Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [79]
Without an archived recording of the program, WBAI directed the FCC to the “Filthy Words” track on Occupation: Foole. The station argued that that the routine was protected under the landmark Supreme Court ruling—the “Miller test,” devised in the 1973 case Miller v. California , in which a distributor of pornographic material was charged for advertising by mass mailing. In Miller, the Burger court had decided upon three criteria to establish obscenity: that the work appealed to prurient interest, that it was patently offensive, and that it had no redeeming social value. WBAI emphasized the social value of the comedian’s work:
George Carlin is a significant social satirist of American manners and language in the tradition of Mark Twain and Mort Sahl. Like Twain, Carlin finds his material in our most ordinary habits and language—particularly those “secret” manners and words which, when held before us for the first time, show us new images of ourselves. . . . Carlin is not mouthing obscenities, he is merely using words to satirize as harmless and essentially silly our attitudes towards those words. . . . As with other great satirists—from Jonathan Swift to Mort Sahl—George Carlin often grabs our attention by speaking the unspeakable, by shocking in order to illuminate. Because he is a true artist in his field, we are of the opinion that the inclusion of the material broadcast in a program devoted to an analysis of the use of language in contemporary society was natural and contributed to a further understanding of the subject.
To the FCC, however, playing the Carlin routine over the air seemed like a flagrant affront. Originally known as the Federal Radio Commission, the FCC was created under the Radio Act of 1927 and charged with defending the “public interest” regarding the new medium, without infringing upon broadcasters’ constitutional right to free speech. Legislators nevertheless saw fit to include a provision for punishing licensees who abused the privilege of the airwaves: “No person within the jurisdiction of the United States shall utter any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication.”
Until the 1960s the provision had little use. Most broadcasters, concerned primarily with attracting and keeping advertisers, voluntarily self-censored; for decades the FCC fielded only rare complaints. But the introduction of listener-supported radio removed the influence of advertisers from those stations. KPFA, WBAI, and their ilk could claim to be serving the cultural and educational needs of their audience alone—the hippies, the peace freaks, the rights activists, and other threats to the status quo.
By the time of the Nixon administration, in an increasingly permissible society the FCC began to see its job as police work. One college radio station was fined a token $100 for broadcasting a 1970 interview with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in which he repeatedly used the words shit and fuck. Two years later a station in Oak Park, Illinois, was fined $2,000 for the frank sexual nature of the discussion on its call-in “topless radio” show. In the early 1970s attorney David Tillotson, who would work for years on behalf of Pacifica, advised the owners of a Mesa, Arizona, rock station who were being threatened with nonrenewal of their license as a result of their repeated broadcast of Frank Zappa’s sexual-escapade song “Dynamo Hum.”
Politically the FCC was being pressured to clamp down. A federal study of television violence, cosponsored by the Surgeon General’s office and the National Institute of Mental Health, was released in 1972. Its appearance set off a wave of indignant