Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [61]
He segued from the Vietnam jokes he’d done in Wisconsin into a parody of “America the Beautiful,” satirizing our national urge to modernize the world by “whipping a little industry on them”: “O beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain/For strip-mined mountains’ majesty, above the asphalt plain.” (Fellow wordplay fanatic Biff Rose had printed a similar verse, “America the Ugliful,” on the back sleeve of his 1968 album The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side: “Oh! Ugliful for racial skies—And ample chance for pain.” Flip Wilson, too, had a signature bit that spoofed the song.)
But it was in conversation with Douglas, the host, that the comedian really made his case for his countercultural shift. Sitting in a director’s chair under a sunny sky, Carlin said that he was working on a book-length collection of humor, The Secret Papers of George Carlin. He also explained that he was involved with a new nonprofit group, a public policy organization called Committee to Bridge the Gap, which he described as a growing network of college students reaching out to political moderates, “just trying to make it less fearsome for people resistant to change. . . . The planet and the species and the country are in a kind of emergency,” he said. Two decades later he would amend himself. “The Planet Is Fine,” he called one of his favorite routines, but “the people are fucked.”
For now, though, he was happily enjoying his newfound popularity with the college crowd. Douglas told his guest that he could tell this was his type of audience. “I spent a lot of time in nightclubs banging my head against the wall,” replied Carlin. “I started as a coffeehouse rapper about seven or eight years ago, and I’m really just coming home. That’s all it is.” Though old show-biz types were lamenting that the younger generation had no sense of humor, Douglas noted, “They’re really just laughing at different things.” The young America had changed everything, Carlin agreed. Music, clothing, morality. Why not comedy?
“The Myron Cohens, the Jack E. Leonards were becoming passé,” says Jeff Wald. “People realize when you’re false. The sensibility George had didn’t fit the material he was doing. He was not being true to who he was. As soon as he became who he really was, which was a pot-smoking, hip guy, then the success started—the real success. I guess making a quarter-million was pretty successful, but he wasn’t happy. He was getting into trouble. He was being a phony, in a way.”
That spring Carlin stumbled onto another opportunity that gave him an added boost of confidence. Mort Sahl had been scheduled as the opening act for the rock band Spirit at the outdoor amphitheater of what was then known as Santa Monica City College, but he had to cancel due to illness. Asked to fill in, Carlin was nervous. Though he was doing the clubs again, a rock ’n’ roll audience was another story. “I’d never done a real college-audience-in-the-Sixties kind of thing,” he remembered.
With about 400 students in attendance, the show took place at midday. “These are rowdy rockers,” recalls Uncle Miltie’s nephew, Marshall Berle, who was managing Spirit at the time. As a young agent, Berle had signed the Beach Boys, Ike and Tina Turner, and others to the William Morris Agency before moving into personal management. At the college gig with Spirit, he was amazed that the promoter would book a comedian to open a rock ’n’ roll show. “This was the psychedelic era, at a time when everyone was getting high,” he says. “Carlin comes out, and he’s getting laughs. I remember saying, This guy’s got a lot of balls.”
To Carlin’s great relief and elation, the audience gave him a standing ovation. “I killed. I thought, ‘This is it, man.’”
To make a great leap forward in his art—and in fact Carlin was beginning to let himself think of his