Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [94]
The exposition on dying (“It’s one of the few fair things in life. Everybody catches it once”) featured an observation that would become almost as much a staple of the comedy club explosion of the 1980s as the two-drink minimum: the prevalence of dying metaphors in comedy. Comics die. They bomb. An unreceptive room is like a morgue. On the other hand, when their jokes hit the mark, they kill. “Laugh? I thought I’d die.”
Despite having done versions of this bit, with segments on funerals, suicide, and the afterlife, on the road for a year or more, Carlin was unprepared for the crisis he faced on St. Patrick’s Day in 1978. Driving his daughter to school, he was bothered by an ache in his jaw and the feeling that the pain reliever he’d taken had gotten stuck in his throat. When the pain didn’t subside, he drove to his doctor’s office, where blood tests confirmed he was suffering a heart attack.
Besides the obvious abuses of his drug habits, Carlin hadn’t exactly been diligent about his diet. “He’d come home after a gig and cook up half a pound of stove-top macaroni with a brick of butter,” says one friend. “That was his midnight snack.” Even after disciplining himself in the kitchen, the comedian lived with the prospect of further heart trouble for another thirty years. His father’s first symptom of heart disease, as he sometimes pointed out, had been “a trip to the cemetery.”
Within a few months of the first heart incident Carlin was back onstage in Phoenix, reworking much of the material from On the Road for his second HBO special. Taped in the round at the Celebrity Star Theater, the performance took place a few weeks after the Supreme Court decision. When it aired, George Carlin Again! opened with a scrapbook-style slide show of the comic as a schoolboy and teenager, posing with various neighborhood friends and his dog, Spotty.
The ninety-minute taping was transferred to film for a proposed feature he had been working on for some time, to be called The Illustrated George Carlin. The story would follow his life from birth to death, using a variety of media. “There’ll be a lot of concert footage with some cartooning and little vignettes,” he explained. “As far as I know, no comedian has made a film with his own concert footage.”
He opened the phone book and found a listing for an animator, Bob Kurtz. “I don’t think anybody had ever found us through the Yellow Pages before,” says Kurtz, laughing. Carlin and Brenda went over to see the artist, who listened to the comic’s ideas for the film, then got up and drew a few frames off the top of his head. “Two minutes [after Carlin and Brenda left], I got a call,” Kurtz recalls. It was Carlin, telling the animator he had the job. In the pre-cell phone era, Kurtz was dumbstruck by how quickly it happened. Where are you? he asked. “I’m across the street in a phone booth,” Carlin responded.
The Illustrated George Carlin preoccupied Carlin for months. “In his very soul, it was the story of George,” says Jim Wiggins, a comic friend of Carlin’s who worked with him as a writer on the project. “Of course, there were so many layers, it was not really autobiographical.” It was, however, “really silly.”
Wiggins was the owner of a heating and air conditioning company in the Chicago area when he decided to sell the business and give comedy a try in the early 1970s. Like Carlin, he was a chronic stoner; also like Carlin, he could do a mean radio announcer’s voice. Inspired by FM & AM, he started writing letters to Carlin. To his surprise, the comedian wrote back. When Wiggins took his first phone call from his pen pal, it was a request: Carlin would be flying in to play the Mill Run Theater in Niles. Could Wiggins come by with a bag of