9
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
C
arlin’s resurrection began, funnily enough, just after his second heart attack in the summer of 1982. Scheduled to tape his third HBO special, this time at Carnegie Hall, Carlin suffered a much more serious heart attack than the first, while watching a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. After checking into the hospital, he was flown to Atlanta, where an Emory University Hospital surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig was experimenting with balloon angioplasty, at that time an innovative method of opening obstructed arteries. Carlin was an early recipient of the treatment.
A year before the heart attack, he’d had an accident behind the wheel. Driving from Toronto to Dayton, where Brenda was visiting family, he hit a utility pole in the early morning hours in downtown Dayton, breaking his nose and suffering cuts on his face. Taxes, heart scares, car crashes: Still, he muddled through. In January 1981 Carlin stepped up as the first guest host of a year-old sketch comedy show on ABC called
Fridays
. An unabashed attempt to elbow in on some of the audience NBC had amassed for its wildly popular
Saturday Night Live
,
Fridays
enjoyed a honeymoon season with its ensemble cast before reformatting to accommodate a weekly guest host. As he had been on
SNL
, Carlin was the guinea pig. This time, though, the connection was stronger: The show’s writing staff was headed by old friend Jack Burns, who also served as the on-air announcer.
Fridays
was a curious blend of old school and new, with a cast and crew of TV neophytes, several of whom would later reconvene on
Seinfeld
(co-creator Larry David, writer Larry Charles, actor Michael Richards), and a hip selection of musical guests including the Pretenders and the Jim Carroll Band. (Carlin’s episode featured meat-and-potatoes rockers George Thorogood and the Destroyers.) The week after Carlin was on, Shelley Winters was the guest host; the Methuselan Henny Youngman followed her.
The show, which was soon doomed by ABC’s decision to expand its popular
Nightline
news program to include Friday nights, had a short-lived reputation for especially risqué political and drug-related humor. One memorable recurring sketch featured the Three Stooges as heavy pot smokers. A month after Carlin hosted, Andy Kaufman made a notorious appearance in which his refusal to act in a live sketch precipitated a skirmish with Burns, who charged onto the set from offstage. Only a few cast members knew about the ploy in advance, and for years many viewers believed they’d witnessed an actual brawl on TV.
The Carlin episode featured a mockumentary-style short film purporting to be a behind-the-scenes look at the real source of the comedian’s observational humor—a writing team of ordinary folks, including a retired drill-press operator and a part-time beautician, plucked from the street. The bit had Bob and Ray written all over it. “I figured out early on that if I was going to stay in tune with the public, well, I’d better have a writing staff that was representative of the public,” Carlin tells the camera.
His style was so familiar to fellow comics that Carlin became a target of parody on another
SNL
knockoff,
SCTV
, the sketch show of Toronto’s Second City. New cast member Rick Moranis began doing a wicked impression of him. In absurd scenarios—Carlin playing Biff in
Death of a Salesman
, for instance—Moranis portrayed the comedy veteran as an incessant one-track mind, taking notes for bits during ordinary conversations, prefacing every comment with “Didja ever notice? . . .” and exhaling “Weeeeird!” after every inane observation. When someone gets knocked out and then comes to, Moranis wondered, why don’t we say he’s knocked
in
?
If Carlin’s observational phase constituted a bridge between the self-expression of his boom years and the social criticism he would soon undertake, it hit a sudden high point with the title hunk of his next album,
A Place for My Stuff
. His first in four years, it was released on Atlantic, the parent company of Little David. (By the time of his next recording,
Carlin on Campus
, Carlin and Jerry Hamza had a deal in place with Atlantic for distribution of their new boutique label, Eardrum Records, which bore the motto “Stick it in your ear.” Eventually the partners purchased the Little David catalog and reissued Carlin’s early albums, individually and in the boxed set
The Little David Years
.)
Stuff
was an anomaly in the Carlin catalog, featuring live tracks alternating with studio-recorded commercial and game show parodies. The seven “Announcements” tracks were the same kind of fast-moving, jack-of-all-trades radio parodies—book club promotions (“How to Turn Unbearable Pain into Extra Income”), an ad for a television movie about a guy who wants to be an Olympic swimmer (“Wet Dream”)—that he’d created as a schoolboy with his Webcor tape recorder.
