A secondhand look at Carlin
By Chuck Leddy
June 10, 2010
James Sullivan has done an outstanding job in his new book "7 Dirty
Words'' positioning the late comedian George Carlin as a
counterculture icon whose loathing of hypocrisy and love of language
changed comedy forever. Yet Sullivan never quite offers a firm sense
of Carlin the man, as if what we learned by observing the comedian
onstage is all there is to know. Comedy is a faint form of
autobiography, and we're left with the impression that there must be
much more to Carlin than Sullivan reveals with his outside-in approach.
Sullivan, who is a regular contributor to the Globe, offers a few
predictable insights about Carlin for example, connecting the
comedian's famous antagonism toward authority to his father's
abandonment of the family. Sullivan relies largely on secondary
sources for much of his biographical sketch. We rarely hear Carlin's
own take on things. In fact, it appears Sullivan interviewed neither
Carlin nor his family or friends.
Sullivan's early pages relate how Carlin questioned his inherited
Catholicism from an early age, dropped out of two New York City high
schools, and joined the US Air Force. "[H]e was court-martialed three
times,'' Sullivan writes, and eventually was discharged. Sullivan
describes Carlin's struggles as a radio DJ, which included a stint in
Boston. In fact, Carlin broke into the comedy business after teaming
up with Boston funnyman Jack Burns.
In the beginning, a clean-cut Carlin built a successful career
tailoring his routines to the taste of middle-class Americans who
tuned into his appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show,'' "The Tonight
Show,'' and elsewhere in the early 1960s. But he gradually became
more and more conflicted about his comedy style. Sullivan relates the
tale of a two-week stint the comedian did at New York City's
Copacabana Club. Almost suffocating inside his tuxedo, Carlin
"started castigating the audience, telling them that places like the
Copa had gone out of style twenty years before,'' writes Sullivan.
Carlin showed his contempt for the audience by "lying on the dance
floor and describing the ceiling,'' something mainstream entertainers
like Milton Berle would never have done.
Finding himself in full rebellion mode by the early 1970s, Carlin
grew his hair long and adopted a more confrontational approach that
openly mocked what he viewed as mainstream American hypocrisies.
Carlin gambled everything by changing his style, but he was following
his own vision, and ironically, writes Sullivan, "the audience he was
seeking had been looking for a comedian to call its own.'' Carlin
began gaining popularity as an enthusiastic pusher of boundaries. His
most famous routine, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,''
pointed out the absurdity of censorship and, of course, famously
invited censorship from the Federal Communications Commission.
When a progressive New York City radio station played Carlin's "Seven
Dirty Words'' routine as part of a program on free speech, the FCC
reacted by issuing a warning. The Supreme Court would ultimately rule
in favor of the regulators, but Carlin had triggered a public debate
about the limits of free expression. Sullivan shows how Carlin
continued to evolve, following his blue period of provocative
language with a black period of darker comedic musings. As Carlin
himself said, "I find out where they draw the line, then I
deliberately step across it.''
In his later years, Carlin would become a curmudgeonly moral
philosopher blasting Americans for their stupidity and overblown
sense of entitlement. "I prefer seeing things the way they are,''
Carlin would explain, "not the way some people wish they were.''
Carlin loved rattling cages, upsetting apple carts, and rocking
boats; in doing so, he would become an American comedic legend.
In his new biography, Sullivan manages to skillfully show us the
drama of Carlin's performing career and how it blended with the
larger cultural landscape. But he gives us the outline of a life, one
that fails to live and breathe. Sullivan never quite gets us inside
the man's head and heart, the dark places that fueled this unique
comedic genius.
--
Chuck Leddy, a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester, can be
reached at chuckleddy@comcast.net.
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Book Review
'7 Dirty Words -- The Life and Crimes of George Carlin'
'Life and Crimes of George Carlin' | Comedian set the bar
By Allen Barra
June 12, 2010
In "7 Dirty Words -- The Life and Crimes of George Carlin," James
Sullivan writes, "For fifty years, he may well have produced more
laughs than any other human being."
Carlin was America's comical conscience. Lenny Bruce came first, Bill
Cosby was more popular and Richard Pryor at times edgier. But no one
managed to keep raising the bar on issues of language in public use
and its application to comedy like Carlin. In "7 Dirty Words"
Sullivan, a former San Francisco Chronicle pop culture writer,
satisfies anyone who has ever laughed at a Carlin routine -- and God
knows that takes in a lot of us.
George Denis Patrick Carlin was born in the Bronx in 1937. Avoiding a
career as a juvenile delinquent, he served in the Air Force
(court-martialed three times for insubordination) and began a career
in radio, which honed his improvisational skills.
In his early 20s he began a legendary stretch on the then-burgeoning
stand-up comic circuit that stretched from Greenwich Village in New
York to San Francisco.
Every American alive in that period remembers the names of the
characters he developed: the Indian sergeant; Al Sleet, The
Hippy-Dippy Weatherman; Congolia and Tondalayo Breckenridge, the
dim-witted game show contestants. While the material appealed to
adults, to kids growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Carlin routines
were as subversive as Mad Magazine had been to Carlin in the late 1930s.
Sullivan nails the reasons for Carlin's popularity -- "He was an
independent thinker who could mock liberals as deftly as
conservatives" (though the subtlety was perhaps lost on the FBI,
which kept files in his activities) -- and why he evolved from Al
Sleet to "The Grand Old Man of the Counterculture."
Carlin created "what has to be he single most impressive body of solo
material ever assembled by an American comedian," Sullivan writes --
work that has influenced nearly every prominent American comic who
has followed him, including Steven Wright, Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld
and Jon Stewart.
More to the point, he influenced the cause of free speech. When the
"7 Words" case went before the Supreme Court, Carlin was secretly
tickled: "That these men had summoned me into their presence to
question my conduct absolutely thrilled the perverse and rebellious
side of my nature," he later recalled. "I thought 'Even if I just
become a little footnote in the law books, I'll be a happy footnote forever.'"
In the end, Carlin proved to be the living link to the great American
tradition established by Mark Twain, who reminded us that "nature
knows no indecencies. Man invents them."
.
1 comments:
Great post man. Loved George Carlin never met him but enjoyed his comedic act on TV, radio and movies. His Catholic upbringing runs parallel to my own. When he spoke I sometimes would think "he is talking to me".
Paul
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