Seven Dirty Words (2 page)

Henry and Homer were archetypes of the classic all-American boy, soon to be seen on television’s
Leave It to Beaver
. They were mischievous, but well-meaning. As the critic John Crosby once noted, radio’s fictional boys, despite their propensity for mischief, were much too timid to ever amount to anything. “There aren’t any Huck Finns in radio,” Crosby wrote. Each week the Henrys and Homers and Oogies (Judy Foster’s pubescent suitor, played by Richard Crenna, in
A Date with Judy
) “get into one jam after another, always by accident, never by design. . . . They never
try
to get into trouble.”

Much more attractive to Carlin’s already wicked sense of humor was the more sophisticated humor of radio’s variety hosts—former vaudevillian Fred Allen, the deadpan improvisational duo Bob and Ray, and the acid-tongued Henry Morgan. The latter was a cantankerous New Yorker who delighted in mangling sponsors’ pitches, for instance, accusing the makers of Life Savers of defrauding their customers out of the candy centers. Between such irreverent ad-libs the announcer played satirical records, many by the comic bandleader Spike Jones, whose City Slickers orchestra was famous for its zany arrangements, with toilet seats, bicycle horns, cap guns, and other props adding to the galloping irreverence. Morgan had a true devil-may-care attitude that earned him the admiration of fellow radio personalities such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny. But it also hastened his exile from the business. “I grew up thinking it was American to be outspoken,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “I’ve since learned it’s un-American. If I was bringing up a kid today, I’d teach him to nod.”

Just as he toyed with advertisers, Morgan couldn’t deliver a simple weather forecast without mocking the format. “Snow, followed by little boys with sleds,” he’d report, or “Dark clouds, followed by silver linings.” Morgan’s irreverence had a clear impact on one listener: Years later, Carlin introduced his own version of a subversive meteorologist to the stoner generation. “Tonight’s forecast: dark,” Carlin’s most enduring stock character, Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman, said countless times in his dope-addled drawl. “Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning.”

Fred Allen, bow-tied and erudite lampooner of American convention, was another of the young Carlin’s exemplars. Unlike most of his gag-dependent counterparts, Allen was a writer first, a comic second. The man of whom James Thurber once said, “You can count on the thumb of one hand the American who is at once a comedian, a humorist, a wit, and a satirist,” the Boston-bred Allen mixed verbal gymnastics and gentle put-downs with parodies of topical events and the mass diversions of the day, most notably his own medium, radio. “He took generous and regular swipes at mawkish soap operas, treacly kid-die shows, noisy quiz programs, talentless amateur hours, insipid husband-and-wife chatfests, banal interviewers, and mindless commercials,” wrote Gerald Nachman in
Raised on Radio
. Not coincidentally, the host of the hour-long
Town Hall Tonight
was forever grappling with censors, who objected to many of the three-dollar words Allen so loved, such as
titillate
and
rabelaisian
. The watchdogs routinely required him to change references to potentially offended parties, including cockneys, hucksters, rodeo fans, and other targets of the announcer’s exasperated wit. “Fifty percent of what I write ends up in the toilet,” Allen complained.

Allen was one of the earliest radio celebrities to mine the daily news for satirical commentary, featuring segments called “Town Hall News,” “Passe News” (a takeoff on the Pathe newsreels of the day), and “The March of Trivia” (which alluded to
The March of Time
,
Time
’s long-running newsreel series). For much of his career—from childhood, actually—Carlin created his own mock newscasts: “In labor news, longshoremen walked off the pier today. Rescue operations are continuing.” Those routines, delivered in the clipped nasal tone of an off-the-rack newscaster, typically featured the additional talents of the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman and a rat-a-tat sportscaster the comedian called Biff Burns. Carlin borrowed that character, subconsciously or otherwise, from a character of the same name in the repertoire of Bob and Ray.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding—like Fred Allen, Boston natives drawn to New York, around 1950—brought the understated, off-the-cuff humor they’d developed as announcers on WHDH to the NBC network, where they became nationally beloved figures. The pair’s comedy took the wind out of radio’s insufferable windbags, from the exhausting sportscaster Burns to the self-important critic Webley Webster, to Elliott’s standby, the hapless newscaster Wally Ballou. “Our original premise was that radio was too pompous,” Elliott explained.

