“Now everyone is walking around wondering what they can say and censoring themselves and, as a result, lowering the standards of discussion and thought.” Sounds like 2022, but the guy who said this was arrested 50 years ago this week on a charge of “disorderly conduct, profanity.” We’ve come a long way but seem to be looping back.
Comedian George Carlin was performing at Summerfest in Milwaukee on July 21, 1972, doing his then-current routine noting the absurdity that “there are more ways to describe dirty words than there are dirty words: dirty, bad, filthy, foul, vile, vulgar, off-color, blue, naughty, bawdy, saucy, raunchy, street language, gutter talk, locker-room talk, barracks language, indecent, in poor taste, suggestive, cursing, cussing, swearing, profanity, obscenity, and all I could think of were . . .” He then listed what will forever be known as the “seven words you can’t say on television.” I won’t repeat them, but I bet many of you can rattle them off from memory.
The Summerfest arrest wasn’t his first. For refusing to show his ID, he was thrown in the same paddywagon as Lenny Bruce in 1962. Maybe that’s why Carlin developed a routine to push free-speech rights even further. The new HBO documentary “George Carlin’s American Dream” chronicles these stories, although like most documentaries it eventually devolves into political hackery. Skip the final 30 minutes—the rest is comedy gold.
The Milwaukee district attorney asked a policeman, “Was it disorderly?” Getting no answer, he turned to an assistant district attorney and asked, “You were there, what did the audience do?” “Well, they gave him a standing ovation.” During the trial, the judge apparently hid his face to cover his laughter. Mr. Carlin was acquitted.
In 1973 a man complained to the Federal Communications Commission that his 15-year-old son heard Carlin’s famous routine on WBAI-FM, a noncommercial station in New York. Eventually, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation made its way to the Supreme Court, and Justice John Paul Stevens’s 1978 opinion, which still stands, ruled that to protect children from “inappropriate” speech—add that to Carlin’s list of dirty descriptors—those seven dirty words shouldn’t be heard on public airwaves.
Though antiestablishment, Carlin’s politics were hard to pigeonhole. On the illusion of choice:
