When the culture began to change in the late 1960s when the
old one-liner comics on The Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty
tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with
drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam George Carlin was the
most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died
Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he
helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's
hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and
courageous popular artists. But he was.
Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early '60s and had
fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a
short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV
audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking
DJs and a "hippy dippy weatherman." But as he watched the
protest marches of the late '60s and absorbed the new spirit of
the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the
wrong audience, that he needed to change his act and his whole
attitude.
So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds
of material about drugs and Vietnam and America's uptight
attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin
weren't ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice
for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine
was about his own "skinny ass"). At the Playboy Club in Lake
Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes
about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even
Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight Show guest for a time
because of his reputation as a drug abuser.
But by the early '70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change,
opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine
an art form. Like Lenny Bruce whom he idolized and who helped
him get his first agent Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a
social commentator, rebel and truth teller. He challenged
conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class
America. He made fun of society's outrage over drugs, for
example, pointing out that the "drug problem" extended to
middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office
to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the
injustice of Muhammad Ali's banishment from boxing for avoiding
the draft a man whose job was beating people up losing his
livelihood because he wouldn't kill people: "He said, 'No,
that's where I draw the line. I'll beat 'em up, but I don't want
to kill 'em.' And the government said, 'Well, if you won't kill
people, we won't let you beat 'em up.' "
Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can
never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his
audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the
scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating
of the "dirty" words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit
that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the
creation of the "family hour" on network television), his
intention was not just to shock; it was to question our
irrational fear of language. "There are no bad words," said
Carlin. "Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords."
Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin's
favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like "jumbo shrimp"
and "military intelligence," and pointed out the social uses of
euphemism: "When did toilet paper become 'bathroom tissue'? When
did house trailers become 'mobile homes'?" He reminisced about
his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough
Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all
taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be
all-powerful, mused Carlin, since "everything he ever makes ...
dies"?
In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing
best-selling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM,
spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a
comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC
introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday
Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first
guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential
series of "On Location" comedy concerts, Carlin was among its
most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the
network, the last just a few months ago.
Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as
well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-'70s
that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in
1978, the start of heart problems that would eventually kill
him) and his career as well. "I really wasn't being as
creative," Carlin admitted years later. "I lost years. I could
have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind
of like doing hurdles."
But in the early '80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived
his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with
small-bore "observational" humor and an aphoristic style. Then,
in the '90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material,
railing against everything from the environmental movement to
the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late 60s,
Carlin could be as perceptive on the clichés and buzzwords of
the era as ever: "I've been uplinked and downloaded. I've been
inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know
the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife. A
cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can
give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond."
Carlin's material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the
point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for
mass suicide and ecological disaster. "I sort of gave up on this
whole human adventure a long time ago," he said a couple of
years ago. "Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the
human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has
squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very
cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don't think it's
fixable."
But Carlin's career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer.
He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a
top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no
help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen
everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the
observational comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing
not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial
annoyances of everyday life was off-limits for smart comedy. And
he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American
culture. It has never left.