For Carlin, the nuanced send-up comedy of such vintage radio programs was complemented by the more lawless humor of other period entertainers to whom he was drawn. “I was a hip kid,” he joked. “When I saw
Bambi
it was the midnight show.” There were the Marx Brothers, of course, with their constant peppering of rectitude. Like many of his classmates, Carlin also got caught up in the national craze for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, whose convulsive physicality and audacious pranks seemed like a reaction to the insanity of the Atomic Age. Such wild men “represented anarchy,” Carlin recalled. “They took things that were nice and decent and proper, and they tore them to shreds. That attracted me.”

At the dawn of network television, Carlin often went downstairs to a neighbor’s apartment to watch “Uncle Miltie,” Milton Berle, on
The Texaco Star Theater
. Fascinated with the new medium, he sometimes traveled to the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center to walk in front of the closed-circuit cameras in the showroom, where visitors could watch themselves in real time on television screens overhead. Mary soon purchased a TV console for the Carlins’ apartment.

The kid made time for Jackie Gleason’s parade of characters on
Cavalcade of Stars
and on Sundays for
Toast of the Town
, the original name of
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Even better, however, was the short-lived
Broadway Open House
, the prototypical late-night variety show starring veteran comedian Jerry Lester, “The Heckler of Hecklers,” whose trademark was twisting his glasses into uncomfortable angles on the bridge of his nose. The show also featured accordionist Milton DeLugg and a vapid bombshell known to viewers as Dagmar. With its antic mix of vaudeville routines and slapstick gags, “That one really got my attention,” said Carlin. “I never missed
Broadway Open House
.” One of the guests during the show’s short run was a twenty-four-year-old comedian named Lenny Bruce.

All of this input worked on the young boy like an electric shock. He took the gags into his classrooms and onto the streets, where he found an eager audience. By telling jokes he was discovering his innate gift for language. Mary recognized it and introduced him to the dictionary, encouraging him to look up a word whenever he was unsure of its meaning, a habit he retained throughout his life. Carlin often said his parents had heightened instincts for storytelling: “Both of them could hold the center stage in any room.” With his mother’s professional colleagues and then the neighborhood children rewarding his affinity for the spotlight, he found himself drawn to performing “like a flower [to] the sun. . . . I had some tools for it from my genetic package, but now the environment was inviting me to develop them.”

Carlin could trace his love of words to his mother’s father, a retired New York City cop, a man dedicated to self-improvement who, during his off-duty hours, liked to copy the works of Shakespeare in long-hand. As a boy Carlin was also intrigued to learn about his namesake, his mother’s troubled brother George Bearey, who insisted on being called “Admiral” and once took his clothes off on a trolley car. “I was impressed, not that he was an admiral, but that he was nuts,” he said.

Carlin’s youth would soon become a lengthy experiment in tweaking authority. It didn’t take long for him to recognize that he had no use for the practices of the Catholic Church. He traced the realization back at least as far as his first communion, when he was disenchanted to find that he felt nothing—no transcendence, no oneness with God, no miraculous visitation, as he’d been led to believe he would. Maybe, just maybe, these church people were clinging to beliefs they couldn’t prove.

He attended grammar school at Corpus Christi School on West 121st Street, a progressive Catholic school that would paradoxically in-still in the young student just the inquisitive tools he needed to reject the religious education he was in line to receive. Founded in 1907, the school was run by the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, who had been invited to New York by Father George Barry Ford, the second pastor of Corpus Christi, in 1936. His church had a reputation for encouraging liberal thinking, particularly because of its association with the writer and activist Thomas Merton, who was baptized there while a graduate student at nearby Columbia University. The pastor was a disciple of the educational reformer John Dewey, who was a professor of philosophy for years at Columbia’s Teachers College, just across the street. Father Ford “talked the diocese into experimenting in our parish with progressive education,” Carlin later explained in a routine called “I Used to Be Irish Catholic,” “while whipping the religion on us anyway, and seeing what would happen.”

