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

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    Other comics were bringing Freudian analysis and frank talk about the sorts of things previously reserved for private company onto the spartan stages of San Francisco’s legendary hungry i in North Beach and its big-city counterparts in Chicago and New York. Many guardians of good manners felt affronted, just as the new comedians intended. Lenny Bruce, the onetime strip-club emcee, was fast becoming “the most successful of the new sickniks,” as Time magazine declared in a July article on comedy’s emerging emphasis on previously verboten subjects such as sex, race, religion, and morality. The Compass Players, a group of improvisational comics with ties to the University of Chicago, opened their permanent theatrical home, the Second City, in 1959. One of their alumni, Shelley Berman, debuted his neurotic humor that year on the album Inside Shelley Berman , for which the “onetime Arthur Murray dance instructor with a face like a hastily sculpted meatball,” as one writer put it, won the first-ever comedy Grammy award. And a husky Ohioan named Jonathan Winters, a “roly-poly brainy-zany” whose mountainous head seemed overstuffed with caricatures, had recently become a regular on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show , bewildering viewers with his loony menagerie of ordinary people, all nearly as bizarre in their own way as the manic-depressive who channeled them.
    For two sharp-witted young men who shared a predilection for subversion, the comedy renaissance of the late 1950s was at least as thrilling as a run-in with a mysterious blonde in Castro’s Cuba. Unlike the old Borscht Belt burlesque men, who were more or less interchangeable—bellyaching, as Carlin often noted, about middle-of-the-road indignities such as crabgrass, “kids today,” wives, and mothers-in-law—the new wave of comics “began to emerge with significant identities of their own. Shelley Berman couldn’t do Mort Sahl’s act. Mort Sahl couldn’t do Lenny Bruce’s act. They were just different.” What each of these men did was to challenge authority, the establishment, “the country itself. We were drawn to that.”
    Up to this point Carlin, still only twenty-two, had been effectively apolitical. Though he’d begun questioning the church’s authority from a young age, he’d grown up blindly accepting his mother’s belief in the strict jingoism of newspaper commentators such as Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler. Pegler, a featured writer for the sensation-minded Hearst syndicate, was a Roman Catholic sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, a prominent foe of labor unions, communism, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. “In my home Westbrook Pegler and Joe McCarthy were gods, and I picked up a lot of that,” Carlin once explained. For him, Burns “opened the door” to political enlightenment. “I began to realize that the right wing was interested in things and the left wing was interested in people, that one was interested in property rights and the other was interested in human rights. I began to see the error of what was handed to me through the Catholics, through the Irish-Catholic community, through my mother, through the Hearst legacy in our family.”
    Burns recognized an opportunity to affect Carlin’s unexamined way of thinking. “At that time George was fairly conservative,” he later told the writer Richard Zoglin. “I always had a progressive agenda. I thought it was the duty of an artist to fight bigotry and intolerance. We had long, interesting conversations, good political discussions.” They also, by Carlin’s account, spent plenty of time sitting around the apartment in their underwear after their radio shifts, drinking beer (Jax, or Lone Star), listening to long-playing comedy records, and watching Paar on The Tonight Show . Their “comedy affinity,” as Carlin put it, naturally led to the makings of an act together, as they impersonated the voices on the comedy albums they spun endlessly and