How George Carlin Showed His Hair

Soon the explanations will be superfluous — the Class Clown is doing very well. In one week, while his album AMFM moved toward the 400,000 mark, he guest hosted The Tonight Show from Hollywood and headlined a sold out concert at Carnegie Hall. Even the "Sistahs" and "Faddahs" at Our Lady of Joyous Agony, that he made famous in one of his routines, would have to admit that he is making it.

Two years ago that wasn't the case. George Carlin found himself being unceremoniously expelled from Las Vegas, the bread and butter of his career back then. Predictably, his firing has since been incorporated into his performances: "I got fired for saying 'shit' at a place whose main attraction is a game called 'crap.'"

"Well, actually," he went on, "I'm taking a little poetic license saying that although something close to it did happen in September of '70 at the Frontier. But actually I had been fired from that club the year before when I did a bit about asses.

"I had a three-year contract with the Frontier. I was doing all right at the first engagement until one night when the whole place was turned over to a special interest group: The Howard Hughes Invitational Golf assholes, which was all the people that the Hughes organization thought were important to golf. So, instead of the regular 8:15 show, they had their showers and all that 19th hole bullshit and dinner. Then I came on as a warmup to Robert Goulet. And I had this bit about asses. There are regular asses and fat asses and no asses at all. It was funny and only offensive to a complete prude and never offensive on a regular night in Vegas. But I got fired and suspended after the show, because I was told that Robert Maheu's wife had found me offensive. But I still got paid for the rest of the week and my contract for the next year still held.

"So now it's the next year and I'm back for four weeks, the first three with the Supremes and the fourth week with Al Martino. By this time my whole presentation had relaxed a little. I was still wearing the tuxedo though, but now I had this bit about shit which would start, 'A lot of people say shit. But I don't say shit. Redd Foxx says shit. Buddy Hackett says shit, but I don't say shit.' and it went on from there. I didn't do it every night, because I liked to do different things, but I had done it a couple of times during the first three weeks and everything was cool. Then during the fourth week I got in trouble with another special interest group. This time it was Chrysler salesmen. Not just regular salesmen but all the best Chrysler salesmen from around the country, if you can imagine how gruesome they were, all in the same room, all juiced up together. And, oh yeah, there were some Lipton Tea assholes there besides.

"But before I even got to the shit stuff, I was doing my usual irreverent stuff which a person who is really uptight could call anti-American. 'Da-da-da.' Now these guys were really juiced and yelling" (he slips into his Upper Westside Irish Archie Bunker voice): "'Hey, what's right about America, huh? Say something good about America, huh?' So I called them all assholes and moved over to a less hostile part of the audience and finished up with my shit thing for them.

"So I went home that night, and got stoned and didn't think much about anything until the stage manager called me up, and he was a friend of mine, so he was very nice about it. He said: 'Hey, Frank [Senant] told me to call you and tell you you're fired.' And this time they canceled the third year of my contract. It caught me by surprise. The official reason they put down was abusive language. It threw me a little. Because in my mind at the time, I was trying to become more relaxed and what I wanted to do was eventually get back to where I had started, playing coffee houses and jazz clubs, and hopefully getting on college campuses. But I figured I would still have to do Vegas one more time for bread. Now as it turned out they had made a decision for me, and actually I was pretty glad about it. I had never hung out with the other Vegas comedians anyway. I never went over to Don Addams' house for dinner. I never bought an alpaca sweater and I never learned how to play golf."

George still had a few contracts for him and his tuxedo to do club engagements following the second Vegas firing.

One of these was at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where George says he really angered an audience and was fired without pay.

"This seemed like a real inconsistency to me, because Playboy was supposed to be the place where it was cool to say anything. I was in trouble for bread at the time so I went down to Chicago to the Playboy mansion to confront Hefner with his inconsistency. What I got from him freaked me, because it was right out of Lenny's bit about 'eat, sleep and crap.' Hefner is saying to me that he has to wear two hats in this situation. On the one hand, he says, there's Hef, who would sit in the audience and really dig the material, but on the other hand" (now Carlin breaks into a voice that sounds very much like Lenny Bruce): "'Well, you see, I have to do business with these assholes, eh hum.'"