http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/07/16/george_carlin_biography/index.html
As a new court ruling overturns the rules on TV cussing, a look back
at the comic who helped start the debate
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 16, 2010
Thirty-two years after the Supreme Court ruled on a free speech case
sparked by the George Carlin routine "Filthy Words," profanity and
the First Amendment are in the news again. A ruling handed down this
week by the New York-based Second Court of Appeals all but torpedoed
the Federal Communications Commission's recent attempts to regulate
so-called fleeting profanity on TV.
Carlin, a First Amendment absolutist who died in 2008, would have
gotten a kick out of the court's decision (and a new routine as
well). The ruling is a handy excuse to appreciate Carlin and praise a
couple of excellent books about the comic: One is James Sullivan's
new biography "7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin."
The other is "Last Words," a posthumous autobiography by Carlin and
Tony Hendra that came out last November. Both are insightful
stand-alone portraits of Carlin. But put them together and you get
more than a multifaceted account of a comic's career. You get a
chronicle of a man's psychological evolution -- a slow unfurling of
self-awareness that transformed Carlin from the colorful but safe
performer he once believed he was fated to be, into the unique and
courageous artist that he ultimately became.
Carlin recorded 22 solo albums and 14 HBO specials, won five Grammys,
was nominated for five Emmys, appeared in over a dozen feature films,
anchored four TV shows (including "The George Carlin Show" and
"Shining Time Station") and published three books. At the time of his
death in 2008 he was recognized as a unique comic voice -- not just a
foulmouthed troublemaker but a hero to skeptics and rationalists, and
a social critic in the tradition of Mark Twain. The Carlin depicted
in posthumous appreciations was an uncompromising soul, targeting
everyday stupidity, right-wing corporate fascism, left-wing political
correctness, theocratic bullying, the homoerotic adoration of the
military and other aspects of American delusion. "Politicians are
there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice," Carlin
said in a rant titled "Who Really Controls America." "You don't. You
have no choice. You have owners."
Obituaries also portrayed him as a free speech pioneer following in
the footsteps of Lenny Bruce (one of Carlin's heroes, and an early
Carlin booster). Superficially, the label made sense: Carlin was the
subject of a 1978 Supreme Court case, sparked four years earlier when
a New York radio show featured Carlin's routine about the seven dirty
words you can't say on TV, and a listener wrote a fine-inducing
letter to the FCC complaining that he shouldn't have to risk hearing
profanity during daylight hours while driving in the car with his
young son. (Carlin never stopped blasting adults who tried to
micromanage free expression under the guise of protecting kids. "Fuck
the children!" Carlin growled in a same-titled routine. "They're
getting entirely too much attention.")
Landmark court case aside, though, for the first three decades of
Carlin's career his material didn't cut as deep as Bruce's. It was
content to skim the surface of American politics and culture and
fixate on quirks of language and behavior and surreal images. The
idea that Carlin's career represented the continuation of Bruce's
legacy wasn't borne out by the Carlin who entertained college
students in the 1970s -- a brainier, druggier ancestor of the soft
observational comics who kept getting handed network sitcoms in the
'80s and '90s. The image bore even less resemblance to the 1960s
incarnation of Carlin -- a mainstream clown whose routines adopted
outward characteristics of beatnik and hippie subculture (notably the
Hippie Dippie Weatherman) but rarely captured their alienation from
America's mainstream.
Carlin identified with outsiders his whole life. He collected jazz
and R&B records, smoked prodigious amounts of pot, hung out with
African-American airmen during his Air Force hitch, and wore buttons
and T-shirts with left-wing political slogans offstage. During the
Vietnam era he started taking LSD and growing his hair and beard out
(incrementally, almost gingerly). But he couldn't muster the nerve to
let his inner freak cut loose because the entertainment industry's
powers-that-be -- network executives, casino owners, nightclub
bookers and Hollywood trade paper reporters -- deemed such people
dirty, disrespectful of authority, unpatriotic and, worst of all,
uncommercial, and Carlin feared losing the money and industry status
he'd worked so hard to accrue. As much as he claimed to prize truth,
originality and unfettered self-expression -- values that his hero
Lenny Bruce epitomized -- he was addicted to comfort. So he feigned
edginess while playing it safe.
