George Carlin: From "White Harlem" to Voice of a Generation

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008) stands as one of the most influential and important stand-up comedians in American history. His career, spanning several decades, saw him evolve from a traditional comedian to a counterculture icon and a sharp social critic. This article explores Carlin's formative years, tracing his journey from a challenging childhood to his rise as a comedic force.

Early Life and Influences: "White Harlem"

George Carlin was born at New York Hospital in Manhattan on May 12, 1937, to Mary (née Bearey) and Patrick John Carlin. He had an older brother, Patrick Jr. Carlin's parents separated when he was just two months old due to his father's alcoholism, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother. His maternal grandfather, Dennis Bearey, was an Irish immigrant who worked as a New York City policeman. One immigrant grandmother’s maiden name once was O’Grady, he recalled, but it changed to Grady before she reached America. “They’d dropped the O in the ocean on the way here,” he said. He would later name his character O’Grady on The George Carlin Show as an act of homage.

Carlin grew up at 519 West 121st Street, in Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood, an area he and his friends jokingly called "White Harlem" because it "sounded a lot tougher than its real name." He credited his mother with instilling in him an appreciation for the effective use of the English language, despite their often difficult relationship, which led him to frequently run away from home.

Education and Early Aspirations

Carlin attended Corpus Christi School, a Catholic parish school in Morningside Heights. His early comedy made mockery of Corpus Christi parish and its priests. However, he was eventually expelled from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after three semesters at age 15. He briefly attended Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem and the Salesian High School in Goshen, New York. Carlin spent many summers at Camp Notre Dame on Spofford Lake in Spofford, New Hampshire. He regularly won the camp’s drama award, and specified that after his death a portion of his ashes be spread at the lake.

From a young age, Carlin idolized Danny Kaye and aspired to emulate him, envisioning a career path that would lead him to become a comedic actor. His early experiences with performance included being an avid fan of the pioneering late-night talk show Broadway Open House, thanks to his mother's ownership of a television set - a relative rarity at the time.

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Air Force Service and Early Broadcasting Career

When he was old enough, Carlin joined the United States Air Force and was trained as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana, and began working as a DJ at radio station KJOE in nearby Shreveport in July 1956. Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors, he received a general discharge on July 29, 1957. Looking back on his service, Carlin was proud to have been generally discharged instead of dishonorably discharged. As a more constructive outlet for his biting comedy, he worked as a disc jockey for the KJOE radio station while on active duty.

Early Comedy Career and The Tonight Show

Within weeks of arriving in California, Burns and Carlin put together an audition tape and created The Wright Brothers, a morning show on KDAY in Hollywood. In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing on television variety shows, where he played various characters, including a Native American sergeant, a stupid radio disc jockey, and a hippie weatherman. Variations on these routines appear on his 1967 debut album, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, which was recorded live in 1966 at The Roostertail in Detroit and issued by RCA Victor in 1967.

During this period, Carlin appeared on Tonight Starring Jack Paar before becoming a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He was one of Johnny Carson's most frequent substitutes during his three-decade tenure. Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce's arrest for obscenity at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago on December 5, 1962. As the police began detaining audience members for questioning, they asked Carlin for identification.

Reinventing Himself: Counterculture Comedy

In the late 1960s, Carlin made about $250,000 annually. In 1970, he changed his routines and his appearance; he grew his hair long, sported a beard and earrings, and typically dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans. He lost some TV bookings by dressing strangely for a comedian at a time when clean-cut, well-dressed comedians were the norm. He hired talent managers Jeff Wald and Ron De Blasio to help him change his image, making him look more "hip" for a younger audience. In 1970, record producer Monte Kay formed the Little David Records subsidiary of Atlantic Records, with comedian Flip Wilson as co-owner. Kay and Wilson signed Carlin away from RCA Records and recorded a Carlin performance at Washington, D.C.'s Cellar Door in 1971, which was released as the album FM & AM in 1972.

Starting in 1972, singer-songwriter Kenny Rankin was Carlin's label-mate on Little David Records, and Rankin served many times as Carlin's musical guest or opening act during the early 1970s. The two flew together in Carlin's private jet; Carlin says that Rankin relapsed into using cocaine while on tour since Carlin had so much available.

