Carlin was as good as his words

He expounded on language, he didn't exploit it

George Carlin (shown in 2003), the comic and performer responsible for the routine the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," died last Sunday at 71. (David g. masseyap/file 2003)

It's 1972 in a bedroom somewhere in the endless flatness of suburbia. A phonograph needle drops on the last track of a much-played vinyl album, and a teenage boy cranes his ears once more, waiting for the voice to come through the crackle:

"I love words," it begins. "They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really."

The ears belonged to me and the voice belonged to George Carlin, who died last Sunday of heart failure at 71. The routine, of course, is the now-classic "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," off the 1972 "Class Clown" album, and it's the only part of the track I can safely quote here. Those seven words are still too radioactive for a family newspaper.

For a while there, Carlin was all my buddies and I talked about. He was funny, yes, but more crucially he was dirty - the linguistic equivalent of the Playboys some of us found hidden in our father's closets. Because we were teenagers and because the culture had swept him under the rug, we had never heard of Lenny Bruce. In a very real way, Carlin (who knew Bruce) was able to take advantage of the passage of time and the rise of the counterculture to finish what his mentor had started.

In so doing, he became something more than a pioneer shock comic, although he influenced dozens: from Sam Kinison to Robin Williams to the dozens of personalities who tumbled out of "Saturday Night Live ," on whose debut telecast he served as guest host. Instead of exploiting the Seven Dirty Words, Carlin expounded on them, and in the expounding both celebrated the joys of language and laughed at the hypocrisy that can cling to it. Once he had broached the subject - what can't you say, and why? - the matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1978 upheld the FCC's fine against a New York City radio station that had broadcast a 1973 Carlin routine, "Filthy Words."

Some words, the court decreed, are just plain bad - not "indecent," but "obscene." For the first time a formal line was drawn in the sand, which turned out to be useful for the FCC when it came time to fine Howard Stern. Yet the horse had left the barn. The words, and the idea of discussing taboo language in an open forum, was out there.

So was the much easier tactic of dropping the F-bomb in public for instant effect. Like violence in the movies, profanity is as smart or as stupid as the person using it, and the standards slowly dropped. Richard Pryor, roughly Carlin's peer, employed four letter words as percussion; he swore like angry jazz. Fifteen years later, Andrew Dice Clay was using obscenity to rouse audiences to mob glee.

Today the Seven Dirty Words are more often than not punctuation in an empty sentence, wielded by stand-ups who lean on them like a crutch. The words no longer even shock; on the contrary, the complacency that lies behind them deadens the ears and sensibilities. What Carlin always knew - intent matters far more than language - was lost on his followers.

Is this why he got so angry in his later years? The latter-day albums and HBO specials - sample title: "You Are All Diseased" - became occasions for withering diatribes against cultural blandness, middle-American groupthink, and ultimately people in general. "What we are is semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons," he said in 2005.

Carlin was gunning for the status of Wise Old Crank, or maybe he was punishing his audience for not paying attention the first time. If stand-up comics are a form of secular clergy, sermonizing on the paradoxes of life rather than the constants, then this one had become a blood-and-thunder holy roller. "I don't have pet peeves," he'd say. "I have major psychotic [expletive] hatreds. And it makes the world a lot easier to sort out."

By contrast, to listen to albums like "Class Clown" or 1972's "FM & AM" again is to revisit a spirit of surpassingly gentle playfulness. Carlin's riffs on classroom pranks and Catholic guilt sounds less original now, but the tone of relaxed inquisitiveness remains fresh, and that's why the "Seven Words" sketch lifts off into new territory. What sticks is the lack of hostility in his cadences. It's the sound of a man temporarily at peace with his demons and with his gifts.

Which makes sense, since Carlin had only recently re-invented himself from the top down. After a decade-plus as a generic Ed Sullivan-era stand-up - short, slicked-back hair; nice suit; inoffensive routines - he was prospering with a recurring role on "That Girl" and guest-hosting duties on "The Tonight Show." And it all felt wrong. At the end of the '60s, then, Carlin grew the hair long, sported an earring, started wearing blue jeans. He was a hippie stand-up - a novelty. When he said "ass" onstage at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, he was summarily fired. And it felt right.

Thus began a second career as a purveyor of brilliant spoken-word arias of filth. At times Carlin could approach the free-form associative poetry of another son of Ireland, James Joyce, such as the bit where . . . never mind, I can't quote it. But it put the "scat" in scatology.

While Carlin was arrested in 1973 for performing the Seven Dirty Words routine at a Milwaukee outdoor festival, he was never into the martyr-jailbird thing. He saw himself as a comedian rather than an activist, and perhaps that's why the frustration gathered as the decades rolled on. He could make people laugh and he could even make them think, but he couldn't change their behavior.

So he tailed off into rants about Mickey Mouse and pop singers with one name and - the last resort of the desperate - airport security. Yet the fascination with language remained, dirty and otherwise, in corners of his routines and in the memories of those who were listening before he turned bitter. When the news came last week that Carlin had died, I quietly said the seven dirty words to myself. And this time I meant them.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com