Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [60]
At the rehearsal Carlin told two topical jokes that came to the attention of producer Bob Precht, Sullivan’s son-in-law, who had the unenviable job of informing rock ’n’ roll acts such as the Rolling Stones and the Doors that they were expected to alter their potentially offensive lyrics. “Ed had a big tent,” says veteran director John Moffitt, who got started in television as a production assistant on the show before moving up to the director’s chair. At a time when households only had one TV set, Sullivan’s show drew in the whole family. “The kids would watch for a musical group. The mom would watch for an opera star or a matinee idol, and the husband would watch for sports figures, like the Mets singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ So Ed was very protective—you don’t go too far, one way or the other.”
Yet Moffitt maintains that Sullivan is sometimes unfairly characterized as a prig. “Ed was, in his own way, very liberal. He gave black performers opportunities before it was fashionable.” When Bob Dylan wanted to perform his “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” on the show, Sullivan told him he could do it, but he was overruled by CBS censors. Dylan walked. Sullivan, says Moffitt, had no problem with Elvis Presley’s gyrations; it was Standards and Practices that made the show shoot him from the waist up.
The first of Carlin’s jokes involved the confrontational Alabama politician George Wallace, whose campaign to regain the governor’s office was marked by racially charged rhetoric. Wallace, who would soon join the Democratic field as a presidential candidate for 1972, routinely referred to Northern elites as “pointy-headed intellectuals.” Noting this, Carlin asked, “Have you ever seen the sheets they wear down there?”
The second joke concerned Muhammad Ali’s ongoing struggle to be reinstated in boxing after his conviction for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to be drafted. Stripped of his title in 1967, the former heavyweight champ had finally been permitted to box again in the fall of 1970. Within months the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn his conviction by unanimous vote. Although his stance was unpopular in the mid-1960s, by the turn of the decade the American public was increasingly turning against the war, and a majority felt that the boxer was being unfairly punished. Ali’s job, Carlin joked, was to beat people up. The government wanted him to kill people. “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ’em up, but I won’t kill ’em.’” And the government replied, “Well, if you won’t kill ’em, then we won’t let you beat ’em up.”
After rehearsal, Bob Precht told the comic that he could do either the Wallace joke or the Ali joke—but not both. “Oddest censorship I ever experienced,” Carlin recalled. He chose the Ali joke.
Bringing that joke, and his new hair, onto the Sullivan stage was daring enough. But Carlin reserved his real television coming-out for a springtime appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, during a week of special episodes broadcast live from a seaside amphitheater at the United States International University in San Diego. Without preamble, he jumped into new material that he had tried out on the Sullivan show, a bit of poetic doggerel called “The Hair Piece”:
I’m aware some stare at my hair. . . . But they’re not aware, nor are they debonair. In fact, they’re real square. They see hair down to there, say beware, and go off on a tear. I say, no fair.
Hair, and not just Carlin’s, was demanding an inordinate amount of attention at the time. After an appearance as a morning show guest host on ABC, fellow comic Robert Klein had received a copy of a letter protesting the network’s hiring of such a “sloppy and hippy character. . . . He is actually dirty-looking with that despicable hair and untidy appearance.” Carlin would get a lot of mileage over the next year or so out of his “Hair Piece.” It may have been a silly little poem, but it was also, like Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” slogan, a masterful bit of cerebral jujitsu. He turned the audience’s potential