Just after leaving the MGM in late 2004, Carlin announced that he was voluntarily checking himself into an exclusive rehab facility for an addiction to the pain killer Vicodin, which, compounded with his taste for fine wine, was becoming a problem. He’d never been in rehab before, as he took care to mention, quitting cocaine completely on his own and cutting down his pot smoking to an occasional hit or two (mostly to “punch up the writing,” as he told
High Times
magazine).
He started with the Vicodin, he said, before Brenda died, when he dipped into the prescription she had been given for fibromyalgia, a mysterious, possibly stress-related condition characterized by extreme fatigue and sensitivity to pain. He felt “almost unworthy” in the program, he later said, with his self-described habit of a bottle or more of wine and four or five Vicodin per day: “Some of the guys in there were taking fifty Vikes a day and burning down their houses and backing into police vans and shit.”
Even if they didn’t know about his Vicodin habit, Carlin’s friends were well aware that he’d become a wine connoisseur. When Carlin quietly put up five figures of his own money to support Chris Rush’s existential one-man show,
Laughter Is the Sound of Bliss
, he took the less-known comic to a fancy dinner. Rush wondered how his friend could justify ordering a $200 bottle of red wine. Then he tried it. “I had two sips, and I started rapping like I was on a mix of acid and Scopolamine,” says the former molecular biologist. Carlin looked at Rush and said, “Now you know why all those counts fought over vineyards.”
His previous habits earned the comedian a voice-over role in the animated Pixar film
Cars
. Carlin’s character, fittingly, is an aging, daisy-painted Volkswagen minibus named Fillmore, who lives in a Day-glo geodesic dome and talks up the benefits of his “homemade organic fuel.” The character was based on Bob Waldmire, a real-life hippie throwback who travels Route 66, where much of the movie is set, in a VW bus, drawing postcards and maps of the historic road’s icons.
Carlin’s rehab was timed to give him a clean bill of health before starting a new Vegas engagement, at the Stardust, in early 2005. He and Hamza knew Terry Jenkins, entertainment director for the Stardust’s parent company, Boyd Gaming, which owned a resort in Tunica, Mississippi, where Carlin had performed. Taking over for Wayne Newton, he stayed at the Stardust Theater until it closed in late 2006, in anticipation of demolition. The gaming company then brought the comedian over to the Orleans. He checked it out beforehand by asking Tommy Smothers, who had headlined there with his brother. “Probably the best comedy room in Vegas,” Smothers told him. Situated several blocks off the Las Vegas Strip on Tropicana Avenue, the Mardi Gras-themed Orleans was a welcome change for Carlin, who appreciated the fact that audiences needed to make an effort to find him there.
Yet he still had plenty of healthy contempt for the town. Vegas, Carlin said not long after the move, remained for him “the most dispiriting, soul-deadening city on earth.” But he couldn’t deny the benefit of working out new material in front of an ever-changing audience, unlike the fixed number of devoted fans he could count on during his periodic visits to medium-sized markets around the country. Though the Vegas audience continually replenished itself, he said, it came with a cost—he couldn’t assume the crowds would be his from the outset. “In Pittsburgh I get the hardcore fans who know what I am about. In Las Vegas often I get people who saw me on Leno or got a coupon. . . . Each night I have to find out how they are going to be and I have to train them.” The Orleans, he knew, was as apt a fit as he was likely to find in Sin City. “He loved it here,” says Jenkins. “Almost every night, George would ask me what percent of the tickets were paid [not comped]. That would always give us an indication about how many people were making that trip from the Strip.” He’d also take note of the cab lines outside after the show. More cabs meant more guests specifically there to see Carlin.
Jenkins and his colleagues watched the comic prepare for his last two HBO specials at Boyd’s Las Vegas properties. The title of
Life Is Worth Losing
, Carlin’s fourth show in a row (and last) from the Beacon Theatre, was a parody of
Life Is Worth Living
, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s inspirational prime-time program from the early days of network television. Carlin’s thirteenth HBO concert, recorded less than a year after his rehab, was relentlessly bleak, the one special that most supports the notion that he grew darker in his final years. Even the stage was designed like a snowy city cemetery at night. After his opening rap, a jargon-filled verse he called “Modern Man” (“I’m a hands-on, footloose, knee-jerk head case, prematurely post-traumatic, and I’ve got a love child that sends me hate mail”), Carlin unleashed a cavalcade of black thoughts, a conversational, almost punch-line-free tour through every macabre subject he could think of, from suicide, genocide, torture, and necrophilia to the beheadings that were recently in the news about Iraq. Such behavior doesn’t say much for the species, he noted drily. For a finale, he imagined “an apocalypse that is part Stephen King, part Quentin Tarantino, and part George Romero,” as one reviewer put it. “In the end, the world is consumed in a mighty conflagration. Only hedonistic New York, Carlin’s birthplace, is spared.”