The “Stuff” routine, a lighthearted take on the human pack rat—“That’s what your house is—a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get . . . more stuff”—didn’t appear on an HBO special until his fourth, but it was an instant favorite among fans and fellow comedians. When Carlin did the bit on the first American
Comic Relief
, the HBO fund-raiser hosted by Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billy Crystal, he stole the show. “We all talked about that again and again,” says director John Moffitt. “That was such a big hit. Perfect delivery. Everyone who worked on the show, and I kept in touch with most of them, always talked about George’s ‘Stuff.’”
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, in a room I had designed and decorated,” Wiggins recalls. “It was a highlight of my life.” En route to the airport the next day, he gave Carlin a briefcase full of cash. Carlin handed it back to Joan, Wiggins’s wife. “That’s your money,” he said. “I did it as a gift for all you guys”—all the comedians still pounding the club circuit.
The Orwellian year 1984 marked a turning point for Carlin. For one thing, his mother died. She had hovered over him his whole life, and her absence brought a kind of relief. “It was truly like a ton of bricks had been lifted off his shoulders,” his daughter, Kelly, once said. Though Mary had been living on the West Coast since the mid-1970s, she hadn’t seen her second son much in recent years. Eighty-nine at the time of her death, she’d lived long enough to see Reagan go from baseball announcer to B-movie actor to California governor to the leader of the free world.
Reagan’s reelection in 1984 confirmed for Carlin that this wasn’t his decade. Though he rarely resorted to political humor—in part because he felt it dated quickly, in part because he was an independent thinker who could mock liberals as deftly as conservatives—Carlin did indulge himself in a few Reagan quickies. “Don’t you think it’s just a little bit strange that Ronald Reagan had an operation on his asshole and George Bush had an operation on his middle finger?” he joked at the beginning of one of the HBO specials. The tone that Reagan set “just fed your dissatisfaction,” he later remembered. And the sense of entitlement adopted by the yuppie generation irked him long after the country had moved on from horn-rimmed glasses and pastel-colored polo shirts with upturned collars.
The period confirmed for Carlin that he was a lifelong outsider, a man who had no interest in being accepted. “Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group,” he said.
When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.
I don’t really identify with America. I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.
Like Democritus, the ancient Greek known as the “mocker” and the “laughing philosopher,” Carlin saw humor and laughter as the only logical response to a crazy world. When concerned townspeople asked Hippocrates about the philosopher, who seemed to be going mad, Hippocrates pronounced him “too sane for his own good.” Inside the gatefold of
Class Clown
, Carlin had featured a parable about a country that produced a harvest said to make those who ate it insane. “We must eat the grain to survive,” said the king, “but there must be those among us who will remember that we are insane.”
In 1983 he had taken his first whack at publishing, writing an oversized, thirty-two-page concert-program-style book called
Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help
. Heavily illustrated and designed like a scrapbook, the book satisfied his chronic urge to categorize and make lists—full pages crammed with pet causes of the Miscellaneous Ailments Foundation (“the creeps . . . the willies . . . the shits”) and People I Can Do Without (“people whose kids’ names all start with the same initial . . . athletes who give 110%”). Other pages of “miscellaneous bullshit” represented the kind of shameless puns Carlin loved as a kid, reading
Esar’s Comic Dictionary
. (“She was an earthy woman, so I treated her like dirt.”)
Some of the drawings were by Holly Tucker, wife of Corky Siegel, the bandleader from the Summerfest incident in Milwaukee. The centerpiece, a two-page spread of 209 “impolite” words scrawled in calligraphy above a drawing of a urinal, provided the artist and her husband with an unexpected moment of amusement. When they went to pick up an early draft of the artwork at a printer’s shop, there was a little old lady behind the counter. As she was handing the print job to the couple, she leaned in to give it a good read. Siegel and his wife were mortified, until the attendant looked up with a smile. “Oh, this is cute!” she said.