In "Last Words," a rare showbiz autobiography filled with scathing
self-criticism, Carlin admits he was a conformist throughout most of
his career. "As I did more and more television," Carlin says, "I
began to realize that there was a price that you paid to do your
stuff. You had to make believe you really cared about and belonged to
the larger community of show business. That you were really
interested in their small talk and shared whatever their values were.
The two-track life was there all the time. I clung to the
respectability and mainstreamness, yet I had no respect for the
things stars did and talked about and seemed to glorify and find glory in."
By the late '60s, Carlin lavished praise on his more daring
colleagues, including Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson and Mort Sahl, and
hung out with innovative popular artists and left-wing activists. Yet
he continued chasing roles in forgettable comedy films, flogging his
counterculture mascot routine for nightclub and casino audiences, and
doing guest shots on network variety shows (all of which, save "The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," were toothless). In "Last Words,"
Carlin says that sometime in the '60s he grew disgusted with himself
and wondered if he just should quit pretending, "change my name to
Jackie Carlin, buy some white shoes, gold chains and pinkie rings."
He worried about "being on this rigid track, about being rewarded
more and more for being cute and clever and funny. But not for being
George Carlin."
The traditions and restrictions that Carlin chafed at were all
manifestations of the same, then-unquestioned assumption: that
popular entertainment had to be as apolitical, sanitized and
generally tame as could be. A baseline interpretation of that mandate
meant a performer shouldn't do or say anything that might violate
commonly accepted standards of discourse, especially if the
performance occurred in an unrestricted public setting (such as a TV
talk show, or onstage at a state fair) or if women or children
happened to be present. Here and there you could find little zones of
expression that were exempt from the usual constraints: strip joints
and bawdy nightclubs; big-city art-house cinemas; raunchy "party
records" by performers who were known to work "blue," such as Redd
Foxx. But for the most part, America considered itself a clean
country. Whenever a popular phenomenon challenged that perception --
artful yet racy bestsellers, E.C. horror comics, Elvis Presley's
swiveling hips -- its creators got smacked around by society's
gatekeepers: attacked on editorial pages, censored or pushed off the
air by radio and TV executives, protested by conservative or
religious groups, vilified in congressional hearings, even prosecuted in court.
The rules started to give way in the 1960s with the rise of
counterculture sensibilities, and the slow ebb of once-powerful
watchdog groups such as the National Legion of Decency. But the
assumption that "popular" necessarily had to be a synonym for
"inoffensive" persisted even though it didn't make much sense
anymore. The news was full of stories about battlefield carnage,
police brutality, protests, assassinations, free love and acid trips.
But you couldn't address any of it in comedy except obliquely, often
in a sniggering, reductive way that pandered to the Archie Bunker
contingent. Comedians who tried to cut deeper were routinely censored
by their bosses (see the Smothers Brothers) or exiled to pop
culture's hinterlands. To Lenny Bruce and like-minded comics that
followed him, the insistence that pop culture had to avoid harsh
reality was more offensive than the reality itself. George Carlin
agreed with that sentiment. But for most of his career he didn't have
the stones to embrace it in public.
From the early '70s onward, Carlin refocused his career on campus
gigs and established his outlaw bona fides by getting busted for
indecency and drug possession. But although his stand-up and recorded
material grew weirder and raunchier, it still wasn't as politically
charged and confrontational as the voice he heard in his head.
Carlin's mostly gentle, bemused stage persona -- that of a hip junior
professor getting baked with the undergrads -- didn't convey the
anger he felt when he contemplated Vietnam, Watergate, corporate
corruption, and government harassment of anyone who looked and talked
like the newer, scruffier Carlin. In "Last Words," the comedian
confesses that his stand-up didn't capture his buried true self until
1988's "What Am I Doing in New Jersey?," a concert that railed
against "Ronald Reagan and his criminal gang" and the
"crypto-fascist" fundamentalists who supported him. ("I don't know
how you feel about it, but I am pretty sick and tired of these
fucking church people.")