His harshest show was a gleeful phantasmagoria. Like dreams, jokes originate in the unconscious, said Sigmund Freud. Both “try to outwit the inner censor.” If Carlin were a painter, this would have been his deliberately ugly period. “There are a lot of comics working forty years who might have added ten jokes to their act over that time,” comedian Richard Lewis told the
New York Times
. “Carlin treats every HBO special like a gallery opening.”
Having taken Lenny Bruce’s radical moral reassessments to an extreme in
Life Is Worth Losing
, the next special,
It’s Bad for Ya
, was Carlin’s nod to the other comic revolutionary of the 1950s, Mort Sahl. Aired live from the arts center in Santa Rosa, California, a stiffer, puffier Carlin, now seventy, padded carefully around a cluttered set designed to look like a cozy den and office, with a thick dictionary on a stand given a place of prominence at center stage. A memorable bit on removing the names of deceased friends from your address book segued into thoughts on the excessive culture of child worship, the misplaced use of the word “pride” (“Being Irish isn’t a skill. You wouldn’t say you’re proud to be five-eleven”), and the “delusional thinking” behind religious and patriotic customs, such as swearing on the Bible and removing your hat for the singing of “God Bless America.” In what would prove to be the last recorded hunk George Carlin ever performed, in what has to be the single most impressive body of solo material ever assembled by an American comedian, he went out, fittingly, with an analysis of the existence of individual rights. There are none, he claimed, breaking the bad news to fans who had come to see him as a beacon of American freedom: “We made ’em up.” And if they can be taken away, they’re not rights: “They’re privileges.”
Between the last two specials, Carlin took part in a tribute to Sahl at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. After the show he made out a big check to his predecessor, who, eighty years old and still performing, was having some financial trouble. Sahl had watched Carlin’s career closely, and the cantankerous elder comic admits he didn’t agree with all of it. “Stuff about white guys playing golf is like throwing fish to a seal,” he says, and he never liked the swearing: “The only time I’ve ever cursed onstage is when I read from the Watergate transcripts.” Still, Carlin was one of the only comedians who followed Lenny and Mort who took the job of social critic seriously. “America has been dying for several years,” says Sahl. “Would you know it from the comedians?” Watching Carlin’s final few HBO shows, you’d have no doubt.
Five years after receiving the Free Speech in Comedy Award at the 2002 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, Carlin returned to Aspen for his last appearance there. Backstage, he casually told John Moffitt he was suffering from heart failure, that he’d recently been in and out of the hospital. “He was so much shorter and frailer. I was really worried about him,” says Moffitt, who pleaded with his old friend to use the oxygen tank the festival had on hand for performers suffering adverse reactions to the altitude. Carlin waved him off, saying he’d resort to it if he needed it. He went onstage with his notes for the upcoming HBO show—working title,
The Parade of Useless Bullshit
—and he did nearly an hour and a half without a break. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
“He was a tough little guy,” says Moffitt. “The good news is that he was working until the very end.”
In June 2008 the Kennedy Center announced that Carlin would receive its eleventh annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. That it took eleven tries for him to get it was nearly as shocking as the first time he said
cocksucker
in Milwaukee. Richard Pryor accepted the first Twain Prize in 1998, followed by Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, and Steve Martin, among others. If he felt it was about time, Carlin kept it to himself. He seemed genuinely pleased with the honor. “Thank you, Mr. Twain,” he said in a statement. “Have your people call my people.”
