Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [73]
The comic also spoke at length, with a surprising amount of fondness, about his Catholic school experience. It could have been any garden-variety parochial school—“Our Lady of Great Agony . . . Saint Rita Moreno . . . Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.” Given the progressive ideals at the Corpus Christi School, however, his was not a stereotypical education by cruelty. Like Bruce, who dug deeply into religion as subject matter, Carlin found his schooling a rich vein of material, and he thanked the nuns and priests by name in the album’s notes. Then, in an abrupt shift, the album closed with his one-two jab at unthinking patriotism—“Muhammad Ali—America the Beautiful”—and the tour de force “Seven Words.”
When the Grammy Award nominees for 1972 were announced, FM & AM was on the list, alongside Flip Wilson’s Geraldine, an All in the Family cast recording, and Big Bambu, the second album by a pair of bong-addled character comedians named Cheech and Chong. Carlin took home the Grammy for FM & AM, but it was Class Clown that really put him over the top in 1972. Club dates at places like the Troubadour and the Cellar Door, for a short time the comic’s bread and butter, were quickly becoming a thing of the past. In November he finished a run of five dates at the venerable Palace Theater on Broadway, totaling a then-considerable box office take of $40,000.
Class Clown easily earned back the comparatively minuscule outlay of a live comedy recording, virtually carrying Atlantic Records, Little David’s parent company, for a time. One Atlantic salesman told De Blasio that receipts from the Carlin record and from Led Zeppelin’s blockbuster fourth album together were covering the company’s operating costs. “And the recording costs [for Class Clown] were probably what the crafts services bill for Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones would have been,” says De Blasio. “Very minimal. They saw profits immediately. You didn’t have to promote anything—he was just out there.”
The acknowledgment of “Leonard Schneider” on the inside cover of Class Clown was clear confirmation of what plenty of listeners had been saying for some time: Carlin was the natural successor to “Saint Lenny,” the fallen martyr of fearless comedy. As early as 1967, the newcomer had been making the case himself. Lenny’s “use of obscene language is very simple for me to understand,” Carlin told Judy Stone, “because Lenny was essentially a reporter, and he used the language of the people he was reporting about.” There was, however, a caveat: Bruce, for the most part, preached to the converted.
“Seven Words” hammered away at the deepening wedge between the generations. (“The whole revolution is about values,” as he said on the album.) But the routine, like almost all of Carlin’s self-expressive comedy at the time, also helped explain the counterculture to the mainstream audience. Language, hair, getting high, opposing the war—all could be reduced to trivialities and made more acceptable in the process. For Carlin, the symbolic seven words changed everything. From then on, he would forever be known as the comic who shattered the language barrier, for better and for worse. Lenny, Carlin once observed, “was the first one to make language an issue, and he suffered for it. I was the first one to make language an issue and succeed with it.”
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SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION
Walking in her Morningside Heights neighborhood one day, Mary Carlin stopped to speak with a couple of nuns from the Corpus Christi School, who were out on their own daily walk. How wonderful George’s career was going, said the sisters. Mary put her fingertips to