Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [93]
For Carlin, although the outcome was disappointing, his indirect involvement in a landmark case of American jurisprudence felt like a validation. After all those years of being called in front of the principal, the priest, the barracks sergeant, and the boss, “those transgressions suddenly seemed like small potatoes.” “That these nine men had summoned me into their presence to question my conduct absolutely thrilled the perverse and rebellious side of my nature,” he said. “I thought, Even if I just become a little footnote in the law books, I’ll be a happy footnote forever.”
True to form, while the lawyers and commissioners were busy parsing the differences between obscenity and indecency and debating the true intentions of the Radio Act of 1927, Carlin cut to the heart of the matter. “All I want is a list,” he said. “When I was a kid, nobody would tell me which words not to say. I had to go home and say them and get hit. As a result of the WBAI case, the Supreme Court has put the FCC in the same position as the parent. It can punish you after the fact, but it can’t tell you beforehand exactly what the restricted areas are.”
So he took it upon himself to collect them all, like a kid filling a binder of buffalo nickels. By the time his HBO special Carlin on Campus aired in 1984, the comic featured in his act “An Incomplete List of Impolite Words” that numbered 350. Two decades later, he was selling posters and T-shirts at his concert appearances featuring small-print lists of “2,443 Dirty Words.” By then, he said, he was just the repository for this extended exercise in creative language. The credit was due to the hundreds of fans who’d sent him their suggestions, and to the anonymous coiners of words and phrases, from “butterbags” to “buzzing the Brillo”—“folk poets, all.”
Timothy Jay, a professor in the psychology department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, has the unusual distinction of being a scholar of swearing. He befriended Carlin several years after FCC v. Pacifica, often providing the comic with his own lengthy lists of debatable words and their offensiveness ratings. The author of Cursing in America, Jay saw how Carlin grew quite serious about his role as the custodian of potty talk.
In Jay’s opinion, the Supreme Court decision was simply “bad law.” “One of the real weaknesses is that the government offers no evidence that there’s anything harmful about this speech,” he says. “We presume harm to children, when in fact they know all this shit before they get into school. It’s not realistic. Anybody with a good sense of parenting knows that kids know all this stuff.”
Shortly before the Supreme Court heard the Pacifica case, Carlin made a sly reference to the juvenile nature of his comic mind. Making a brief appearance on a celebrity-stocked salute to “Mr. Television,” Milton Berle, he brought out his prized copy of Berle’s joke book, Out of My Trunk, which an uncle had given him when he was a boy. Carlin had been a fan, he said, since the origins of Texaco Star Theater, when he was ten. “Thanks to your influence, there are still people who think of me as ten years old,” he joked.
The attention given the case didn’t quite carry over into his career. On the Road, Carlin’s seventh album—the sixth in five years—had come out in 1977. It was the second in a row that didn’t go gold. The album came with an eight-page insert, a “Libretto,” which combined transcriptions of the album’s routines with