Advertisement
New York — "What you see now is what was inside there all the time. I always had long hair only I used to keep it inside my head. Now I've let it come out where people can see it. What you used to see was only what I showed..." George Carlin was in his eighth floor hotel room with a view of Central Park, talking on the phone to a woman who said she knew him from the old days growing up in White Harlem — Morningside Heights.
George didn't remember her but she remembered him. She remembered him from his guest spots on the Merv Griffin Show when he would come out in a tie and jacket as the fast-talking Cousin Brucie-styled DJ of Wonderful WINO radio. She remembered him co-hosting a summer replacement series for the Kraft Music Hall, with Buddy Greco, called Away We Go. She remembered that one day he was on TV and had an album out and one day he was gone.
George is back on TV and has another album out, but he sure looks different. The ties, jackets, and tuxedos have been replaced by T-shirts and jeans, he has a long pony tail where his hair used to stop, a gold earring is sticking out of one of his ears, and his eyes seem suspiciously blurry. Actually, his eyes always looked like that only nobody noticed. Anyway, this woman wanted to know how come, at age 35, he's suddenly turned into a hippie. So, for the thousandth time, George explained this phenomenon.
"Well, the reason that I only showed what I used to show was because I thought that would help me get what I wanted, which at the time was a half-hour TV series. And, oh yeah, I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to get all the movie roles that Jack Lemmon turned down. But then I decided that I'd really rather be myself. Which is what you see now.
"Listen, I'd like to keep talking to you but I'm in the middle of an interview and I'd like to get back into that. OK. Well, thanks. Yeah, it's nice to say hello again even though I don't remember who you are."
When he was off the phone I asked him whether it wasn't tiring to have to explain his new appearance all the time.
"No, not really. I enjoy the challenge of trying to discover different ways to say it. It's natural for people to distrust what appears to be a change. Especially from entertainers. They assume you're trying to trick them somehow. That's because they've been tricked and shucked so many times already."
Advertisement
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.'"
Advertisement
Getting fired from the Frontier and the Playboy Club were catalysts in George's evolution, but more important in his mind was the realization that he himself was no longer in his own act. Biff Barf, the sportscaster, Congolia Breckenridge, and Al Sleet, the hippiedippie weatherman, were there. But George was missing.
He made this realization after taking acid. He mentioned it during his recent guest hosting of The Tonight Show, only to have it cut out of the tape. He also decided that for the present he didn't want to be an actor. He decided that after making a film called With Six You Get Egg Roll with Doris Day and Brian Keith.
His performances are now autobiographical. He doesn't refer to his work as an act but as a job, and on stage he mentions that originally his job was called "Fool." During his job he refers often to dope smoking simply because it has been an integral part of his life for so long. Lately, however, that has changed.
"I'm 35 now, and I started smoking grass when I was 15, which is 20 years, — my entire adult life. Which means like 20 years of eight to ten joints a day, plus about eight bottles of beer a day, because I was always into that at the same time. Then after 20 years of getting up every day and getting high and doing everything high, I would say, 'Well, I'm gonna walk down the stairs now, and wouldn't it be great to do that stoned.' After 20 years of that, I discovered cocaine and how good that was. And what was scary was that I discovered I could afford it.
"Then one night my wife Brenda and I went through some fine confessions and everything opened and we decided to cut it all out. We said, 'Well, we've been through the first half of our life stoned, let's try the second half straight.' And we did that for about two months. There were a number of reasons for it. For one thing, I was missing some jobs because of laryngitis. This German doctor would say to me. 'Don't use coke, because when you use coke you rap too much.'
"So Brenda and I laid off of everything for two months and then all of a sudden, we decided to celebrate the Carson thing and the Carnegie thing by getting high. And that was great too. So now we know we can stop and be off everything and then all of a sudden we might say, 'Hey, let's have another one of those weeks of getting high.' Anyway, I take a perverse delight in knowing that I never did a television show without being stoned."
What did hosting the Carson Show mean, besides a nice
excuse to celebrate?
"Hosting The Tonight Show meant being turned down on
having Ralph Nader as a guest because the show has too many Detroit
sponsors. Being turned down on Jane Fonda and being turned down on
Sally Marr, Lennie Bruce's mother. That was really the capper. I
had to call Sally and say, 'Sally, you won't believe this. He's
been dead for six years and they're still scared of him.' I'd like
to host the show a couple of more times. Or do the Cavett Show if
that comes up. And each time I'm gonna ask for Ralph Nader, Jane
Fonda and Sally just so I can say I kept asking for them."
What did it mean to do Carnegie Hall?
"Well, Carnegie was important I guess because I grew up in New
York and all that. Also because it was near the Copa which is the
place I always hated working the most. If you have any intelligence
at all it doesn't go over at the Copa. One time I worked at the
Copa for three weeks and it was really hostile. I told the
audiences I was a Dada humorist who had come there for their
rejection."
It was much different at Carnegie. The Class Clown ran out in front of the packed house screaming, "Isn't this a great place to meet? Let's Meet Here Every Week." The audience was his for two solid hours. The only time they stopped laughing was when they applauded. George moved back and forth with far greater animation than Fritz the Cat in his cartoon form. Stand-up comic would be a misnomer for him. He's a gifted mime in perpetually hilarious motion. He trucked off after two hours and then trucked back on to a standing ovation, letting Biff Barf and Al Sleet finish the show for him.
Afterwards he went back to the Plaza where he and Brenda and their daughter Kelley and their dog Tippy stayed up until 10 the next morning rapping.
[From Issue 115 — August 17, 1972]