Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [67]
It was prestigious company for Carlin. After a dozen years of hustling, alternating real achievements such as The Tonight Show and Sullivan with the disappointments of the supper clubs and the game shows, Mary Carlin’s mischievous younger son was set to command the stage at the symbolic top of the show-business heap. He’d known how to get to Carnegie Hall all his life: He practiced.
In sharp focus, he did an hour and a half, relying heavily on new material about his parochial school upbringing, aversion to big business, and disdain for authority. Backstage at the reception, Mary appeared stricken. Elated that her “sensitive” son had earned a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall—Carnegie Hall!—she was nevertheless deeply conflicted that they were applauding his blasphemy and vulgarity. “She didn’t know it had reached this level. She didn’t know it had this force,” Carlin remembered. “It was dawning on her that this tough, irreverent thing was OK in many people’s eyes.”
At the heart of the matter was a particular segment Carlin had been working on for months, recording it during the Santa Monica Civic show at the end of May. The piece was an expansion of the ideas about language that had caused him so much trouble in Vegas. Plenty of potentially offensive words, he reasoned, could be safely uttered on television, depending on their context. An ass could be a biblical donkey, a bitch a female dog, a bastard an illegitimate child, and so on. What, then, were the words that had no redeeming meaning whatsoever? The resulting routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” was destined to become a landmark not only for stand-up comedy, but for the history of free speech in America.
There are 400,000 words in the English language, he reasoned, “and there are seven of them you can’t say on TV. What a ratio that is! Three hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety three . . . to seven.” Carlin’s “heavy seven”—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits—were the ones that would “affect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.” (When Class Clown came out later in the year, the album arrived with a front-cover “warning” that repeated this line.) Far from being a provocation, “Seven Words” was Carlin’s attempt to expose the absurdity of outlawing words. His tone was playful, not confrontational: “Tits doesn’t even belong on the list, ya know? . . . Sounds like a nickname, right? ‘Hey, Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits.’”
Even the mainstream media recognized the gentleness in the approach. “He takes seven expletives and analyzes the meaning and use of each of them with the wit and skill of the most compelling professor of linguistics,” wrote a New York Times contributor. “In the process, the verboten is rendered suitably ludicrous. It is an energized, intense, though never strident, and frequently hilarious turn.”
Carlin wasn’t alone. Adult language was becoming increasingly common in comedy by 1972. Lenny Bruce had left behind a small army of comic imitators who carried on the business of liberating four-letter words, and then wondered why they had difficulty getting booked on talk shows. Pryor, after radicalizing himself to the Black Power movement while living in Berkeley, had released an album the previous year called Craps (After Hours), which not only made ample use of most of the words on Carlin’s list, but also featured bits on masturbation, farting, and the mysterious legend of the “Snappin’ Pussy.”
Carlin found himself ideally suited to have it both ways, with his years of service in the pursuit of innocuous variety-show chuckles counterbalanced by the emergence of his genuinely rebellious nature. He’d once told his friend Bob Altman—the free-associating thinker everyone called Uncle Dirty—that he was going to show him how to perform the kind of subversive, socially incisive comedy they both adored, “and make a million bucks at it.” Larry Hankin, an avowed Bruce admirer, suggests