Five days later he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with chest pain. He died late that afternoon, June 22. He had performed the week before at the Orleans, where he was already beginning to organize his thoughts for his next HBO special. In interviews he had been telling a favorite story about the master cellist Pablo Casals, who continued to rehearse three hours a day well into his nineties. Asked why, Casals once replied, “Well, I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”
Bum ticker and all, Carlin made it to seventy-one, defining a half-century in American comedy. “There’s always hope for comedians,” he said near the end. “You notice how long fucking George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, and all these 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.”
His daughter and his brother spread Carlin’s ashes outside a few New York nightclubs and then at Spofford Lake, site of his early performing triumph at Camp Notre Dame. Fittingly, the family announced that the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, along with the American Heart Association, would be the recipients of donations.
Shortly after his death Carlin’s partner, Sally Wade, received a proclamation from the U.S. Congress. It accompanied the flag that flew over the Capitol the day after the comedian’s death. He would have been supremely amused: Flags, he once said, are only symbols, “and I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”
KICKER
IN LATE 2003 California Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill into Congress that was intended, once and for all, to make broadcast use of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” punishable by law. Ose’s bill identified as profane “the words ‘shit,’ ‘piss,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘asshole,’ and the phrases ‘cock sucker,’ ‘mother fucker,’ and ‘ass hole’ [
sic
].” Ironically, writes the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the Clean Airwaves Act was “the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress.” Once again, Carlin’s instincts had been validated. Substituting
asshole
for
tits
, the “Milwaukee Seven” were, in fact, the words you couldn’t say.
The Congressman’s bill was a response to conservative outrage over the FCC’s decision not to fine NBC for its live broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, during which the rock singer Bono said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC had been maddeningly inconsistent on the issue, slapping a small PBS affiliate in the San Francisco area with a fine for indecent words heard in the Martin Scorsese documentary series
The Blues
. The Bono episode and others, including a notorious example of “visual indecency”—Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, when one of her breasts was momentarily exposed on national television (for which CBS was fined $550,000, since overturned)—gave the culture the enduring concept of the “fleeting expletive”: a one-time instance of profanity, indecency, or obscenity that occurs during live programming.
Given the rise of cable television, satellite media, and the Internet, taboo words about sex acts and bodily functions are more widespread than ever, as Pinker points out in
The Stuff of Thought
. Yet the government continues to hold radio stations and broadcast television networks accountable to another standard. Comically, the author notes, another piece of legislation, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, was passed on the same day that Vice President Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor “to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.”
Upon Carlin’s death, reporters took the opportunity to examine all the ways their newspapers continued to dance around the seven words that apparently will still infect your soul and curve your spine. Carlin’s “heavy seven” were conspicuously incessant (if bleeped) on Comedy Central’s
South Park
and
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
. They were half the dialogue on HBO’s
The Sopranos
, and they were permitted unchecked on broadcast networks in a documentary,
9/11
, and the commercial television debut of
Saving Private Ryan
. Even
The Today Show
let slip with “the word that’s probably the Queen Mother of all obscenities, an unflattering reference to female nether regions,” when guest Jane Fonda uttered it. “NBC apologized, to be sure,” wrote one TV critic, “but the sky didn’t fall.”
In April 2009 the Supreme Court once again heard a case involving the FCC’s jurisdiction over Carlin’s magic words. By another 5-4 vote, the court upheld the commission’s sanctions against “fleeting expletives.” The case featured the spectacle of the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia providing a dramatic, expurgated reenactment of the singer Cher’s acceptance of a lifetime achievement honor at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, seen live on Fox: “People have been telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So
f-word
’em.” Legal scholars pointed out that the decision sidestepped the First Amendment issue, and they predicted further litigation. That would ensure that Carlin’s lexical evangelism—Lenny Bruce’s legacy—would have still more days in court.
“What can I say about George Carlin that hasn’t already been argued in front of the Supreme Court?” joked Bill Maher when he kicked off the Kennedy Center’s posthumous tribute for the Mark Twain Prize. The late comedian’s friend Lily Tomlin, his fellow Greenwich Village alum Joan Rivers, and next-generation devotees Jon Stewart and Lewis Black were among those on hand to celebrate the life and career of the comic wordsmith.
In his lifetime, Twain had much to say about censorship and taboo. “Nature knows no indecencies,” he wrote. “Man invents them.”
At the end of his own life, George Carlin was working on a one-man show he was planning for Broadway. One of his working titles was
Watch My Language
.