Seven Dirty Words (26 page)

In late 1984 Carlin took another swing at hosting
Saturday Night Live
, which was in the middle of one of its extended periods without creator Lorne Michaels at the helm. After viewing a brief clip of Carlin on the first
SNL
episode nearly a decade earlier (“Does anybody know who that was? He sure had a lot of hair”), he joked about the long gap: “They told me if I did a real good job, they’d have me back. . . . I’m really glad that some people live up to their word.” He noted the complaint that NBC had supposedly received from the archbishop’s office about his God monologue, then proceeded to bait the current archbishop, the newly appointed John Joseph O’Connor, with more material about religion.

This time on
SNL
he was a team player, guest-anchoring the newscast and taking part in a few sketches. He played to type as an Irish fireman, making a guest appearance in Billy Crystal’s parody of
The Joe Franklin Show,
and he soloed in a mock infomercial for “Ted’s Book of World Records.”

By this time Carlin was like a nutty uncle to the emerging generation of comedians. He gave Bob “Bobcat” Goldthwait, a newcomer by way of the Boston and San Francisco scenes who always seemed on the verge of hysterics, a part in the proposed HBO series
Apt. 2C
. Garry Shandling, who had mustered up the nerve to approach Carlin for comedy advice when he was still an electrical engineering student at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s, was now a regular Carson guest host and the cocreator of Showtime’s
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
. Shandling loved to recount his youthful encounter with Carlin, who was performing at a jazz club in Phoenix when he took the time to read the nervous kid’s work.

Carlin’s curiosity about the unexamined side of human life was a huge inspiration for Steven Wright, the molasses-paced surrealist whose breakthrough came with his 1985 debut album of comic koans,
I Have a Pony
. “I was amazed how he talked about everyday things,” says Wright, “little things people don’t usually discuss. He’d make his comedy about these mundane things, and it was hilarious—the speed of light, and coasters, and lint.” Wright, who recited routines from
FM & AM
and
Class Clown
(with proper credit) for his public speaking class at Boston’s Emerson College, says he instinctively gravitated toward Carlin’s “whole approach, like he was an outsider of society, looking in.” Over the years he had several opportunities to speak with Carlin, who sought Wright’s advice on playing certain venues and told the younger comic he was one of the comedians Carlin had on his iPod. The connection was as meaningful for Wright the last time as the first. “It was a big rush for me that he liked what I did,” he says.

The
Carlin on Campus
HBO special, which aired in 1984, was Carlin’s best yet. On an eccentric set designed by Brenda—a landscape of oversized geometric shapes—he crafted a kind of comic poetry by blessing the performance with a mock recitation, jumbling lines from the Lord’s Prayer with the Pledge of Allegiance (“Give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail”). He also offered an updated, well-polished version of “Baseball and Football” and, in a long hunk about “Cars and Driving,” the astute observation that everyone who drives slower than you is an “idiot,” whereas those who drive faster are invariably “maniacs.” The closing credits were accompanied by a brief taped performance of the star of the show playing an original composition called “Armadillo Blues” on piano while wearing a nun’s habit.

The hour was interspersed with several minutes of completed material from the work he had done with animator Bob Kurtz and his staff for
The Illustrated George Carlin
. “It’s No Bullshit” was a cartoon parody on amazing-facts features like Ripley’s
Believe It or Not
, with fake news items and a compendium of fanciful sporting events, like a blind golf tournament. The music over the end credits was provided by Kurtz’s friend Joe Siracusa, a veteran of Spike Jones’s anarchic orchestra, who, much to Carlin’s delight, improvised a one-man band of cuckoo sounds—bells and whistles and hiccups and washboard percussion.

Kurtz entered the short film, packaged as
Drawing on My Mind
, in several festivals, and it won first prize in its category at an animation festival in Canada. In New York a woman asked the director whether he felt the “Blind Golf ” bit was offensive to blind people. “Not anybody who saw it,” he replied. At another festival in France, the print with the French translation didn’t arrive in time, so the audience watched it in English. Despite the language barrier, “People were laughing so hard they thought they were going to die,” Kurtz recalls. “For five days, people would yell at me, ‘It’s No Bullshit!’ We didn’t win an award, but it was the hit of the festival.”

