Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [98]
Fridays was a curious blend of old school and new, with a cast and crew of TV neophytes, several of whom would later reconvene on Seinfeld (co-creator Larry David, writer Larry Charles, actor Michael Richards), and a hip selection of musical guests including the Pretenders and the Jim Carroll Band. (Carlin’s episode featured meat-and-potatoes rockers George Thorogood and the Destroyers.) The week after Carlin was on, Shelley Winters was the guest host; the Methuselan Henny Youngman followed her.
The show, which was soon doomed by ABC’s decision to expand its popular Nightline news program to include Friday nights, had a short-lived reputation for especially risqué political and drug-related humor. One memorable recurring sketch featured the Three Stooges as heavy pot smokers. A month after Carlin hosted, Andy Kaufman made a notorious appearance in which his refusal to act in a live sketch precipitated a skirmish with Burns, who charged onto the set from offstage. Only a few cast members knew about the ploy in advance, and for years many viewers believed they’d witnessed an actual brawl on TV.
The Carlin episode featured a mockumentary-style short film purporting to be a behind-the-scenes look at the real source of the comedian’s observational humor—a writing team of ordinary folks, including a retired drill-press operator and a part-time beautician, plucked from the street. The bit had Bob and Ray written all over it. “I figured out early on that if I was going to stay in tune with the public, well, I’d better have a writing staff that was representative of the public,” Carlin tells the camera.
His style was so familiar to fellow comics that Carlin became a target of parody on another SNL knockoff, SCTV, the sketch show of Toronto’s Second City. New cast member Rick Moranis began doing a wicked impression of him. In absurd scenarios—Carlin playing Biff in Death of a Salesman, for instance—Moranis portrayed the comedy veteran as an incessant one-track mind, taking notes for bits during ordinary conversations, prefacing every comment with “Didja ever notice? . . .” and exhaling “Weeeeird!” after every inane observation. When someone gets knocked out and then comes to, Moranis wondered, why don’t we say he’s knocked in?
If Carlin’s observational phase constituted a bridge between the self-expression of his boom years and the social criticism he would soon undertake, it hit a sudden high point with the title hunk of his next album, A Place for My Stuff. His first in four years, it was released on Atlantic, the parent company of Little David. (By the time of his next recording, Carlin on Campus, Carlin and Jerry Hamza had a deal in place with Atlantic for distribution of their new boutique label, Eardrum Records, which bore the motto “Stick it in your ear.” Eventually the partners purchased the Little David catalog and reissued Carlin’s early albums, individually and in the boxed set The Little David Years.) Stuff was an anomaly in the Carlin catalog, featuring live tracks alternating with studio-recorded commercial and game show parodies. The seven “Announcements” tracks were the same kind of fast-moving, jack-of-all-trades radio parodies—book club promotions (“How to Turn Unbearable Pain into Extra Income”), an ad for a television movie about a guy who wants to be an Olympic swimmer (“Wet Dream”)—that he’d created as a schoolboy with his Webcor tape recorder.
The “Stuff” routine, a lighthearted take on the human pack rat—“That’s what your house is—a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get . . . more stuff”—didn’t appear on an HBO special until his fourth, but it was an instant favorite among fans and fellow comedians. When Carlin did the bit on the first American Comic Relief, the HBO fund-raiser hosted by Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billy Crystal,