The long-deferred unveiling of the fully self-actualized, near-final
version of George Carlin -- at the ripe old age of 51! -- was sparked
by the 1984 death of his mother, the militarism and greed of the
Reagan era, and the emergence of Sam Kinison, who inspired the older
comic "to raise my level to where I wasn't lost in his dust." Nearly
all of Carlin's most widely quoted routines -- including "The Planet
Is Fine," "We Like War" and "Religion Is Bullshit" -- were created
during the last two decades of his life. By that stage, says Carlin
in "Last Words," he had figured out that the most honest and useful
forms of self-expression were attempts to solve "the giant puzzle:
'Who the fuck am I, how did I come together? What are the parts and
how do they fit?'"
"7 Dirty Words" deepens Carlin's posthumous memoir by putting his
evolution in context. Sullivan deftly mixes quotes from Carlin's
friends, rivals, protégés, collaborators and employers with
impeccably researched overviews of trends in radio, TV, the record
industry and the nightclub circuit. The result is at once an
engrossing account of Carlin's life that rarely lapses into hero
worship, and a highly readable survey of 20th century popular
culture, stretching from the last gasp of vaudeville during the
Depression through the rise of premium cable and the Internet. No
matter how much you know, or think you know, about American show
business, you'll still learn a lot from this book.
The sections dealing with the "dirty words" case are especially good.
Unlike Carlin in "Last Words," Sullivan explores the muddled fallout
of the Supreme Court's decision -- a 5-4 vote in favor of the FCC
that validated the government's ability to regulate the content of
mass media without providing any guidelines. The decision, Sullivan
writes, "passed on an opportunity to clarify which speech, if any,
would be subjected to FCC reprimand moving forward." Timothy Jay, a
psychology professor known as a "scholar of swearing," tells
Sullivan, "One of the weaknesses of this decision is that the
government offers no evidence that there's anything harmful about
this speech." After the Carlin decision, the FCC has mostly passed up
chances to spur more test cases. And with rare, usually silly
exceptions, it has let artists, patrons and audiences decide what's
appropriate, and watched along with every other private citizen as
pop culture got bluer and bluer.
Sullivan's book is most valuable as a companion to "Last Words." The
autobiography fills in half of Carlin's "giant puzzle" ("Who the fuck
am I, how did I come together?"); "7 Dirty Words" completes the other
half ("What are the parts and how do they fit?").
The autobiography, for example, represents Carlin's post-1988 work as
a mostly unimpeded march toward total artistic integrity, briefly
interrupted by heart attacks, tax problems and an ongoing struggle
with drugs. Sullivan is more measured. Among other things, he shows
that Carlin's desire to be loved and accepted was another kind of
addiction from which he never completely recovered. He got involved
in surprising, sometimes challenging non-stand-up work (including a
rarely seen supporting turn as a grimy, limping, free-spirited trader
in a TV miniseries version of Larry McMurtry's novel "Streets of
Laredo"). But he also took on would-be moneymaking projects that
evoked his diluted '60s clowning (notably "The George Carlin Show," a
likable but lame Fox sitcom).
Such sidelights were rare, though. Both "Last Words" and "7 Dirty
Words" agree that Carlin's last two decades focused on exploring and
defining who he was and what he stood for, then pouring his
realizations into his stand-up -- and that he was happier, more
relevant and (paradoxically) richer and more influential as a result.
"Bum ticker and all, Carlin made it to 71," Sullivan writes,
"defining a half-century in American comedy." Then he quotes his
subject: "There's always hope for comedians. You notice how long
fucking George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle and all those
cocksuckers lived? I think it's because comedy gives you a way of
renewing life energy. There's something about the release of tension
that comes from being a comic, having a comic mind, that makes you
live forever."
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