone,” wrote the New York Times on the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. “There