As had Kurtz, comedian Chris Rush got a call out of the blue to help Carlin work on a script for his proposed HBO series
Apt. 2C
. Rush, a motor-mouthed, high-IQ Brooklynite whose comedy has always reflected the peculiar mix of his instinctive perversity with his clinical training as a molecular biologist, says he got started in comedy while still a toddler, performing ersatz opera with made-up dirty lyrics at family gatherings. He was Carlin’s kind of guy. In fact, though, it was Brenda who turned her husband on to the shaved-headed, philosophically inquisitive potty-mouth. She was the first of the two to hear Rush’s headlong debut album,
First Rush
, recorded for Atlantic in 1973 while Rush was writing for the fledgling
National Lampoon
. One day Carlin called his fellow New Yorker and asked him to fly to LA for a meeting. “It was a stunning fucking thing,” says Rush. “Here was a guy I idolized. . . . He was the guy that softened the beach for the rest of us.”

They hit it off and began writing together. At one point Rush stayed at Carlin’s house in Brentwood for the better part of a week while Brenda was away. Officially, Carlin was also writing with his good friend Pat McCormick, a longtime
Tonight Show
contributor whose association with the show went back to the Paar years. McCormick was a hulking, anything-goes comic presence who had recently starred as Big Enos in the
Smokey and the Bandit
films. Also involved were the British-Canadian comedy writing duo of Andrew Nicholls and Darrell Vickers, who later became Johnny Carson’s head writers, until his retirement in 1992. They were introduced to Carlin by his brother Pat, who met the writing team while all three were working under the table for Alan Thicke on his short-lived late-night show,
Thicke of the Night
. (Carlin sometimes helped set up his older brother with writing work, once calling the office of
Hustler
magazine to get someone to read a submission from Patrick. Pat Carlin kept an office in the same building as Carlin’s for a while, before quitting Hollywood and moving to upstate New York with his wife.)

“George was very healthy at this time—bottled water all around and tofu salads,” says Nicholls. “He used to hug everyone when they got to work and hug them all good-bye at the end of the day. Pretty intimidating for us, just down from Canada, only a few years after listening to his albums at night on headphones under the covers.”

Prefiguring
Seinfeld
, the premise of
Apt. 2C
featured an apartment-dwelling writer constantly distracted by the shenanigans of his eccentric friends and neighbors, who included McCormick, Goldthwait, stand-up comic Jeff Altman, and Lois Bromfield (whose sister, Valri, had appeared on the first
SNL
). Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, played a Girl Scout. Despite the writing talent rounded up for
Apt. 2C
, Rush could tell that the constraint of working with a writing team was unproductive for Carlin. “If you’re a gunfighter for twenty-five years, and all of a sudden they ask you to be a group leader in an advertising agency—you’re not good at working with people, you know?” says Rush, who had a part in the pilot but backed out. “I told him, ‘I see what you’re trying to do, but it’s falling short.’” At one point an HBO executive gave Carlin some notes on the network’s suggestions for improvement, including a recommendation to tone down the four-letter words. Not surprisingly, that pretty much sealed the show’s fate. Carlin had wanted to push the network on Rush’s own idea for a show, a mind-boggling conceptual thing he called
Innertube
. “After
Apt. 2C
lit a bomb,” says Rush, “that was the end of that.”

Not long after the pilot disappeared, Carlin called Rush in New York and told him to come by the Ritz-Carlton, where he was staying. After encouraging the younger comic to berate him for not taking his advice—with some reluctance, Rush launched into a private, foul-mouthed, one-man roast of his friend—Carlin, laughing, wrote out a check for $18,000. Write a movie, he said. The script that Rush eventually produced, a gag vehicle called
Strange Days
, went nowhere.

