bursting out of me, full-blown:
I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I'm an American. You know—
you GROW. I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in
New York. A parish school. Corpus Christi was the name, but
it could have been any Catholic Church: Our Lady of Great
Agony. St. Rita Moreno. Our Lady of Perpetual Motion. The
school wasn't one of those prison schools with a lot of corpo-
ral punishment—Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler:
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WHEESH! "AAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHH!! My HAND!!"
You'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right?
"He's behind in penmanship, Mrs. Carlin. I don't know why."
He's CRIPPLED-THAT'S WHY! He's trying to learn to write
with his LEFT HAND!
We didn't have that. The pastor was into John Dewey and he'd
talked the diocese into experimenting with progressive educa-
tion. And whipping the religion on us anyway and seeing what
would happen. There was a lot of classroom freedom. No grades,
no uniforms, no sexual segregation . . . In fact, there was so
much freedom that by eighth grade many of us had lost the faith!
They made questioners out of us. And they really didn't have any
answers for us: they'd fall back on, "Well, it's a MYSTERY. . ."
"A mystery? Oh. Thank you, Fadder!"
I used to imitate the priests, which was right on the verge of blas-
phemy. I did Father Byrne the best. He did the children's Mass
and told parables about Dusty and Buddy. Dusty was a Catho-
lic. And Buddy—WAS NOT. And Buddy was always trying to
talk Dusty into having a hotdog on Friday.
I could do Father Byrne so well that I wanted to do him in con-
fession. Get into Father Byrne's confessional one Saturday and
hear a few confessions. Because I knew, according to my faith,
that if anyone really thought I was Father Byrne and really
wanted to be forgiven-and PERFORMED THE PENANCE
I had assigned—they would've been FORGIVEN, man! That's
what they taught us—it's your intention that counts. What you
want to do. Mortal sin had to be a grievous o f f e n s e , sufficient
reflection and full consent of the will. YA HADDA WANNA!
In fact, WANNA was a sin all by itself! Thou shalt not WANNA!
It was a sin for you to WANNA feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you
to PLAN to feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to FIGURE OUT
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A PLACE to feel up Ellen. It was a sin to TAKE Ellen to the
place to feel her up. It was a sin to try to feel her up and it was a
sin to feel her up! There were SIX SINS in one FEEL! . . .
(With an Irish priest at confession) . . . First of all, he recognized
your voice, because youd grown up there. He knew everyone.
"What'd you do that for, George?" "Oh God! He KNOWS!"
And the Irish priests were always heavily into penance and pun-
ishment. They'd give you a couple of novenas, nine First Fridays,
five First Saturdays, the Stations of the Cross, a trip to Lourdes.
That was one of things that bothered me about my religion. That
conflict between pain and pleasure. They were always PUSH-
ING for pain. You were always PULLING for PLEASURE!
There were other things that bothered me. My church would keep
changing rules. "That law is eternal—except for THIS WEEK-
END!" Special dispensation! Eating meat on a Friday is defi-
nitely a SIN—except for the people in Philadelphia—THEY
WERE NUMBER ONE IN THE SCRAP IRON DRIVE!
I've been gone a long time now. It's not even a sin anymore to eat
meat on Friday. But I'll bet you there are still some guys in hell
doing time on a MEAT RAP!
Once a week Father Russell would come for Heavy Mystery
Time. And you'd save all your weird questions for Father Russell.
You'd take a whole week thinking up trick questions. "Ey, Fad-
der: If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock so big he himself
can't l i f t it? AHAHAHAHAHA! We GOT 'IM NOW!"
Or you'd take a simple sin and surround it with the most bizarre
circumstances to relieve the guilt. Example: you had to perform
your Easter Duty—receiving communion at Eastertime—once
between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost Sunday. So you'd ask
the priest: "Ey, Fadder: Suppose that you didn't make your EAS-
TER DUTY. And it's PENTECOST SUNDAY. And you're on
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a SHIP AT SEA. And the chaplain GOES INTO A COMA.
But you wanted to receive. And then it's MONDAY, TOO
LATE! But then ...you CROSS THE INTERNATIONAL
DATE LINE!...
With Class Clown and Occupation: Foole in 1973 (which was
really part two of Class Clown), I had a sense of coming alive, of
experiencing myself fully, of great potential for further exploration.
Each time I shone light into a new corner I discovered new passageways. What I had been doing before had been limited and closed: a
cul-de-sac. This new approach had an open end. It stretched off into
the distance and the future.