FM & AM proved very popular and marked Carlin's change from mainstream to counterculture comedy. The "AM" side was an extension of Carlin's previous style, with zany but relatively clean routines parodying aspects of American life. The "FM" side introduced Carlin's new style, with references to marijuana and birth control pills, and a playful examination of the word "shit".

"Seven Dirty Words" and the Supreme Court

In this period, Carlin perfected his well-known "seven dirty words" routine, which appears on Class Clown as follows: "'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." On July 21, 1972, Carlin was arrested after performing the routine at Milwaukee's Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws. The case, which prompted Carlin for a time to call the words the "Milwaukee Seven", was dismissed in December when the judge declared that the language was indecent but that Carlin had the freedom to say it as long as he caused no disturbance.

In 1973, a man complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after listening with his son to a similar routine, "Filthy Words", from Carlin's Occupation: Foole, which was broadcast one afternoon on radio station WBAI. The FCC cited Pacifica for violating regulations that prohibit broadcasting "obscene" material. The controversy increased Carlin's fame. He eventually expanded the "dirty words" theme with a seemingly interminable end to a performance, finishing with his voice fading out in one HBO version and accompanying the credits in the Carlin at Carnegie special for the 1982-83 season, and a set of 49 webpages organized by subject and embracing his "Incomplete List of Impolite Words". On stage, during a rendition of this routine, Carlin learned that his previous comedy album FM & AM had won a Grammy. Midway through the performance on the album Occupation: Foole, he can be heard thanking someone for handing him a piece of paper.

The legal battles surrounding the "seven dirty words" routine culminated in the 1978 United States Supreme Court case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5-4 decision affirmed the government’s power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves.

Saturday Night Live and HBO Specials

Carlin hosted the premiere broadcast of NBC's Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975. Per his request, he did not appear in its sketches. The next season, 1976-77, he appeared regularly on CBS Television's Tony Orlando & Dawn variety series. Carlin unexpectedly stopped performing regularly in 1976, when his career appeared to be at its height.

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For the next five years, he rarely performed stand-up, although it was at this time that he began doing specials for HBO as part of its On Location series. In 1981, Carlin returned to the stage, releasing A Place for My Stuff and returning to HBO and New York City with the Carlin at Carnegie TV special, which was filmed at Carnegie Hall and aired during the 1982-83 season. Carlin continued doing HBO specials every year or two over the following decade and a half. The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977, broadcast as George Carlin at USC.

Film and Television Career

Carlin began to achieve prominence as a film actor with a major supporting role in the 1987 comedy hit Outrageous Fortune, starring Bette Midler and Shelley Long. Beginning in 1988, Carlin evolved and adopted both a new appearance and a new direction. As he did in his first change of direction in the early 1970s, Carlin blended his old and new styles by bringing in politics and disdain for society with nihilist humor while using some of the previous material direction of pointing out the odd things people all do and continued his fascination with language, but with disdain for its current uses by society. He also began growing a ponytail at this time.

In 1989, he gained popularity with a new generation of teens when he was cast as Rufus, the time-traveling mentor of the title characters in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That same year, Carlin became the second American narrator of the children's television series Thomas & Friends, narrating the first through the fourth season. He played Mr. Carlin's Jammin' in New York, a new HBO special in 1992, highlighted the directional change he'd been honing the last few years as he wore all black with longer hair and a new biting humor. Critics applauded the show and he continued down this path of more serious subjects and nihilistic tone for the remainder of his life.

In 1993, Carlin began a weekly Fox sitcom, The George Carlin Show, playing New York City taxicab driver George O'Grady. The show, created and written by The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon, ran for 27 episodes, through December 1995. In Last Words, Carlin wrote of The George Carlin Show, "I had a great time. I never laughed so much, so often, so hard as I did with cast members Alex Rocco, Chris Rich, Tony Starke. There was a very strange, very good sense of humor on that stage … [but] I was incredibly happy when the show was canceled. I was frustrated that it had taken me away from my true work."

