Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [88]
Stand-up comedy epitomized the kind of “event” programming HBO envisioned for itself, says Levin, the company president, who later went on to run Time Warner. “We were looking for something that would dramatize the nature of the medium itself—that is, subscription, free-flowing, and I don’t mean just language. Comedy in a nightclub setting was a hard-ticket value item.” Like boxing, the other signature presentation of the network’s early years—HBO launched its new satellite feed system with a showcase event, the heavily hyped “Thrilla in Manila” title fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier—comedy had a rawness that suited the new venture well. Both featured lone gladiators in the spotlight. “Both, in a not-so-subtle way, reinforced to the consumer that they were getting box-office value from something even though it was coming through their TV set,” Levin says.
Carlin’s ninety-minute set, taped at USC in early March 1977, debuted just as the D.C. Court of Appeals’s reversal of the FCC order on WBAI was being handed down. Determined not to self-censor, HBO nevertheless went to considerable lengths to cover its heinie. It summoned former Life magazine columnist Shana Alexander, known to television audiences as the liberal half of the weekly “Point/ Counterpoint” segment on 60 Minutes. “A portion of Mr. Carlin’s performance needs special introduction,” Alexander said in a taped disclaimer that ran at the top of the program.
His target is language—how we use it and abuse it. Some would simply say that tonight’s language is very strong. Others would say it goes beyond this, and would find it vulgar. Aristophanes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were vulgar too at times. Anyway, the segment is controversial.
Mentioning the court’s ruling, she called the comic an important performer: “one of this generation’s philosophers of comedy, defining, reflecting, and refining the way we see our own time.” His act “contains language you hear every day on the streets, though rarely on TV.” It was up to viewers to make up their own minds about the content.
“It was an adult medium, and people were paying for it,” says Levin. Another of HBO’s core concepts was to make R-rated movies available to subscribers. “I remember the first time I played an R-rated movie for some people at Time Inc. They were appalled that we were running that on TV. I said, well, that’s the concept. If you can see it in a theater, why can’t you see it at home?” Landing Carlin, the radical reformer of harsh language, was “a kind of capstone symbolism of what we were trying to do,” says Levin. “If some people thought it was exploitative, well, then they thought George Carlin was exploitative. I personally thought he was one of the most brilliant, not just comedians, but commentators we had.”
Another disclaimer toward the end of his HBO debut read “THE FINAL SEGMENT OF MR. CARLIN’S PERFORMANCE INCLUDES ESPECIALLY CONTROVERSIAL LANGUAGE. PLEASE CONSIDER WHETHER YOU WISH TO CONTINUE VIEWING.” Not that he hadn’t already cursed during the set. Doing a bit about cats, he’d noted how they make every clumsy mishap seem like it was intentional. After smashing into a door, he joked, a cat will go behind the couch to hide its pain. Only when it’s out of sight will it react: “Fuckin’ meow!”
HBO was happy to have him, but the broadcast networks were as wary as ever. Pop singer Tony Orlando, a close friend of Freddie Prinze, wanted Carlin for his variety show, which had a new name, The Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour, for the 1976 season. After a couple of years on CBS, the show was being revamped as a sketch-and-performance show, mimicking SNL to a degree. “I was never