Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [99]
Three months after his heart attack, Carlin was at Carnegie Hall for the third HBO special. In a taped opening, he visited the old neighborhood, asking average New Yorkers the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” One guy gives him directions by bus. How about the subway? Carlin asks. “Got a gun permit?” the guy replies.
At the hall, he strolled across a huge oriental rug covering the venerable stage and led with the kind of deliberately outrageous icebreaker that marked all his HBO specials to come: “Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” It was a calculated rejoinder to Ronald Reagan’s quip about pro-choice activists: “I notice that everyone in favor of abortion has already been born.”
He’d recently taken six months off, the comic said, only three of them voluntary. Just as Richard Pryor had turned his self-immolating freebasing incident into inspired material for his own act, Carlin joked that it was time to update the “Comedians’ Health Sweepstakes.” He now led Pryor two to one in heart attacks, he said, but Pryor was beating him one to nothing in “burning yourself up.” Though the performance flew by the seat of its pants—there was no opportunity to tape a backup set, as was customary with the On Location series, and they couldn’t even get in to set up until late in the day because of an afternoon recital—the show went a long way toward ensuring that Carlin would remain an HBO fixture for years to come.
“The orchestra chairs are piled behind Carlin on the stage of the great hall, giving the impression that he and a full house of laughing fans sneaked into the building while none of the authorities were looking,” wrote Tom Shales in a Washington Post review. Though the comedian might have “spent a bit too much of his recuperation staring into his refrigerator or contemplating bowls of Rice Krispies,” overall, the critic found that the performer had not lost his touch, “and his touch is frequently cherishable.”
“HBO didn’t kick in for me until 1982,” Carlin later suggested. “That’s when I learned who I was in that period.” His first two specials for the network were directed by Marty Callner, who was doing all of the On Location shows at the time, but Carlin at Carnegie was directed by first-timer Steven J. Santos. He’d worked on a crew the previous year for The Pee-Wee Herman Show, which was directed by Callner. Santos stayed with Carlin through Apt. 2C, the comic’s ill-fated HBO pilot, in 1985.
On the road, Carlin and Hamza were “four-walling” theaters, renting out the venues and then promoting the shows themselves. For the rest of his life Carlin continued to do as many as a hundred dates a year, taking home paychecks considerably larger than he might have drawn from a tour promoter. He’d play anywhere, he joked, as long as it had a zip code. When Jim Wiggins resettled in Illinois and revamped an old airline pilot’s bar in Palatine called Durty Nelly’s, he asked Carlin to come bless the place. Planning a trip to New York, Carlin arranged a layover in Chicago and told Wiggins to book two shows on the night he’d be in town.
Since the comedian had long ago moved off the nightclub scene into theaters, Carlin’s booking was big news for Durty Nelly’s. The club’s big back room, which Wiggins had named the Blarney Stone, held just 180 customers. “I’m sure we stuffed 225 people into each show,” says Wiggins. “They were ass-cheek to ass-cheek in that room.” He made up special “tickets”—bars of soap wrapped in Day-glo sticky paper—and had the audience surprise Carlin by holding them up the first time he swore. Biff Rose, Carlin’s loony old colleague from The Kraft Summer Music Hall, opened the shows, with Wiggins introducing. “There’s me opening for two of my heroes, two of my kids’ godfathers,