Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [96]
Carlin also learned that he had major problems with the IRS. He had seriously neglected his taxes, which he blamed on bad advice and his own cocaine habit. “By the time 1980 arrived,” he recalled, “I believe I was about two million dollars upside down with the IRS, and it got to be another million before the saga was finished.” He had a new manager, a regional promoter named Jerry Hamza, a native of Rochester, New York, who had booked some of Carlin’s shows before agreeing to handle the comic’s career. Before handling Carlin, Hamza had specialized in country music, organizing appearances by iconic artists such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn. With Hamza’s help, the comedian began the long, grueling task of paying off his enormous debt.
His personal problems were affecting his ability to see where his career was headed. He knew it, but he was philosophical about it. “My album career had faded, and I didn’t have a personal vision of myself anymore,” he said. “I’d gone through my autobiographical stage. Then I started to get into what they call ‘observational’ comedy—these things that have no importance at all, but they’re universal. . . . It was a casting about, a wallowing in the backwater of this career success I’d had.”
He agreed to a guest appearance on Welcome Back, Kotter, the ABC sitcom starring the former Village comic Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher returning to his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Carlin played Wally “The Wow” Wechsel, a popular disc jockey who was once one of the Sweathogs, the remedial students who were the stars of the show. Somewhat more intriguing was the gig he took narrating Americathon, a weirdly prescient futuristic scenario written by the Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, who had established their loony brand of sketch comedy on Pacifica’s KPFK. With an ensemble cast including John Ritter, Fred Willard, a young Jay Leno, and the new wave rock ’n’ roller Elvis Costello, the movie imagined the United States two decades down the road, in the year 1998. Having run out of oil and on the verge of bankruptcy, the government sponsors a telethon. Not only did this now out-of-print film predict a rash of eventualities (such as China’s compromise with capitalism) that seemed ludicrous at the end of the 1970s, it also neatly predicted the gleeful doomsday prophesies of the latter years of Carlin’s own career.
He continued to make a handful of Tonight Show appearances each year, working out his new material on the national stage. (Carlin would claim to have done the show 105 times by the time Carson retired in 1992,) He and Muhammad Ali were two of the guests on an episode guest-hosted by Diana Ross; he appeared with Richard Pryor not long after Pryor’s infamous freebasing accident. During one guest-hosting spot in early 1981, he sat at a desk during the monologue and trotted out the latest version of his old standby, the mock newscast. One item involved the “Gay Liberation Front, who along with the Tall People’s Association have announced they will oppose the Army Corps of Engineers next week when it attempts to destroy a fifty-foot dike.” With Debbie Reynolds once again a guest, as she had been on his first guest-hosting night in 1972, Carlin rounded out the episode by discussing sexual fantasies and men’s beards with Dr. Joyce Brothers.
At the end of the 1970s, comedy in America was on the verge of its own kind of gold rush, with thousands of prospectors and a fortunate few who would cash in. The folk clubs of the sixties, with their regular showcase opportunities for comedians, were almost a thing of the past. The momentary heat of the disco scene was also fading fast. The vast disillusionments of the 1970s—war, political corruption, garbage