Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [8]
All of this input worked on the young boy like an electric shock. He took the gags into his classrooms and onto the streets, where he found an eager audience. By telling jokes he was discovering his innate gift for language. Mary recognized it and introduced him to the dictionary, encouraging him to look up a word whenever he was unsure of its meaning, a habit he retained throughout his life. Carlin often said his parents had heightened instincts for storytelling: “Both of them could hold the center stage in any room.” With his mother’s professional colleagues and then the neighborhood children rewarding his affinity for the spotlight, he found himself drawn to performing “like a flower [to] the sun. . . . I had some tools for it from my genetic package, but now the environment was inviting me to develop them.”
Carlin could trace his love of words to his mother’s father, a retired New York City cop, a man dedicated to self-improvement who, during his off-duty hours, liked to copy the works of Shakespeare in long-hand. As a boy Carlin was also intrigued to learn about his namesake, his mother’s troubled brother George Bearey, who insisted on being called “Admiral” and once took his clothes off on a trolley car. “I was impressed, not that he was an admiral, but that he was nuts,” he said.
Carlin’s youth would soon become a lengthy experiment in tweaking authority. It didn’t take long for him to recognize that he had no use for the practices of the Catholic Church. He traced the realization back at least as far as his first communion, when he was disenchanted to find that he felt nothing—no transcendence, no oneness with God, no miraculous visitation, as he’d been led to believe he would. Maybe, just maybe, these church people were clinging to beliefs they couldn’t prove.
He attended grammar school at Corpus Christi School on West 121st Street, a progressive Catholic school that would paradoxically in-still in the young student just the inquisitive tools he needed to reject the religious education he was in line to receive. Founded in 1907, the school was run by the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, who had been invited to New York by Father George Barry Ford, the second pastor of Corpus Christi, in 1936. His church had a reputation for encouraging liberal thinking, particularly because of its association with the writer and activist Thomas Merton, who was baptized there while a graduate student at nearby Columbia University. The pastor was a disciple of the educational reformer John Dewey, who was a professor of philosophy for years at Columbia’s Teachers College, just across the street. Father Ford “talked the diocese into experimenting in our parish with progressive education,” Carlin later explained in a routine called “I Used to Be Irish Catholic,” “while whipping the religion on us anyway, and seeing what would happen.”
Classrooms at Corpus Christi were unorthodox for the time, with movable desks and relaxed seating arrangements. Classes were coed, and there was no uniform requirement. There was also no formal grading system, and the students were encouraged to ask questions of all kinds. The setting served Carlin well. Years later he would often acknowledge the role the nuns of Corpus Christi played in shaping his mindset. (Several priests and nuns, including Father Ford, are sincerely thanked in the liner notes to his 1972 album Class Clown. “This album would not have been possible,” Carlin wrote, without their “loving help.”) “The church part and the neighborhood part were typical, but the school was not,” he told his audiences. The students at Corpus Christi had so much freedom, in fact, “that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. Because they made questioners out of us, and they really didn’t have any answers.”
To Carlin, the church’s solemn rituals seemed laughable. As one historian has noted, since medieval times the Catholic Church has “frowned on laughter.