Carlin And His Seven Words

George Carlin may have passed away, but the impact he has had on the English language and modern culture will be felt for years to come. Carlin died of a heart attack at the age of 71, and we who are still alive continue to grope our way forward in defining the boundaries that the word ‘permissiveness’, from a linguistic point of view, defines.

In a comic act at the Summerfest in Milwaukee on July 21, 1972, Carlin mouthed seven words considered unutterable. That routine landed him in the paddy wagon on charges of violating laws pertaining to obscenity. The whole episode is a reflection of the straight jacketed attitude that authorities had in those times about linguistic and other related taboos and also of Carlin’s perception of the usage of words.

Even today, our movements towards permissiveness in the literary domain have not been exactly uniform. Carlin deserves the credit for at least getting us moving in that direction. Some of the words that were offensive earlier are now widely accepted, such as the word ‘sucks’.

That word finds mention almost everywhere, even on television and the movies. The animated feature Kung Fu Panda uses the word easily. South Park from Comedy Central dedicated an entire episode in 2001 to one of the seven words Carlin originally used in his now-famous routine, repeating it 162 times.

Today, the moral police is out in full force from time to time, as evidenced by the uproar caused by Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and the language wars Howard Stern has been part of on radio. The latest and most outrageous of them all was the blanking out of Sally Field’s acceptance speech at the Emmys in September 2007. by Fox.

What makes the last mentioned incident even more outrageous was that it did not feature even one of the seven words Carlin used. All Fields said was, “If the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamned wars in the first place.”

There is a reason for the almost paranoiac approach networks and radio stations are taking to bowing acquiescence to the moral police – the Federal Communications Commission. This watchdog agency has raised the fine amounts levied on networks found guilty of violating decency standards.

And yet this is what Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell and the man at the helm of the FCC when it was dishing out the huge fines when the Super Bowl incident happened, had to say about Carlin, “I think since he did it, there have been periods of greater permissiveness – on the part of the citizenry and government regulations—and there have been periods where it has swung back to the notion of some higher level of propriety in broadcast television.”

For someone who rose to such heights, Carlin’s beginnings were quite humble. He started his career, like many others of his time, with a clean act, appearing The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show.

Carlin changed his looks and also his routine at the end of the decade, growing his hair and beard. He also started using words that were considered ‘obscene’ in those times, in his act. Needless to say, he got into trouble many a time for those inclusions.

He came out with his comedy album “Class Clown” towards the end of 1972. The album featured Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. His status as an anti-establishment figurehead was confirmed when a broadcast of another of his hits, Filthy Words, by a New York radio station in 1973 resulted in legal action that went up all the way to the Supreme Court.

Richard Zoglin, author of Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America (2008) said of Carlin, “Language was the real taboo. He didn’t do it to shock people. It was a shock to hear them said on stage, but he was really trying to make a point. Why [do] we fear language? ... There’s nothing really bad about these words. They’re just words.”

Carlin has passed away, but the admiration continues. Paul Provenza, who directed Carlin in the 2005 movie, The Aristocrats, said, “He was the product of a cultural revolution, a change in attitudes, of a time frame. Whether he’s responsible for those changes or a manifestation [of them] is irrelevant because he defined them intellectually, legally and creatively."

Carlin was one person who you can say changed attitudes and perceptions. That is something not all of us can boast of doing. Simply put, that is the power of his words; that is the power of Carlin.