Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [85]
Nevertheless, once the decision was made, Michaels was glad to have a name on which he could hinge the launch. Carlin, he joked to the press, was “punctual, and he fills out forms well.” Still needing a director, he met with Dave Wilson, a television veteran who had recently worked with Jim Henson on the second of two pilots for The Muppet Show. Michaels, wearing a “Dracula Sucks” T-shirt and with his hair in a ponytail, was skeptical about Wilson, who was already in his forties. Looking for a way to dismiss the interviewee, the producer asked if Wilson thought he could relate to Carlin (who was, of course, himself nearing forty). In fact, he could. Dave Wilson was “Wacky” Wilson, the New Hampshire camper whom the boyhood Carlin had unseated as Camp Notre Dame’s drama award winner. They were old friends, Wilson said. Michaels offered to say hello when he met with Carlin on his next trip to California. “I kept praying, ‘I hope George Carlin remembers me,’” Wilson recalled. “Turns out he did, and Lorne, I guess, was sort of impressed by that.” Wilson got the job, and he went on to direct more than 300 episodes of Saturday Night Live over the next two decades.
As the show came together, the NBC brass at Rockefeller Center grew suspicious. “What was this weird little show with these dirty people riding up and down the elevator?” Kellem puts it. During the week of rehearsals prior to broadcast, Dave Tebet, the network’s head of talent, heard that Carlin was planning to step onstage with a soiled T-shirt visible under his suit. Tebet, worried that some undecided affiliates might choose to drop the show if it didn’t appear professional, laid down an edict. Carlin would wear a clean T-shirt, and he should probably consider a haircut, too.
How Carlin would appear became “the major focus of the night, weirdly enough,” recalled Michaels. “That was a much greater distraction than can possibly be understood.” Ultimately the comic bounded through the audience onto the stage of historic Studio 8-H, where Toscanini had conducted the NBC Symphony, in a blue T-shirt covered by a jacket and vest.
Because of Carlin, the ninety-minute show almost didn’t go out as advertised—live. NBC had debated using a six-second delay, so the producers would have a window in which to bleep any offending words. In the end, however, the delay was forgotten. Carlin had agreed to do NBC’s Saturday Night, as the show was originally called, in part because he had a new album to promote. (Though Michaels had asked for fresh material, Carlin essentially did cuts from the new record.) After a “cold opening,” a sketch about an immigrant learning English, featuring Belushi and National Lampoon alum Michael O’Donoghue, Carlin strolled onstage to the band’s energetic theme and Don Pardo’s excited introduction. “Talk about a live show! Wow,” he said to the boisterous studio audience. Without further comment on the concept for the new show, he jumped into a routine from the new album called “Baseball—Football.” It gave him a chance to make a drug joke almost immediately. The rules of football, he noted, had been changed recently: “They moved the hash marks in. Guys found ’em and smoked ’em anyway.” The hunk, later expanded into one of Carlin’s most beloved routines, pointed out the contrast between football’s militarism and baseball’s pastoral sensibility. Alternating between the steely voice of a combat officer and a little boy’s innocent singsong, he joked, “In football you get a penalty. In baseball, you make an error—whoops!” The premise was surely influenced by his first