Later Career and Recognition

Carlin was honored at the 1997 Aspen Comedy Festival with a retrospective, George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy, hosted by Jon Stewart. Carlin later said that there were other, more pragmatic reasons for abandoning his acting career in favor of standup. In an interview for Esquire magazine in 2001, he said, "Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of. I did it honorably, and I don't begrudge them. I don't hate paying taxes, and I'm not angry at anyone, because I was complicit in it. But I'll tell you what it did for me: it made me a way better comedian.

In 2001, Carlin was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 15th Annual American Comedy Awards. In 2003, Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill (H.R. 3687) to outlaw the broadcast of Carlin's "seven dirty words", including "compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms)". The bill omitted "tits", but included "asshole", not one of Carlin's original seven words.

Carlin performed regularly as a headliner in Las Vegas, but in December 2004, his run at the MGM Grand Las Vegas was terminated after an altercation with his audience. After a poorly received set filled with dark references to suicide bombings and beheadings, Carlin complained that he could not wait to get out of "this fucking hotel" and Las Vegas; he wanted to go back east, he said, "where the real people are". He continued: "People who go to Las Vegas, you've got to question their fucking intellect to start with. Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fucking moronic. That's what I'm always getting here is these kind of fucking people with very limited intellects." An audience member shouted, "Stop degrading us!" Carlin responded, "Thank you very much, whatever that was.

After his 13th HBO special on November 5, 2005, Life Is Worth Losing, Carlin toured his new material through the first half of 2006. Carlin's last HBO stand-up special, It's Bad for Ya, aired live on March 1, 2008, from the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California. Themes included "American bullshit", rights, death, old age, and child-rearing.

Personal Life and Death

Carlin met Brenda Hosbrook while touring with Burns and Carlin in Dayton, Ohio, in August 1960. They were married at her parents’ home in Dayton on June 3, 1961. The couple’s only child, Kelly, was born on June 15, 1963. In 1971 the couple renewed their wedding vows in Las Vegas. In November 1997, Carlin met Sally Wade, a comedy writer based in Hollywood; Carlin described it as “love at first sight,” but was hesitant to act on his feelings so soon after Brenda’s death. They eventually married on June 24, 1998, in a private, unregistered ceremony. Their marriage was often marred by his cocaine use and her alcoholism, the latter of which worsened when Carlin's mother came to stay with them and would secretly pour Hosbrook drinks while derogating him.

Carlin had a history of heart problems, including heart attacks in 1978, 1982, and 1991. He also had an arrhythmia requiring an ablation procedure in 2003, a significant episode of heart failure in 2005, and two angioplasties on undisclosed dates. In the 2022 documentary George Carlin's American Dream, Jerry Hamza-Carlin's manager from 1980 until his death-said Carlin underwent many heart surgeries in a short period toward the end of his life.

On June 22, 2008, at age 71, Carlin died from heart failure at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. His death occurred one week after his final performance at The Orleans Hotel and Casino. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and its ashes were scattered in front of various nightclubs he played in New York City and over Spofford Lake, in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, where he attended summer camp as an adolescent.

Legacy and Honors

Along with numerous other accolades, Carlin won five Grammy Awards and was nominated for six Primetime Emmy Awards and two Daytime Emmy Awards. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 1987, and was a recipient of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts named him its 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor honoree. He became its first posthumous recipient on November 10 in Washington, D.C.

Upon Carlin's death in 2008, HBO broadcast 11 of his 14 HBO specials from June 25 to 28, including a 12-hour marathon block on the HBO Comedy channel. NBC scheduled a rerun of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which Carlin hosted. Both Sirius Satellite Radio's "Raw Dog Comedy" and XM Satellite Radio's "XM Comedy" channels ran a memorial marathon of Carlin recordings the day after he died. Sirius XM Satellite Radio has since devoted an entire channel to Carlin, Carlin's Corner, featuring all his comedy albums, live concerts, and works from his private archives. Larry King devoted his June 23 show to a Carlin tribute, featuring interviews with Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Roseanne Barr, Lewis Black, Carlin's brother, Patrick Jr., and his daughter, Kelly.

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