David Cantwell writes:

Here’s my George Carlin story.

On the morning of my 13th birthday, I found two presents wrapped and at my place at the breakfast table, both clearly albums. This was exciting. Not only would these lp’s likely be ones I wanted–I’d earlier supplied my parents with a list of desired albums for just this purpose–but they would be mine, the first albums in the house that I didn’t have to share with my younger sisters (I believe we had a couple of K-Tel collections by that time) or that didn’t belong to my parents (such as, Tom Jones’ I (Who Have Nothing), Kitty Wells’ Queen of Honky Tonk Street, The Best of Hank Snow).

Thirty four years later, I still have one of those birthday albums, Dancing Machine by the Jackson Five. But the other one, I don’t have–and, in fact, listened to only once. That album was Class Clown by George Carlin.

I didn’t know much about Carlin then. I think I’d seen him on a few variety shows, reprising his Al Sleet character, the hippie-dippie weatherman, who’s absurdist forecast cracked my barely teenage ass up:

“Tonight’s forecast…Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning.” (It still cracks my ass up!) But I’m certain I wouldn’t have known enough about Class Clown to request it specifically.

But now there it was in my hands, Carlin sitting in front of a schoolroom chalkboard, a finger fake-shoved up his nose and, in the lower left corner, a white sticker in red letters that proclaimed:

“This record includes Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. Hearing it could infect your mind, curve your spine, and lose the war for the allies.”

I’m sure my father didn’t know anything about the record either, but, acting like a good parent, he figured he’d better check the record out first and make certain that his son really didn’t wind up hearing any words unfit for TV.

Those seven words–all together now: “shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits”–would eventually get Carlin arrested and Pacifica radio in trouble with the FCC for playing the bit over the air. But I wouldn’t discover anything about that until years after the fact. I like to think, though, that this early, albeit unknown, brush with the issue of censorship set me down the road to fighting record labeling laws here in Missouri in the early 1990s.

But that was a long time later. On my thirteenth birthday, my father took the album into my room to preview it privately. When he emerged, he was livid. Instead of smashing the record over my head, though, or telling me I couldn’t have it after all, he surprised me. “I want you to go in there and listen to your heee-roh.”

Cut to me in my room, bent over and holding my sides, trying desperately not to laugh loudly enough for my father to hear.

After I’d heard the album, and had been warned again of its potential for evil, my father announced that we were returning the record to the Venture department store where he’d bought it. “This is philthy,” my father told the woman at the returns counter. “I want my money back.”

“But, sir, it says right on the front that it includes seven words you can’t say on television,” she protested.

Without missing a beat, my old man replied: “Yeah, but it also says it’ll lose the war for the Allies.”

He got his money back.

It’s nice to think that the Class Clown himself might’ve applauded a man who could win an argument through his use of language and awareness of contradiction. While I was never a devoted Carlin fan after the Class Clown incident, I’d sometimes catch his HBO specials and laugh my ass off anew, always appreciative of how he never shied away from sprinkling his social commentary with–forever the class clown–good ol’ fart and tit jokes. As he got older, his humor got angrier, or so it seemed to me; he’d sometimes abandon laughs altogether and just rant for a minute or two–often, especially of late, he bitched about how stupid a lot of people were. But what always kept Carlin from being a misanthrope like so many other libertarians (like, say, that jackass Dennis Miller) is that he always made plain the moral center of where he was coming from, which in turn made his anger (if not every one of his diagnoses) seem more than fair to me and his humor dig much deeper.

On that last point…there are tons of great videos of Carlin at work over at YouTube, but I especially recommend his famous bit on homelessness and golf courses and his skewering of the American Dream. It’s sad he’s left us, at only 71, because we still need his righteous humor. Every tragic hero needs his fool, and every class needs a clown.

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