Seven Dirty Words by James Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page A

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    In between spinning new songs from singers such as Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon on The Coca-Cola Hi-Fi Club (later known as The Teen Club ), Carlin began extending his comic premises on-air. KXOL was a popular station with local advertisers, known for its brisk in-house production of ads and jingles. The DJ who preceded Carlin each afternoon once did an entire hour so packed with commercials that he had time to play just one song, Carlin recalled, “and it still sounded like pure entertainment.” But during the evenings Carlin had relatively few commercial obligations, and he used the time to his advantage. “It was nice—the log book wasn’t very crowded, so you could have a little fun,” he recalled years later, in a tribute to the station. “It was so relaxed, in fact, that one night I did two whole hours in a British accent. Apparently, no one thought anything of it. . . . It was a chance to express my goofy self at night.”
    “Everything George said was funny,” recalls Pat Havis, then a Fort Worth resident, a twenty-year-old divorcee and mother of a baby daughter, living on odd jobs and listening to her favorite DJ at night while she did the household chores. “He helped me laugh at myself, and everything in general.” Though a newcomer to Texas, Carlin was quickly established as an asset for KXOL. His name was prominently featured in ads on benches at bus stops across the city, says Havis. One of Carlin’s recurring bits, the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” depicted a gently addled hippie character years before the long-haired, glassy-eyed hippie archetype came into mainstream usage. (The term hippie , generally presumed to have been adopted by Beat Generation hipsters in reference to their younger collegiate followers, was not yet widely recognized, though by some accounts it had been used on the radio as early as 1945 by Stan Kenton, one of Carlin’s musical heroes.) Carlin’s Weatherman sounded as though Maynard G. Krebs, Bob Denver’s absent-minded, bongo-playing jazzbo on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis , had taken up meteorology. Adopting the deliberate, bemused voice of a chronic stoner (without making explicit references to marijuana), the disc jockey offered absurd parodies of weather reports, just as Henry Morgan had a decade earlier.
    Within a matter of weeks, Carlin’s career took a serendipitous turn. Arriving unannounced at the station one day was Jack Burns, his short-term Boston roommate, who explained that he was en route to Hollywood, hoping to give the entertainment industry “one last chance at me.” He had an idea that he might become the next James Dean, Carlin recalled. By sheer coincidence, one of the station’s news-casting positions had become available the day before, and Carlin convinced his friend to take it, at least temporarily. Badly in need of new tires for his car, Burns accepted, and he immediately began delivering five-minute news broadcasts during Carlin’s evening program.
    They took a place together at the Dorothy Lane Apartments in Fort Worth’s historic Monticello neighborhood, and their conversations picked up where they’d left off in Boston. Mostly they talked about the things that made them both laugh. Comedy in America was undergoing some radical changes at the time. Mort Sahl was already established as the next generation’s politico humorist, an off-the-cuff cold war commentator with a trademark newspaper tucked under his arm. His grad-student analyses of global politics and the American system were a wholesale shift from the broad gags of Gleason and Uncle Miltie. The jokes of the new comedians were crafted for insiders—campus current events connoisseurs and coffee shop intellectuals. “If things go well, next year we won’t have to hold these meetings in secret,” Sahl joked. His humor had a whiff of grad school about it, as he ad-libbed lofty barbs about fleeting political role-players and policy