Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [65]
Carlin’s generational appeal was confirmed when John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose him as one of several radical guests for their week in February as guest cohosts on The Mike Douglas Show. The former Beatle and his wife had recently relocated to New York, where they swiftly came under FBI surveillance. The couple knew something about censorship issues: Lennon’s 1972 single “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” so named for a statement Ono once made about woman’s subservient role in a male-dominated society, was widely banned from airplay. Lennon and Ono’s guests for their week on the Douglas show included Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and antiwar activist and Yippie cofounder Jerry Rubin.
On the program Carlin introduced a concept that he would keep in the act for some time. Calling attention to the absurdity of stand-up comedy itself, he came out and greeted the audience like a man inviting a visitor into his corner office. “Welcome to my job,” he joked. It was a quintessential stoner moment—wow, this is weird. Midway through an otherwise straightforward set, he announced that it was time for his break. Sitting down on a stool, he stopped talking and stared off into the distance, stealing a glance at his watch. A seemingly small gesture, it was the kind of “meta” comedy that only became commonplace years later, in the disassociated humor of Andy Kaufman or Mitch Hedberg.
When Carlin joined the cohosts on the panel, Douglas held up a copy of FM & AM and pointed to a sticker on the cover. “It is recommended that the contents of this album are screened carefully before clearing for airplay,” he read. Yoko laughed. Douglas noted that he’d never seen such a warning sticker on a record before: “Are they going to rate albums now, George? Is this an X-rated album?”
Though none of the material was that raunchy, Carlin’s compulsion to challenge prudery with language was evident right on the cover. In a hint at the one-line non sequiturs that would eventually become a staple of both his act and his writing, his photo on the back of the album was framed in fine print with a couple dozen zingers, several of them off-color: “Beer nuts is the official disease of Milwaukee. . . . A car-raising contest is a jack-off.” Although the longhaired hipster in the photo looked nothing like the product of a parochial school education, in such shameless juvenilia it was easy to hear the voice of the class cut-up doing time in Father Jablonski’s detention hall.
The host also wanted to know whether Carlin’s change had made him a better person, a better comic. “I don’t know about ‘better,’” he replied. “It’s made me more efficient.” His old repertoire of silly characters had effectively crowded out the real George Carlin from his own act, he said. “I was hiding behind these things. Television rewarded that. . . . I was not in my act anymore.” This time, it was Lennon who chuckled empathetically.
Carlin may have felt more efficient, but he was again exhibiting some of the erratic behavior the entertainment industry had been leery of a year or so earlier. In the spring he missed a few gigs due to laryngitis. On one visit to The Tonight Show, Carson mentioned that Carlin had almost had to cancel. “I’ve been staying up a little late,” Carlin offered lamely. A few months later he told Rolling Stone that his “laryngitis” was exacerbated by his new fondness for snorting cocaine. For most of his life, he said, he’d been waking up and getting high. “After twenty years of that, I discovered cocaine and how good that was. And what was scary was that I discovered I could afford it.”
When a “German doctor” advised him to lay off the blow, he and Brenda had a heart-to-heart. “We decided to cut it all out,” Carlin told the magazine. “We said, ‘Well, we’ve been through the first half of our life stoned, let’s try the second half straight.’” Whatever his level of intoxication, Carlin’s career was suddenly flying. At the end of May he recorded a performance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The set became his second