Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [6]
a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements. . . . It prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual human beings charged with my care ever bothered to.
The radio gave Carlin another world in which his mind could roam. He was enthralled by the adventures of The Lone Ranger, and he became a big fan of Fibber McGee and Molly. Broadcast on NBC at 9:30 on Tuesday nights, the show was a ratings champion by Carlin’s grammar-school years. Jim Jordan and his wife, Marian Driscoll, played the title characters, the scheming, yarn-spinning knucklehead McGee and his ever-patronizing companion. Another popular program, The Aldrich Family, prefigured the family-oriented situation comedies of television, following the mild misadventures of young Henry Aldrich and his chum, Homer Brown, who closed each show by singing a jingle from their sponsor, Jell-O. “That was my family, the people on the radio,” Carlin recalled. “No cousins, no grandparents.”
Henry and Homer were archetypes of the classic all-American boy, soon to be seen on television’s Leave It to Beaver. They were mischievous, but well-meaning. As the critic John Crosby once noted, radio’s fictional boys, despite their propensity for mischief, were much too timid to ever amount to anything. “There aren’t any Huck Finns in radio,” Crosby wrote. Each week the Henrys and Homers and Oogies (Judy Foster’s pubescent suitor, played by Richard Crenna, in A Date with Judy) “get into one jam after another, always by accident, never by design. . . . They never try to get into trouble.”
Much more attractive to Carlin’s already wicked sense of humor was the more sophisticated humor of radio’s variety hosts—former vaudevillian Fred Allen, the deadpan improvisational duo Bob and Ray, and the acid-tongued Henry Morgan. The latter was a cantankerous New Yorker who delighted in mangling sponsors’ pitches, for instance, accusing the makers of Life Savers of defrauding their customers out of the candy centers. Between such irreverent ad-libs the announcer played satirical records, many by the comic bandleader Spike Jones, whose City Slickers orchestra was famous for its zany arrangements, with toilet seats, bicycle horns, cap guns, and other props adding to the galloping irreverence. Morgan had a true devil-may-care attitude that earned him the admiration of fellow radio personalities such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny. But it also hastened his exile from the business. “I grew up thinking it was American to be outspoken,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “I’ve since learned it’s un-American. If I was bringing up a kid today, I’d teach him to nod.”
Just as he toyed with advertisers, Morgan couldn’t deliver a simple weather forecast without mocking the format. “Snow, followed by little boys with sleds,” he’d report, or “Dark clouds, followed by silver linings.” Morgan’s irreverence had a clear impact on one listener: Years later, Carlin introduced his own version of a subversive meteorologist to the stoner generation. “Tonight’s forecast: dark,” Carlin’s most enduring stock character, Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman, said countless times in his dope-addled drawl. “Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning.”
Fred Allen, bow-tied and erudite lampooner of American convention, was another of the young Carlin’s exemplars. Unlike most of his gag-dependent counterparts, Allen was a writer first, a comic second. The man of whom James Thurber once said, “You can count on the thumb of one hand the American who is