Classrooms at Corpus Christi were unorthodox for the time, with movable desks and relaxed seating arrangements. Classes were coed, and there was no uniform requirement. There was also no formal grading system, and the students were encouraged to ask questions of all kinds. The setting served Carlin well. Years later he would often acknowledge the role the nuns of Corpus Christi played in shaping his mindset. (Several priests and nuns, including Father Ford, are sincerely thanked in the liner notes to his 1972 album
Class Clown
. “This album would not have been possible,” Carlin wrote, without their “loving help.”) “The church part and the neighborhood part were typical, but the school was not,” he told his audiences. The students at Corpus Christi had so much freedom, in fact, “that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. Because they made questioners out of us, and they really didn’t have any answers.”

To Carlin, the church’s solemn rituals seemed laughable. As one historian has noted, since medieval times the Catholic Church has “frowned on laughter. To laugh was to mock heaven, by creating a kind of heaven here on earth.” Of course, trying to suppress his giggling only made Carlin laugh more. The cosmic uncertainty of it all—the “Heavy Mysteries,” as Carlin called them—naturally led the emerging disbeliever to the roots of absurdity. Why are we here? What is the point? Who makes the rules, and what are they for?

Mary began sending her boys away to camp during the summer, to get them out of the city. Carlin spent eight weeks each July and August at Camp Notre Dame, a Catholic boys’ retreat on Spofford Lake in southwestern New Hampshire. Opened by a group of New York area priests in 1900 as Camp Namaschaug, the compound of cabins and cottages was purchased in 1939 by John E. Cullum, a grammar school principal from North Bergen, New Jersey. Known as “Uncle Jack” to a succession of nephews who attended Camp Notre Dame, Cullum was a devout Catholic who expected the boys—200 or so of them each summer—to climb out of their cots at sunrise every morning to attend mass, before breakfast. The camp was run with military precision, with regular bugle calls—“Reveille” at sunup, a mess call at mealtime, and “Taps” at day’s end.

Athletics were strongly emphasized, with the campers playing baseball, basketball, volleyball, and other organized sports. They swam every afternoon and took part in track and swim meets on the weekends. They rowed, canoed, and hiked; at night, they sat around bonfires. Saturday nights were reserved for a talent show, with campers concocting singing groups, playlets, magic acts, and other amateur performances. At the end of each season boys were honored for excellence in various categories, including drama. Dave Wilson, a camper from Hoboken who was four years older than Carlin, was the perennial drama winner as the director of comic skits, which earned him the nickname “Wacky.” Carlin, meanwhile, opted to go it alone, delivering comic monologues and shaggy-dog stories. “I don’t know whether he got them from radio, or what,” recalls Leo Cullum, a nephew of Uncle Jack’s who attended the camp from 1948-1959. “But he was very good. He had your attention. He was known around the camp as a funny guy. You’d hear his name dropped around the camp—‘George Carlin, George Carlin.’”

A sense of humor was imperative at the camp, says Cullum, a longtime
New Yorker
cartoonist who began his career as a gag writer for the black-humor illustrator Charles Addams. “There were a lot of funny people, a lot of mocking and jibing. It was kind of a survival mechanism—being a good ‘ragger,’ we called it.” After a few summers, Carlin finally unseated Wacky Wilson, winning the drama award, for which he received a medal embossed with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Throughout his life the medal remained one of his two most treasured possessions. (The other was an autograph he got from the saxophonist Charlie Parker, outside the New York nightclub called Birdland, when Carlin was fifteen.) For Carlin, the medal affirmed his strongest instinct—that he belonged on the stage.

Whether or not he belonged in Catholic camp was another question. An aspiring shutterbug, Carlin was caught shoplifting film for his camera at a grocery store in town. “He left under a cloud,” recalls Cullum. “My uncle packed him up on a bus and sent him back to the city.” True to form, however, Carlin did not begrudge the camp director. In later years, after he’d made a name for himself, he sometimes returned to Camp Notre Dame to visit John Cullum.

In New York the boy found himself increasingly attracted to trouble. Though Catholic school and summer camp had been Mary’s idea of instilling structure and discipline in her mischievous son, it was becoming abundantly clear they weren’t the solution—that there might be no solution. “That was her big thing—‘the boy has no male supervision at home,’” Carlin remembered. “As if that’s gonna help.” At ages twelve and thirteen he was hanging around the parks, drinking beer, talking about girls—“debs”—and running with classmates in would-be street gangs. They had jackets with gang names: “the Riffs and the Condors and the Beacons and the Corner Boys and the Lamp-lighters and the Chaplains and the Bishops.”