• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 837 0

as it may seem to some individual Members of this Court,” Brennan wrote, “some parents may actually find Mr. Carlin’s unabashed attitude toward the seven ‘dirty words’ healthy, and deem it desirable to expose their children to the manner in which Mr. Carlin defuses the taboo surrounding the words.” That there might not be huge numbers of such parents “does not alter that right’s nature or its existence,” he wrote. “Only the Court’s regrettable decision does that.” The adult individual’s right to receive information, Brennan submitted, far outweighed the “minimal discomfort” of an offended listener “during the brief interval before he can simply extend his arm and switch stations or flick the ‘off’ button.” Aiming the judicial equivalent of more than a few epithets at his fellow jurors, he lamented their “depressing inability” to appreciate viewpoints outside their own, calling it “an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”

The decision was big news in Hollywood. “Court Bans ‘7 Dirty Words,’” ran a banner headline across page 1 of the Los Angeles Times’s final edition that day. A few months later, Norman Lear invited Carlin to join the ACLU’s Southern California affiliate at a dinner called “The Politics of Humor.” Fellow honorees included Lily Tomlin, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, and Lear’s onetime partner Bud Yorkin, with whom he’d produced All in the Family and Sanford and Son. Though Carlin did wear a dark suit—“that’s as far as I go, even for the First Amendment,” he joked—he couldn’t take the event seriously, making faces across the table at his friend Tomlin all night long. “What the hell have two comics and a cartoonist really contributed to the cause of freedom in America?” he wondered.

Legal scholars were keenly interested, too. Commentator George Will applauded the Court’s action in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post (“Is There a ‘Periphery’ on the First Amendment?”). In response, Nicholas von Hoffman, the Post columnist and onetime 60 Minutes contributor, wrote a mocking piece headlined “Seven Dirty Words: A Cute Form of Censorship.” Von Hoffman, who had been dumped from his television gig by 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt for calling Richard Nixon “a dead mouse on the country’s kitchen floor,” wondered why the Pacifica ruling hinged on the possible presence of children in the WBAI audience at two o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Surely, he reasoned, kids at that hour were “locked up in school taking sex education courses, where presumably Carlin’s Anglo-Saxon terminology is replaced with Latin cognates on whose acceptability for broadcasting neither the commission nor our nine most exalted jurisprudes have yet to rule.”

Just after Independence Day, the New York Times ran its own analysis of the case. The writer led by noting ABC’s recent broadcast of a news special called Youth Terror: The View from Behind the Gun, which had featured “a good deal of street talk, including words never before spoken on national television.” The fact that twenty-one network affiliates had declined to run the program, which the parent company refused to sanitize, was seen in the broadcasting industry as proof that the airwaves were not in imminent danger of being overrun by foul language, no matter how the Supreme Court decided. “Our network operates by its own set of standards that aren’t affected by the decision,” said the president of ABC-TV. Philosophically, however, the court’s ruling set a bad precedent, he said, “with long-range implications on our freedom of expression.”

In fact, the FCC stumped everyone by dropping the matter entirely. Incoming chairman Charles D. Ferris, who had succeeded Richard E. Wiley in October 1977, told the Times that he didn’t consider the Supreme Court ruling a mandate to go after broadcasters. When the commission received complaints about Monty Python’s Flying Circus from viewers of WGBH, Boston’s public television station, who were offended by the show’s “scatology, immodesty,