Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
George Carlin on obscenity in the age of Ashcroft.
Apr 3, 2004 | Anybody who's ever listened to George Carlin parse some absurdity of the language knows the man is a word freak. In conversation, he talks about coming from a verbal family and the need for the self-educated to prove they are as smart as the folks who actually went to college. The mere suggestion of a topic is enough to set Carlin off on monologues. But instead of feeling you're in the presence of a man who's showing off, you feel that you're listening to someone who is in love with words, with teasing out the illogic in behavior and received wisdom.
In Kevin Smith's "Jersey Girl," Carlin gives a convincing, unsentimental performance as Bart, a working-class Jersey stiff who winds up taking in his hotshot publicist son and granddaughter after his daughter-in-law dies in childbirth. For Carlin, the role was a chance to show there were more sides to him than those seen in the 90 nights a year he does stand-up. But he's very proud of the work that he's done on more than a dozen HBO specials (the next is next year) and, since he insists that his comedy comes out of his writing, of the two books he has published so far. ("When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" appears in the fall.)
As you'd expect from a man whose work received some unwanted attention back in the 1970s from the government (a father heard Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" on the car radio with his son in attendance and the resulting case was argued to the Supreme Court. Here's a hint: Free speech didn't win) Carlin has plenty to say about the FCC's latest follies (call it The Pro Bowdlerizer's Tour), as well as the political impulse behind it, the tyranny of boomer parenthood, the source of his own comedy, and at least a half-dozen more issues.
Salon reached Carlin by phone during his tour to promote "Jersey Girl."
You've been in the news indirectly with the FCC fracas and people have harked back to the "Seven Words" case --
Thanks for saying "harked." So many people say "harkened back." I give you a medal.
Thanks. What I wanted to ask you is, Do you think things are worse now, are these things cyclical, is it because we're in an election year?
There are suggestions in that series of choices you gave me. Definitely, I see the need for them to secure not just the vote of the far right. As you probably know, [Bush] disappointed a lot of the far-right people with their spending and their deficits, not living up to the full conservative image they had of him. There's a need on the right, not just to get them to vote for him, but to get them to work for the ticket. And the Massachusetts Supreme Court threw the gay marriage thing in his lap as a gift.
I don't know how it works, maybe they say to the FCC, keep an eye out on things, or maybe they just wait for the Janet Jackson thing. The other answer is, yes, there is a cyclical nature to some of this. It's like being in the Air Force or the Army and having inspection. You're in a permanent outfit and everyone does their job well, so discipline gets a little lax. And then every now and then, a general or a colonel or someone will notice and suddenly there are inspections. They want your shoes shined, your coat hangers in a certain way, they want the hospital corners on the bed. They get very chickenshit for about a month. And that goes away. It's similar to that. It's a chickenshit thing that comes and goes.
But overall, the impact of John Ashcroft and the PATRIOT Act -- the impulse to want to control behavior better among the populace, and to legislate patriotism and religiosity -- has created a chilling effect on expression. And I'm sure there are people censoring themselves at these networks and all these media outlets. And it's not a long leap between that and someone saying, "You know, these left wingers, they're starting to say things that are really not in the interest of this country and perhaps they ought to be controlled, too." From dirty language to political speech doesn't seem so far of a leap once you get people used to the idea that a government body can do this.
How do these people get away with the idea that they are protecting kids?
I think in terms of the dirty language and the overprotection of children in general -- God, you need a helmet for everything these days. I have never seen any sort of study or even an informal body of opinion that thinks these words alone are somehow morally corrupting, that the words do any damage. What they do in many cases is they have a potential of embarrassing the parents because they know they don't want their kids to say them in front of the neighbors. I don't know that there's ever been any evidence shown that that father in the car who reported the "Seven Dirty Words" -- by the way, that name was what the L.A. Times called it, I never used the word "dirty," I called it "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" and I didn't like them called dirty because that was my argument: that they weren't. But anyway, they are now. So that father and that son sat there. I believe he belonged to something called Morals in Media. They didn't turn that off. They weren't appalled. They weren't shocked into turning the radio off or changing the station. He let the child listen, and he listened, and my assumption is that neither of the two were morally corrupted or injured in any way by this experience. They were actually exposed to the words and what damage did they do?
When my little girl was growing up, we cursed around our house and she heard me curse. She was 9 years old when the "Seven Dirty Words," so-called, case hit. We told her, "Listen, Kelly, we don't mind you using that kind of language among people who don't mind you using that kind of language. But you go to someone else's house and you're not sure how that mother or father feels, and most of them won't like it, that's not where you say it. You don't go there and insult other people and violate their own rules that they have. You're at school or in a setting where that language isn't called for or accepted, you honor what's going on there. But there's nothing wrong with the words. They're fine. They will not hurt and neither will the things they represent, which you'll find out more about later."
We have to remember what most of this springs from is religion. Probably among humans there is a natural and an innate modesty. In northern climates you were forced to cover certain parts of your body because it was cold as a motherfucker. But the church took what may have been a natural modesty about the bedroom, and a natural sort of a shyness, and exploited it into this idea that the body is somehow dirty and evil or at least potentially evil. Well, of course, you can raise a stick and kill somebody. The body is capable of all sorts of nastiness. Two of the most irresistible urges in nature -- "I gotta take a shit!" "I gotta get laid one of these days!" I know it's imperfect and it won't look great in print. But those two things are bodily needs. Sure, shit is nasty and dirty but so are a lot of other things, so is the garbage that comes out of the bottom of a grease trap in the kitchen. But the church has over the centuries has given us guilt, fear and shame about our bodies and the things that they do.
In a recent interview, you said you were anxious to take the role of Bart [in "Jersey Girl"] because you wanted to show you were capable of more things than people thought. I don't know how many people remember that you played a gay man in "The Prince of Tides." What do you think the image of you is versus what you can do?
I don't worry about my image that much. The movie people are very unaware of my career and the success of my stand-up, month in, month out and year after year. They sort of know it but they don't really. So they think of me as a kind of comedian, and I am that. But they think of me one-dimensionally and haven't really listened or heard or the seen the fact that there are a lot of things going on in my comedy besides just showing up and doing superficial jokes.
So I've tried to show that I have other sides to me besides what they see on a stage, which is a highly intensified, theatricalized, strident, confrontational thing that some people read as anger. They don't see me as a person with a well-rounded personality. Granted, "The Prince of Tides" was a great exception. Everything else I've been offered and not done has been very cartoony and one-dimensional -- you're the high-school principal and the kids get the better of you and your temper explodes. But because I cared to act a little, because I would like to entertain that part of myself, I wanted Hollywood people to see that I could do more. Whenever I meet a guy who makes movies I say, "If you ever need someone to kill six children, call me, because I have other things I can do."
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