Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [76]
Stand-up comedy now belonged to the rock ’n’ roll era, and Carlin was suddenly the leader of the band. Still a few years before Steve Martin would become wildly popular for walking onstage with a fake arrow through his head and the cast of Saturday Night Live would debut in bee suits, the comedians of the early 1970s were working with their most basic commodity—their words. And they were taking a stand over the words they’d previously been denied. Nearly ten years after Mario Savio’s dramatic, impromptu speech at a University of California-Berkeley sit-in galvanized the free speech movement, a raggedy band of clever stooges were staging their own protest, of a sort. In Miami, Cheech and Chong faced four cops positioned at the lip of the stage, waiting to pounce the first time the dopers said the word fuck or any of its variations. Three of the officers couldn’t help themselves and soon began laughing at the comics’ material. During a bit called “The Dogs,” with the two comedians crawling around on all fours, Cheech bounded over to the one cop who hadn’t broken character and lifted his leg. “I ‘peed’ a long time on him,” the comedian recalled.
Pryor, no stranger to coarse language, named his 1974 comeback album That Nigger’s Crazy. Newcomer Albert Brooks, younger brother of Smothers Brothers writer Bob Einstein, was baptized by fire while opening shows for Sly and the Family Stone. He learned that he could command a restless audience simply by uttering one magic, drawn-out word—shii-ii-it. “Shit has saved my life,” he told author Phil Berger. “I know it sounds like a National Inquirer article, but it’s true.” Klein, who riffed on his New York boyhood on his debut album Child of the 50’s much as Carlin did on Class Clown, examined the typically unexamined use of words such as homo and whore (pronounced, in outer-boroughs fashion, as hoo-er). And he needled his elders for their embarrassing habit of referring to body parts and functions with ridiculous baby names—tu-tus, boom-booms, poo-poos. “They wouldn’t let me say Jew-boy on The Tonight Show,” he said. “NBC, you know. Uptight. Too many letters from Alabama saying, ‘Why didn’t you say Jew bastard?’”
Forceful language was an increasingly newsworthy topic outside of comedy, too. In 1971 the Supreme Court had heard the case of a young war protester convicted of disturbing the peace when he brought a jacket reading “Fuck the Draft” into the Los Angeles Courthouse. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Court reversed the California Court of Appeals’s ruling to uphold the conviction. Veteran Justice Hugo Black, a longtime supporter of freedom of expression, nevertheless agreed with the dissenting opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who suggested that defendant Paul Robert Cohen’s statement in wearing the coat was “an absurd and immature antic . . . mainly conduct and not speech.” With a group of nuns reportedly in attendance at the hearing, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger took pains to ask the lawyers not to “dwell on the facts” of the case. In his majority opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan made an observation that would become infamous in its own right: “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”
Just after the release of Occupation: Foole, one radio station put that proposition to the test. On October 30, 1973, WBAI disc jockey Paul Gorman hosted a midday show known as Lunchpail. His topic that day was an examination of society’s attitudes toward language. The volatile political dialogue of the time “was doing great damage to words, in my view,” Gorman explained a few years later. On the program, he discussed the fact that the government dropped bombs through its “defense” department; meanwhile,