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For a few years Wiggins operated a Monday night comedy show in the back room of a gay restaurant known as Le Pub, in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. Tim & Tom, the biracial act of Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, were fellow regulars. One winter night Wiggins and his wife, Joan, who was pregnant with their fourth son, drove up to Milwaukee in an unheated Pontiac to bring Carlin another stash. Sitting on the edge of the stage together long after the show had ended, Joan spontaneously asked Carlin to be the baby’s godfather.

Shortly thereafter Wiggins packed up his family and moved to Hollywood, where they put $8,000 down on a big old dilapidated house with an extension that had housed a doctor’s examining rooms. Wiggins converted the place, a few blocks northwest of Hollywood and Vine, into a rooming house for aspiring comics trying to break in at Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store and Budd Friedman’s Improv. Several months into the project, strapped for cash, Wiggins asked Carlin for a $1,500 loan to buy drywall. He’d repay it when he got his check for writing gags for Chuck Barris on The Gong Show, he said. Carlin sent a messenger with three grand and told Wiggins not to bother paying him back. Set the money aside, he said, as an emergency fund for the comedians staying in the rooming house. “Then tell them they don’t owe it to you. Tell them to pass it on to somebody else.”

Working to establish his own comedy career, Wiggins (who now calls himself “The Last Hippie”) had the nagging suspicion that people would think he was deliberately emulating Carlin. “We could do wordplay like ping pong,” he says. “We had the same kind of laugh, the same kind of attitude. It was always in the back of my mind.” Working on a screenplay for The Illustrated George Carlin, they began spending afternoons in an old office Carlin kept in a Santa Monica building right out of a film noir: “Like an old detective’s building, down a corridor with glass-paneled doors,” Wiggins recalls. There they spent countless hours writing gags for the proposed movie. One day Carlin told Wiggins that their shared sensibility was likely to stand in the way of Wiggins ever becoming a well-known act. The death of Lenny Bruce had left a void for him to step into, he said. “You’re not that lucky. I’m not gonna die.” When Carlin was hospitalized, Wiggins sent him a telegram:

Dear George,

Try again.

As Wiggins remembers it, Carlin finally abandoned the film project after a lengthy series of negotiations with the Canadian Film Board. He called his writing partner into the office to deliver the bad news. He couldn’t get an agreement on the level of control he wanted. “Wigs,” he said, “remember—if you ain’t got control, you ain’t got shit.”

At the end of 1978 Little David put out what would prove to be its last Carlin album, a compilation intended to capitalize on the notoriety of the Pacifica case. Smartly titled Indecent Exposure, it was a best-of collection specifically focused on the comic’s taboo topics and forbidden language, with routines including “Sex in Commercials,” “Bodily Functions,” and “Teenage Masturbation,” bookended, of course, by “Seven Words” and “Filthy Words.” The cover pictured Carlin in another pose connecting his comedy to crime—wearing a pair of running shoes and a flasher’s overcoat. As much as the dirty words had made him a household name, he was ready to move on. “Frankly, I feel dated, because I’ve continued to do that material for so long that I feel a bit of a prisoner,” he said.

For Carlin, the next couple of years were wilderness years, a time for regrouping. “It was like a breathing-in period,” he reflected. “Everything can’t be constantly on an upswing. Nature shows you there’s inhale and exhale. . . . Other people would call it ‘His career was going in the shithouse.’”

Gradually weaning himself off his cocaine habit, he was emotionally drained. His continued use strained his relationship with Brenda, who was working hard to stay sober. Their relationship was not always