Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [86]
By his own later admission, Carlin had been on a cocaine bender all week. Getting only a smattering of chuckles out of one line, he asked someone in the front row, “Have I done these jokes before tonight?” Given the near-debacle of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, it was quite possible he really wasn’t sure. Still, he managed. He introduced musical guests Billy Preston and Janis Ian (Michaels had originally wanted Stevie Wonder and Carole King) and a short film by Albert Brooks. He did two more short monologues of absurd tidbits (“Have you ever tried to throw away an old wastebasket?”) and one final set, well after midnight, questioning God and religion.
Although Carlin’s presence undeniably lent the show some legitimacy, he also caused his share of problems on a very tense and nervous set. All week he had been unenthusiastic about participating in a sketch. Written by O’Donoghue, the sketch imagined Alexander the Great at his high school reunion. After dress rehearsal, with an hour to go until air time, Carlin told Michaels he wouldn’t do the sketch. The producer had no choice but to cut it.
Carlin’s allotted monologue segments also contributed to the show’s first big internal controversy. Billy Crystal, whom Michaels had recently spotted at Catch a Rising Star, had turned down a showcase on a new Cosby special to appear on Saturday Night. At the last minute his six-minute segment was bumped from the show. Michaels was committed to keeping newcomer Andy Kaufman’s “Mighty Mouse” lip-synching routine, a small masterpiece of modern Dada, and his only other option was to take air time from his host. “I probably didn’t have the nerve to cut Carlin,” the producer recalled. Crystal’s devastation at being left out clouded his relationship with SNL for some time.
Then there was the matter of Carlin’s last bit. Called “Religious Lift,” it was a piece he’d been working on for several months. He had performed a version of it, with a blatant use of cheat sheets and the hoarse throat and grinding jaw of a man in the throes of a binge, on Mike Douglas a few months earlier. We’re so egotistical about God, he joked on both shows, that we face our dashboard Jesuses toward us, rather than on the road ahead watching out for traffic, as they should be. The routine was incisively Lenny-esque.
As soon as Saturday Night ended, with cast and crew breathing a collective sigh of relief, Dave Tebet called from his hotel suite to complain to Ebersol about Carlin’s antireligion soapboxing. The NBC switchboard was lighting up with complaints, he claimed. One caller said he was phoning on behalf of Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York. Heading home from the wrap party, a dejected Ebersol walked past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, checking to see whether the office lights were on. On Monday morning he heard that the call had been a hoax. Try as he might, Carlin couldn’t draw the ire of every archbishop in the country.
There had been talk of Carlin agreeing to host several episodes of the new show, but after the first one, neither side brought it up again. (He returned once, hosting in November 1984, during Michaels’ several-season hiatus from the show he had created.) Despite a nationally televised plug for his new album—he had held up a copy of the LP, An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, as the closing credits began to roll—the record was his first on Little David that failed to go gold. It did earn the comic another Grammy nomination, but Carlin was about to be knocked off his three-year perch atop the comedy world. Ironically, his appearance on the first Saturday Night Live seemed to underscore the notion that a new kind of funny was about to sweep the culture.
8
WASTED TIME
Robert Klein looked like a grad student still hanging out with the underclassmen. The thirty-three-year-old stood on the stage of the theater at Haverford College, a prestigious liberal