I couldn’t believe that my cousin Steve had gotten away with it. We had been with his
mother, my aunt, at a Kmart—this would have been, I think, 1972—and while she wasn’t looking he had gone to the record and tape department and bought an 8-track of
George Carlin’s album “Class Clown.”
We knew George Carlin’s work, of course. If you watched TV in the early 1970s you would really have
had to read TV Guide pretty carefully to avoid him. He was on the Johnny Carson
show every few weeks, he was a guest on every variety show going—and at that time there were as many variety shows on the air as there are
reality shows now.
So there Carlin would be, doing a monologue here, doing a sketch featuring Al
Sleet the Hippy Dippy weatherman there. He was everywhere, and he was
hilarious.
Here’s how dedicated a fan of his I was then. One Christmas I got a cassette recorder, and there was an
occasion when he was a guest on Flip Wilson or Dean Martin or some other show.
I taped his performance of “The Hair Piece,” a long poem about hair (It begins, “I’m aware some stare at my hair/To really be fair, some really despair of my hair”). I thought it was so great, so perfect in every syllable, that I memorized the
whole thing. I would recite it—often—whether asked to or not.
I still can recite it. I’m still not asked to.
Steve and I knew Carlin’s TV work, but we also knew that his records were something else—just as funny, but, as an added bonus, especially to junior high aged boys, they
were dirty.
The only 8-track player at Steve’s house was the one in the car, a blue Chevy Impala that was parked in the
carport. Steve got the keys and, while the adults were inside talking, he
turned the player on and popped in the tape.
We giggled, we guffawed, we howled. “Class Clown” was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. And then, of course, came the
king of them all, the one humor piece that every obituary of Carlin had to
mention: “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”
It had all the shock of the words themselves, of course, but Carlin was doing
more; much later I realized he was using words like a jazz musician uses notes.
“Seven Words” was funny and profane—and also profound.
Steve and I weren’t thinking profound. We just knew it was forbidden and funny. Man, was it funny.
We got caught.
My aunt came out and tapped on the driver’s side window and wanted to know what we were listening to in there that was so
funny.
My memory goes a little hazy at this point, but I think that Steve may have
played a little of the tape for her. In any case, we were ordered out of the
car and that was the end of our George Carlin listening that day.
I later heard that my aunt had been so offended by the language on the tape that
she took it back to the store for a refund, and while the clerk was giving her
the money back, she told them she thought that the police might be interested
to know they were selling such things.
I have no idea whether she followed up on this threat. I could only imagine the
bored cop fielding the call: “Yes, ma’am—you say that Kmart is selling a tape with dirty language on it? We’ll send a car right over.”
The truth is that there were places where the police were interested. Carlin was
arrested several times for performing “Seven Words” at live shows, and a radio station was sued for airing it—a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Those seven dirty words were
serious stuff.
When George Carlin died a few weeks ago, people remembered what a social critic
he was, and how he was a genius at thinking about the way we live and speak,
and spinning humor out of that shared humanity.
But what I remembered first was that pair of 14-year-old boys laughing ourselves
silly in that Chevy Impala with the “Seven Words” coming over the speakers.
It’s 36 years later, and that bit is still profane, funny and true. And you still
can’t say those words on television.
