The suit-and-tie version of George Carlin, like Pryor, got himself fired on a Vegas stage. Unlike Pryor, Carlin didn’t walk off -- he got thrown out.
Carlin had a regular gig at the Frontier, a job that paid him the handsome sum of $12,500 a week. (That’s about 95 grand weekly in 2022 dollars). But, like Pryor, Carlin was dismayed about routines that no longer felt authentic. “I was a victim of my own success and here’s what I was missing,” he says. “I was missing who I was.”
So on one night in 1970, he began his Frontier set with a little number on the different ways to say “shit.” At this point, the audience was only silent. When he started in on the Vietnam war and American business ethics, some angry men had to be restrained from bum-rushing the stage. He was canned that night.
The real-life incident became part of his new counterculture comedy routine.
I got fired in Las Vegas for saying “shit” in a town where the big game is called “craps.”
While both comics’ transformations came from a place of artistic dissatisfaction, Carlin’s in particular was fueled by mind-altering substances. “I was a traitor and I was living a real lie because I wanted to say so many different things,” he says. “What happened that changed everything was acid.”
The specific incident was one that Carlin’s daughter Kelly never forgot. She and George’s wife Brenda found him tripping in his bedroom. He’d taken several publicity pictures of himself and “smashed his fist into them to the point where he had made his hands bleed, and there was blood everywhere.” The two sat with the comic for nearly an hour before he fell asleep.
“Really, very, very scary,” Kelly says. “He was having a real battle within himself. Which George is gonna win?”
Bette Milder opened for Carlin at a Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, soon after the incident. He had a whole new set of material to try. “I guess he had been working up to this,” says Midler. “He wanted to be a different George Carlin.’
The anti-Vietnam war material went over even worse this time, with club management warning George that they couldn’t guarantee his safety and that he should leave quickly.
“It felt,” says Bette, “like a leap into the unknown.”
Carlin realized that he was in the middle of a generation war. “I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were 40, and they were at war with their kids who were 20. So I had to come to terms with what I really wanted to do and who I was.”
That meant abandoning the well-paying Vegas casinos and Playboy Clubs and essentially starting his career all over again. Like Pryor, he toured small clubs as he re-established an audience, this time one more in line with his counterculture sensibilities. In time, his fame exploded as he and Pryor became the faces of 1970s comedy.
In the mind of comic Patton Oswalt, Carlin’s evolution wasn’t a transformation at all. “The clean-shaven guy was a persona that the industry expected of him,” says Oswalt. “It was like he de-transformed into who he actually was.”
For more ComedyNerd, be sure to check out:
Andy Dick: A History Of Being Terrible
20 Crank Yankers Calls For The Hall Of Fame
Saturday Night Live: The 8 Kinds Of Sketches You Find On The Show
For ComedyNerd exclusive content and more, subscribe to our fancy newsletter:
[newsletter]
Top image: Apatow Productions