As long as you have observations to make, as long as you can see
things and let them register against your template, as long as you're
able to take impressions and compare them with the old ones, you
will always have material. People have always asked me: "Don't you
ever think you might run out of ideas? Don't you ever worry about
not having anything to say anymore?" Occasionally that does flash
through your mind, because it's a natural human impulse to think
in terms of beginnings and endings. The truth is, I can't run out of
ideas—not as long as I keep getting new information and I can keep
processing it.
I had skills and gifts that I hadn't suspected. Originally, stand-up
had been intended only as a means to an end. But now that it had
become its own end, now that it was starting to be the thing I did,
all the walls came down. "Jesus, I am good at this. Here I am just
talking about something and suddenly I've attached two minutes to
it that's funny in itself." I was taking my life and putting it out to the
world—me, the artist, the writer, the performer, creating something
out of nothing or perhaps out of something I already knew without
knowing that I knew it. Making something greater out of something
smaller.
All three of these albums eventually went gold, and FM (5 AM
won me my first Grammy. They also benefited from being on the
leading edge of a new boom in comedy albums. Albums had been
the medium of choice for rock and the counterculture, which both
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rejected and was rejected by television. It was natural for our new
humor to use albums too as our medium. That's at the heart of
"Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." Even though
it's been possible for a while to say some of them sometimes on
television, it's still one of my favorite pieces, if for no other reason
than the grief it caused people who deserve to have grief caused to
them.
There are four hundred thousand words in the English language
&nbs
p; and there are seven of them you can't say on television. What a
ratio that is! Three hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-three . . . to seven! They must really be bad. They'd
have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large.
"All of you over here . . . You seven, you bad words."
That's what they told us, you remember? "That's a bad word."
What? There are no bad words. Bad thoughts, bad intentions,
but no bad words.
You know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television?
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Those
are the Heavy Seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul,
curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.
Tits doesn't even belong on the list. Such a friendly-sounding
word. Sounds like a nickname, right? "Hey, Tits, c'mere, man!"
"Hey, Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots." Sounds like a
snack, doesn't it?
Yes I know, it IS!
But I don't mean your sexist snack. I mean new NABISCO
TITS! The new cheese tits. Corn tits, and pizza tits, and sesame
tits, onion tits. Tater tits. Yeah. Bet you can't eat just one, right?
I usually switch o f f . But that word does not belong on the list.
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Actually, none of the words belong on the list but you can un-
derstand why some of them are there. I mean, I'm not completely
insensitive to people's feelings. I can dig why some of those words
got on the list. Like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are
heavyweight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides
the literal translation and the emotional feeling, they're just busy
words. A lot of syllables to contend with. Those k's are aggressive
sounds, they jump out at you. Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Cock-
sucker, Motherfucker. It's like an assault on you.
Two of the other four-letter Anglo-Saxon words are piss and cunt,
which go together of course but forget that. A little accidental
humor I threw in. Piss and cunt. The reason that piss and cunt
are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said, "Those
are the two I'm not going to say. I don't mind fuck and shit, but
P and C are out! P and C are out!" Which led to such stupid
sentences as: "Okay, you fuckers, I'm going to tinkle now."
And of course, the word fuck. I don't really—here's some more
accidental humor—I don't really want to get into that now! Be-
cause it takes too long. But the word fuck is a very important
word. It's the beginning of l i f e and yet it's a word we use to hurt
one another. People much wiser than I have said, "I'd rather
have my son watch a film with two people making love than two
people trying to kill one another." And I can agree. It's a great
sentiment, I wish I knew who said it first. But I'd like to take it a
step further. I'd like to substitute the word fuck for the word kill
in all those movie clichés we grew up with:
"Okay, s h e r i f f , we're going to fuck you now. But we're gonna fuck
you slow."
Those are the seven you can never say on television under any
circumstances, you just cannot say them ever, not even clinically,
you cannot weave them in on the panel with Doc and Ed and
Johnny, I mean it's just impossible. Forget those seven, they're
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out. There are, however, some two-way words. Like prick. It's
okay to prick your finger. But don't FINGER YOUR PRICK!. . .
Another part of the excitement of doing albums came from them being distributed by Atlantic Records. I had a corporate push behind
me and also the music business. Going to their offices was exciting!
Record offices were full of stickers and posters and shit on the walls.
The people all dressed the way they wanted to. The women looked
terrific. As if a bunch of high school kids had said, "Let's play office."
You felt connected to all the other acts on the label—rock and
folk superstars. You got the feeling vividly when the person whose
office you were visiting or doing business in took a phone call and
mentioned some of these artists in the conversation. "Hey, I'm on
the same roster as the Rolling Stones!"
Then there's something everyone with an album does. You go
into the record store and see about ten of your records displayed. Or
you look in the comedy rack and see your name on the separators.
You have your own section! And I did this more than once: if there
was a bunch of comedy albums not organized, I would take mine
out and put them in the front. Absolutely!
So suddenly there was money. The college dates I'd wanted began to come in, not huge yet, $3,000 or $4,000 a pop, but some of
them the kind where you got a guarantee versus a percentage of the
I had money. I felt terrific. So why not get more cocaine? To do
Class Clown, which I recorded on May 27, 1972,1 had to say to myself, "I want to be sharp and clean and clear tonight. No cocaine."
My diction on it is remarkably lucid. In other words, I was already
using enough cocaine that I had to think consciously about not using it to record an album.
But it was a great time. I felt so free. So flush. It was such a catharsis, such a coming to terms, such a reward. It was proof that I
was right—fuck you people, look at this! Not only are they going
for it—it's GOOD too! I needn't have been worried about success.
Lily Tomlin once said, "I worry about being a success in a mediocre world," and I'd always been fearful that if I had mass appeal I
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wouldn't have substance. So I was happy that I had substance and
yet was getting all this attention, approval, applause, approbation,
affirmation—all those A's I never got in school.
Throughout '72 and early '73 the excitement built and built. It
was a time of First Times. There was the first time of selling out a
theater or a club. I still have the handwritten sign from the Main
Point, a little folkie room, near Bryn Mawr, west of Philadelphia.
About four hundred people had shown up, and they had to put up a
sign on the door: "SOLD OUT." The first time this ever happened
in my life!
There was the first time I got caught in my own traffic jam. The
first time you're driving to the theater and you're stuck in theater
traffic you have created! (This also happened in Philadelphia, at the
Academy of Music.) Just a fabulous feeling: "I did this! I've created a
fucking traffic jam!" To stand there and see them all walking in and
think: "Each one of these people has left his or her home and paid
money and come here just to hear me and this stuff I'm doing." It's
so affirming—it fires your imagination about the rest of your future.
There was another, deeper level of fulfillment too, about playing
at colleges to college students.
I had a deferred adolescence. In my actual adolescence I was
already thinking like an adult and making adult decisions. I was
pla
nning my career at eleven, getting engaged at fifteen, getting my
mother if not out of my life certainly out of my heart in advance of
any normal differentiation that a child goes through with his parents. And I joined the air force at seventeen.
So my late childhood was postponed, or rather not experienced.
Then, in 1967, as I'm entering my thirties, along comes a youthoriented culture that attracts me for political reasons, but for other
hidden reasons too. "Oh, there's something I didn't do when I was
that age. They're burning a car!" When I make the identity full and
complete and it includes what I do for a living and as an art form,
I say, "Let me tell you about when I was a kid. I'm just like you!" I
finally found a way to live that deferred adolescence.
Oenerationally—for what generations are worth—I'm at the midpoint between the Boomer generation and the GI generation. I had
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no biological identification with one side or the other of the generational conflict of the time. Which was good, because it gave me
a feeling for both. Though technically I was past the magic age of
thirty, beyond which there was no trust and no hope and no life.
My rejection of the older generation's notions of values and authority were by now complete. In my mind and heart, I was saying,
"Your values suck, I reject your inherent authority, I don't buy that
authority comes on a direct line from God to my parents, to my appointed church people, or to the police or to anyone else." For me, all
authority comes from within. All my power comes from within me.
But the other side of me—the side that respected much about the
GI generation and had nostalgia for it—could find fulfillment too.
In the summer of 1972, I played Carnegie Hall. It not only meant
validation but arrival at a certain level. You may not really be on the
same level as others who played there before you, but you now have
something in common with them. Lenny worked Carnegie Hall.
Stokowski worked Carnegie Hall. I worked Carnegie Hall. Fabulous. And it was an acknowledgment that I did accept certain kinds
of authoritative wisdom: for example, that Carnegie was a prestigious place to appear.
A simpler pleasure was standing over on the northwest corner
of 57th and Seventh and watching people milling around outside