http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/books/09book.html
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: July 8, 2010
If there's a definitive illustration of the adage that whatever
doesn't kill you makes you stronger, it may be the early years of
George Carlin's stand-up-comedy career.
Carlin swam mightily through the lukewarm ooze of American pop
culture, opening for lounge acts like Joey Heatherton, Barbara Eden
and Robert Goulet. He appeared on regrettable television shows, the
kinds of things that will play on every television station in hell:
"John Davidson at Notre Dame"; "Perry Como's Holiday in Hawaii"; "The
Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour." He became a grizzled, bankable
survivor. A weird anger began to light him, like an ingested lava
lamp, from within.
George Carlin died two years ago, on June 22, 2008, a dark day for
those (I was among them) who sought regular injections of his
word-drunk, reflexively anti-authoritarian humor. Carlin has already
had a busy afterlife. His "sortabiography," "Last Words," written
with Tony Hendra, was published last year and was a better, chewier,
more touching book than it had any right to be. On the horizon is an
oral history, compiled by his daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall. George
Carlin: he's hot, he's sexy, and he's dead.
In the meantime we have "Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of
George Carlin," a biography from the entertainment journalist James
Sullivan. It's a banty-weight book, thinly sourced. Its wordplay is
more John Davidson than Bob Dylan. But it fills in and complicates
our mental image of Carlin, and it isn't long or distinctive enough
to genuinely dislike.
Mr. Sullivan, whose previous books are "The Hardest Working Man: How
James Brown Saved the Soul of America" and "Jeans: A Cultural History
of an American Icon," has bravely avoided padding out his book with
quotations from Carlin's stand-up routines.
He has succeeded too well. You miss Carlin's voice. ("If crime
fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom
fighters fight?" he asked, in a quotation that is provided.) The
tumbleweed scarcity of direct quotation prevents you from getting a
clear sense of how Carlin's acid comic voice developed.
This book gets the story told, however, and Mr. Sullivan convincingly
makes the case that for 50 years Carlin "may well have produced more
laughs than any other human being."
George Carlin was born in 1937 and grew up in the Morningside Heights
section of Manhattan, a neighborhood he called White Harlem. His
father, who'd been born in Ireland, was a talker, a newspaper ad
salesman who won a national Dale Carnegie public speaking contest in
1935. He was a drunk, though, and Carlin's mother fled with her
children while George was still a baby.
Carlin began a lifelong pot-smoking habit when he was a teenager. He
began hanging out on street corners. He dropped out of high school at
16. Everyone who met him, though, recognized one thing. "The kid,"
Mr. Sullivan writes, "had a mouth on him."
During a rocky stint in the Air Force he began to work at a radio
station, KJOE in Shreveport, La. Listeners liked him. He had more
going for him than a nice baritone. He also worked at stations in
Boston, Texas and California before turning to stand-up comedy.
Carlin had been weaned on Mad magazine, and later the brainy,
subversive patter of comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. After
working the club circuit, he began appearing on Mike Douglas's and
Merv Griffin's talk shows. He began popping up on Jack Paar's
"Tonight Show," and then Johnny Carson's. He would ultimately appear
with Carson more than 100 times.
As the 1960s dragged on, Carlin began to realize he was aiming at the
wrong demographic parents, not the new generation of college-age
baby boomers. He changed his act. It got druggier. He began taking on
the Vietnam War and politics. He became an admirer of Paul Krassner's
counterculture magazine, The Realist. He grew a beard and let his hair grow.
His career briefly took a step back before leaping forward. He began
playing hip clubs and college theaters instead of Vegas lounges,
taking comedy to a rock 'n' roll audience. He also released several
popular comedy albums. He first performed his landmark routine,
"Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," in 1972. It got him
arrested in Milwaukee. When a New York radio station played it at
lunchtime, the F.C.C. issued on order prohibiting the routine's
language as "indecent."
The case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling. But the
controversy put Carlin permanently on the map. Lenny Bruce, he said,
"was the first one to make language an issue, and he suffered for it.
I was the first one to make language an issue and succeed with it."
Carlin was the first guest host on "Saturday Night Live." For a
generation he defined satirical late-night humor. His gifts were
reminiscent not just of Bruce and Sahl but of Mark Twain and H. L.
Mencken and Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. In the late '70s he
began doing free-form concert specials for HBO, a series he would
continue until shortly before his death.
Mr. Sullivan writes well about Carlin the comic's comic, a man of
vast productivity who took pride in writing his own material. Many
comics manage to stretch a few thin bits into entire careers; Mr.
Carlin wrote a new show from scratch every year or two.
You won't get a strong sense from "Seven Dirty Words" of what Carlin
was like offstage. We learn about his drug use and, later, his
obsession with good red wine. He was married to his first wife,
Brenda, for 36 years, until her death. But Mr. Sullivan suggests
there might not have been that much to know. Carlin was a workaholic,
usually on the road or at his desk, working on his next show.
What got him, in the end, was his ticker. He died of heart failure,
after suffering his first heart attack in 1978.
Carlin wasn't big on reverence. To Civil War re-enactors he said,
"Use live ammo." He did a riff about how we devote a moment of
silence to the dearly departed, and why there aren't variations on
that theme. "How about a moment of muffled conversation," he asked,
"for the treated and released?"
Well, here's a cockeyed salute, then, a moment of dazzled mental
genuflection for a comic who, every once in a while, felt like the
most alive human being on the planet.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment