Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits

I’m listening to ‘Occupation: Foole’ right now. I just finished ‘Class Clown’ before that. He’s doing ‘When Grass Swept the Neighborhood’ now, and he starts it with a little observation. ‘I’m 35 right now, which is great when the whole country seems like it’s 18 and 50. It gives me reach on both sides.’ When I first heard that line I was probably 15 or 16 and I didn’t get it the way I do now. Carlin wasn’t a Boomer or of the Greatest Generation; his cohort is ironically enough in his case, the Silent Generation. My life was immeasurably enriched by his voice. 

From my speaker comes his voice from a March night in 1973. He’s doing a bit he calls ‘Filthy Words’ where he plays with the sounds and the notions of profanity. When this album is played on a radio station in October of 1973 the resulting furor over this particular track would result in the Supreme Court ruling that the FCC has the authority to prohibit broadcast of programs it considers indecent. Right now he is riffing on the word ‘fuck’ in various permutations. He says, “it sounds like a proud word. Who are you?” and then in this deep dramatic boom he intones, “I.. am… Fuck!” And there’s a hard laugh that he lets live for a moment and he adds, “of the Mountain!” Huge laugh. Then in his impeccable announcer tones he blurts, “Tune in next week for ‘Fuck of the Mountain’!” and brings down the house. A few years ago I wrote a sketch which had a guy trying to pitch projects to Samuel L Jackson’s agent and the payoff was a sequel to ‘Pulp Fiction’ that followed Jules Winnfield as he ‘walked the Earth’ to Canada and his subsequent adventure as a mounted policeman fighting Yakuza in Vancouver. It was called ‘Motherfucker of the Mounties’. I stole that joke without even realizing it. Carlin is as much an influence on my writing as Shakespeare or Twain, and far greater than most others that I’ve read, and I’ve only really ever listened to him.   

There really isn’t a way to describe what kind of influence he was on me. I can’t tell you how many times I played his records throughout my life. His mastery of language was incomparable. His rhythms were perfect. I learned so much about timing from him. His brave compassion toward homosexuals and other despised people made him one of my earliest teachers of what humanism really is. His brave honesty is one of the standards I hold myself to when I think I should hold my tongue. I don’t have any idols but I suppose he was one of my heroes. He taught me that we have power over words, not the other way around.

It is easy to make people scared or angry or sad. Barely literate demagogues do it every day. It’s easy to mock the lowly and the different. Pandering hacks make brilliant careers of it. Making people laugh at themselves and their sacred cows is difficult and often thankless work but it is of far deeper benefit to us all than any of the easy things. George Carlin made it look easy. I will miss his voice.