It had been a decade since Carlin had acted in
Car Wash
, nearly two since
With Six You Get Eggroll
. Despite the disappointing experience of the HBO pilot, he was warming to the idea of renewing his acting aspirations. Kelly, too, was thinking about pursuing a career in acting, and father and daughter enrolled together in a workshop class with Hollywood acting coach Stephen Book. “He thought it was time to become knowledgeable as an actor, to have technique and expertise,” says Book. Also in the class were the young actors Tate Donovan and Grant Heslov. In one class, Carlin and his daughter partnered to do a scene. Book gave them Somerset Maugham’s
Rain
, the story of a prostitute named Sadie Thompson, who arrives on an island in the South Pacific, and the zealous missionary who hopes to reform her. “I thought, This is going to be interesting,” says Book with a laugh.

The first acting that Carlin did after starting the class was in the brief noirish set pieces (“The Envelope”) at the beginning and end of his next HBO special,
Playin’ with Your Head
. The stand-up performance was taped over two nights in May 1986 at the Beverly Theater. Much as Moranis had spoofed Carlin’s habit of analyzing common turns of phrase, the real Carlin opened with a bit about the odd and annoying ways we say hello and good-bye to each other. He liked to mash them together, he joked: “Toodle-oo, go with God, and don’t take any wooden nickels.” He also did material on why there aren’t more variations on the notion of a moment of silence for the dearly departed (“How about a moment of muffled conversation for the treated and released?”) and, in a hint of the politically incorrect button-pushing that would partly define his later years in comedy, a crass joke about guys who wear earrings. “I’m better than that,” he began to apologize, then recanted: “No, I’m not!”

Playin’ with Your Head
was Carlin’s first HBO special with a new director, Rocco Urbisci. Urbisci’s first job in Hollywood had been on the staff of Steve Allen’s last talk show, locally produced at the KTLA studio in Los Angeles and syndicated to several markets in 1970 and 1971. Urbisci had booked Carlin on Allen’s show a number of times during the comic’s transformative period, when bookings were uncertain. Later the two worked together on
The Midnight Special
. Although they hadn’t seen each other for years when Urbisci showed up backstage at a Carlin set at the Wadsworth Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard, Carlin impulsively asked if the director would like to take on his next HBO project. They collaborated on all of Carlin’s original HBO events until his death more than two decades later.

Coincidental to the acting class, Carlin was offered a supporting role in an upcoming comedy featuring Bette Midler and Shelley Long, who was nearing the end of her five years starring on the NBC sitcom
Cheers
.
Outrageous Fortune
was directed by Hollywood veteran Arthur Hiller, who had directed
Silver Streak
with Pryor and, years earlier,
The Out-of-Towners
with Jack Lemmon, the man Carlin once suggested was his comic-acting role model. With its title plucked from the famous soliloquy of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, the slapstick-y movie followed the story of a pair of aspiring actresses who end up dating the same man, who turns out to be an agent for the KGB. In a flat-brimmed cowboy hat and sporting an uncharacteristic tan, Carlin played Frank Madras, an old desert drunk who convinces the women to hire him as a tracker. Comically cranky about letting himself get sucked into his new clients’ dangerous escapade, he lends them his clothes as a disguise and spends much of the movie wearing Midler’s print skirt and orange sweater. “There were projects that he really busted his ass on,” says Book. Though it proved formulaic,
Outrageous Fortune
was one of these.

Carlin brought a bit less desire to
Justin Case
, an NBC movie for which director Blake Edwards hand-picked the comic as the lead. Carlin played the ghost of a private detective trying to learn the circumstances behind his own murder at the hands of a mysterious “Lady in Black.” Dead detectives, old rascals, fading hippies, corrupt clergy-men, and sage advisors—for the rest of his career, Carlin was nearly always cast to type, usually based on the stock voices he’d been using in his act for years. Even the gratification of being the first choice of Edwards, who’d made not only the
Pink Panther
films but also
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and (with Lemmon starring) the dramatic
Days of Wine and Roses
, was not quite enough to convince Carlin that this project was more than a paycheck.

He had more fun with 1989’s
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
, playing Rufus, the back-from-the-future mentor to the title characters—two clueless, metal-loving dudes, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, who must pass their history exam in order to save humankind. The future, Rufus reports, is paradise: “Bowling averages are way up. Mini-golf scores are way down. And we have more excellent water slides than any other planet we communicate with.” It was a distinctly different attitude than Carlin the comedian would soon take, as his sense of humor grew progressively more apocalyptic.