Although he started in a double act with George Burns, Carlin made his television debut in 1962 on The Tonight Show. Carlin worked consistently, continuing to produce worthwhile material and his career became the “longest-lived and least compromised” in stand-up comedy history. In the fifty or odd years of his career, George Carlin produced twenty-one specials and fifteen hours for HBO, acted in numerous television shows and films, wrote seven books, won five Grammys, and instigated one Supreme Court case. By any metric, he had a career to be reckoned with.
The highmark of that career is unquestionably his 1972 landmark bit, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” It is the last track on the B side on his album Class Clown, and was an enormous success, remaining one of the most important and influential stand-up bits of all time. “I wanted a list,” he explains to his audience, “That’s the problem, nobody gives you a list. Wouldn’t that make sense, if they didn’t want you to say something, they’d give you a list?” The bit was a linguistic and satirical mockery of the way in which censorship operates in this country. The words, being piss, shit, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, Carlin called “The Heavy Seven.” In Class Clown he jokingly told his audience, “Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.”
Carlin’s Seven Words routine hugely impacted the world of free speech and artistic expression. The twelve-minute bit was played on the Pacifica Foundation-owned New York radio station WBAI on October 30th, 1973, and caused a huge backlash with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The case, FCC v. The Pacifica Foundation, was taken to court and made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1978. It was a landmark court case, setting a new standard for first amendment rights and the regulations over the broadcasting of “indecent” material. But to be honest, you can’t really talk about George Carlin or dirty words without talking about Lenny Bruce.
Eight short years before Carlin’s seven, Bruce himself was taken to court for his comedy and its content. Bruce was arrested from stage multiple times throughout his career for violating the public obscenity laws of the time. His final court case was still underway at the time of his death in 1966. Carlin’s very first album, back when it was Burns and Carlin, features an impression of Lenny Bruce. Bruce was an early hero of Carlin’s, and he was on the young, hip side of comedy when Carlin was still a suit-and-tie Vegas guy. If it weren’t for Bruce, Carlin may never have left Las Vegas and found his true voice. While Lenny Bruce was only 12 years his senior, the world that Lenny came up in was altogether different. “Some people have erroneously connected me with Lenny because of profane language,” said Carlin. “He was the first one to make language an issue and suffered from it-- I was the first one to make language an issue and succeed from it.”