Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [89]
When his producer told Orlando that Carlin’s drawing power was slipping and he might be available, the “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” singer implored the CBS brass to bring him in. As Orlando recalls, it was his duty to hand down the network’s conditions: Carlin would have to trim his hair (he agreed), and he’d have to promise not to goad the Standards and Practices Department. “You couldn’t even use the word ‘pregnant’ on our show, let alone anything stronger,” according to Orlando. For his part, Carlin asked that his six-minute segments be followed by commercial breaks, so the pieces would stand alone.
In several episodes in the 1976 season, which turned out to be the show’s last, Carlin worked hard on his contribution. After several years of packed schedules, he could sense that opportunities were dwindling. “You can’t be the hot new guy in town forever,” he reasoned. Each week he strode onto Orlando’s stage with an old brown briefcase under his arm, pulling out a torn sheet of paper that read “Time for George” and pinning it to a bulletin board.
The segments were conceptual, covering such themes as “Time,” “Age,” and “Rules.” They suited Carlin’s clinical approach to comedy. In the first, he examined the various ways we describe time: “What’s the difference between a jiffy and a flash?” We can never truly live in the present, he said. Just as we identify it, it’s moved on to the next moment. “There’s no present. Everything is the near future, or the recent past.” The “Rules” segment explored the universal language of parental reprimands (“Because I said so!” “You’ll break your neck!”). It was the kind of observational humor—a grown-up looking back at childhood—for which a young Jerry Seinfeld soon became well known.
Though the show was good exposure, Carlin was once again exploring a starring vehicle for himself. As a warm-up, he took a cameo part in the film Car Wash. Based on a screenplay written by future director Joel Schumacher, it was a slapdash, low-budget production calculated to bring comedy to the same audiences that had made sleeper hits of black dramas such as Shaft and Super Fly. Carlin’s Little David label mate Franklin Ajaye, wearing his hair in an enormous Afro, had the starring role. Guests included Richard Pryor, playing a highfalutin preacher, and Professor Irwin Corey, whose surreptitious activity around the car wash makes him a suspect in a bombing threat. Carlin, who cut a deal to write his own lines, didn’t have to stretch much to play a transplanted New York cabbie. In a striped T-shirt and a flat leather cap, he tells a customer, a drag queen played by Antonio Fargas, “I ain’t got nothin’ against you people. I ain’t got nothin’ against any people. That’s what I think we need—more love in the world.” Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, he hollers out the window: “Ya bastards!”
“I probably talked to George on Car Wash more than I did at Little David,” says Ajaye. “I was a young actor, making hardly any money. He was in and out in a couple of days.” To Ajaye, acting was much easier than stand-up: “almost like a vacation. . . . Everyone from Don Rickles to Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters—every comedian can act on some level. You’re already doing an act on the nights you don’t want to be there [onstage].”
Carlin was at the Roxy when Ajaye recorded his lone album for Monte Kay, Don’t Smoke Dope, Fry Your Hair! (1976), on which the younger comic made Carlin’s language pale in comparison. Getting into college was easy for a black man in the wake of the race riots, Ajaye joked. All he had to do was write on his application, “I’ll burn that motherfucker down!”
Motherfucker was still in its infancy. “It would seem to be an American Negro invention,” wrote a British anthropologist in 1967, who marveled at how the word was “curse, expletive, epithet, and intensive all at once.” The word was not noted in print until the 1960s,