May 27, 1972: George Carlin Says Seven Words

Warning: If naughty language offends you, don't read this. And ask yourself why the naughty language offends you.

May 27, 1972: Comedian George Carlin gives a performance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, outside Los Angeles. It is recorded for the album Class Clown, which is released on September 29.

In the 1960s, Carlin specialized in characters and voices, including Al Sleet the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. He would drop jokes about drugs, including, "This (weather system) is known as a Canadian Low, which is not to be confused with a Mexican High."

But "The Sixties," as a cultural phenomenon, had a big effect on him. Lenny Bruce, who died of a drug overdose (which may not have been self-inflicted) in 1966, had occasionally been arrested for using profanity onstage -- and Carlin had once been arrested along with him. Muhammad Ali was stripped of the Heavyweight Championship of the World because he refused to accept being drafted, and used his religion as his reason.

The one time The Beatles had to apologize for something they did had nothing to do with opposition to the Vietnam War: It was when John Lennon said the band was "more popular than Jesus now." And he was right. In the press conference in which he apologized, he told the truth again: "If I had said that television was more popular than Jesus, I might have gotten away with it." And Jim Morrison of The Doors had been arrested on a charge of exposing himself on stage.

So Carlin changed his act. He switched from suits to casual clothes, grew his hair long, grew a beard, and joked about touchy subjects, like war, drugs, sex and religion -- and about subjects that shouldn't have been touchy, like clothes, hair and language.

In his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1971 -- it was the show that was about to be canceled, not Carlin himself -- he went into a long poem about long hair, and said, "So, be like a bear. Be fair with your hair. Show it you care. Wear it to there. Or to there. Or to there, if you dare!" But, on live national television, he wasn't yet willing to say, "Wear your hair to your derriere!" 

The next year, he was ready to go all the way -- on record and onstage, if not on TV. One of the tracks on the Class Clown album was titled "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television." Here is how George started the bit:

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion.

Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. Then, we assign a word to a thought, and we're stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words.

I like to think that the same words that hurt can heal. It is a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that are not into all the words. There are some that would have you not use certain words. There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are 7
of them you can't say on television. What a ratio that is: 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you 7: Bad Words.

That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word!" No bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words.

You know the 7, don't you, that you can't say on television? "Shit," "Piss," "Fuck," "Cunt," "Cocksucker," "Motherfucker," and "Tits." Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war: "Shit," "Piss," "Fuck," "Cunt," "Cocksucker," "Motherfucker," and "Tits." 

He would vary the bit over the years. Someone pointed out that "Motherfucker" was a derivative of "Fuck," so it should be dropped, in favor of another word. At first, Carlin decided that this fan was right. But after a while, he changed his mind -- not because he now thought the fan was wrong, but because he'd been doing the bit the same way for so long, that he just decided his original Seven Words simply had too good a rhythm to change. Even a comic as foul-mouthed as George Carlin understood the importance of timing.

Of course, the order had nothing to do with which of them was more offensive. I was a kid in the 1970s, and "shit" was the 1st curse-word I knew about, and "fuck" was the 2nd. In the 1st grade, in 1976, another kid in a crowded cafeteria showed me the word "shit" on a piece of paper, and asked me to say it out loud. Being 6 years old, and not knowing any better, I figured "out loud" meant, "really loud." So I said it, really loud. And about 100 people gasped. Oddly, I didn't get in trouble. Today, if a 6-year-old kid shouted the word "Shit!" in a crowded cafeteria, maybe nobody would bat an eye.

Carlin knew what the top two (or bottom two) words were, and he pointed out that they referred to, respectively, the need to get waste product out of the human body, and the desire to have sex in order to reproduce, even if that's not what you're thinking about when you're thinking about sex. He said, "Two of the most powerful and unstoppable forces in the world, and we're not allowed to talk about them? Fuck that shit!"

An aside: When I first got interested in English soccer, I got into the slang used in England's pop culture, and I noticed something: They use "bollocks," meaning testicles, the way we use "shit": Something that's bad is shit or bollocks, but something good can be "the shit" or "the bollocks." Going back to Carlin, that's weird, because "balls" was not one of his original Seven Words.

Nor was any other word we use for that part of the male anatomy: Stones, onions, etc. Nor was any word we use instead of penis: Dick, cock, dong, etc. Nor was "pussy" for vagina -- but "cunt" was, and is. A few years ago, because of its use to insult women, a female writer for The New York Times Magazine wrote an article on the word "cunt," without using it once, titling the article "The Worst Word in the English Language." She contended it was even worse than the word starting with N that is used to insult black people, and that it should never be used. Ever.

In America, sure: You can't use it anymore, not even to insult a man: "See that guy who drives a gas-guzzling SUV and complains about high gas prices? He's the reason they're so high. He's a cunt!" But in Britain, they use it all the time. In his memoir Fever Pitch, novelist Nick Hornby, commenting on the abuse of players in soccer games, was once relieved to realize that a fan had called a black player "merely a cunt, not a black cunt."

Getting back to body parts: There are a lot of euphemisms for "breasts." When the game show Match Game was restarted in 1973, with edgier clues than in its 1962-69 version, the words you could use instead of "breasts" was "bust" and "bosoms." They also allowed a variation on "bosoms": "Bazooms." (Which may have led to another, that I heard Markie Post use on Night Court in the 1980s: "Zoomers.")

But you couldn't use "tits." Carlin liked to say, "'Tits' doesn't even belong on the list." On a 1974 installment of Match Game, "Boobs" was used as an answer, and everybody was shocked. Carlin was stunned: He couldn't understand why "boobs" was allowed on TV, and "tits" wasn't. Why that choice? Why is one okay to use, and not the other? Why not the other way around?

By 1978, the use of "boobs" on Match Game was so common, actress Marcia Wallace, a semi-regular on the show's panel, was able to say, "I have found, on this wonderful show, that if you're stuck for an answer, it's either 'boobs,' or 'Howard Cosell.'"

On a 1980 installment of that show, Betty White pointed out that the sound of the letter K is inherently funny. Carlin caught onto this at least as far back as that 1972 album: "And those Ks, those are aggressive sounds. They just jump out at you, like 'coCKsuCKer, motherfuCKer. CoCKsuCKer, motherfuCKer.' It's like an assault on you."

Years later, he would joke about the sounds of names. For example, we admire the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. He was German, but his ancestry, and therefore his surname, were Dutch. Carlin said, "He wouldn't be nearly so famous if his name was Joey Cocksucker, would he?" But, being German, it would have been "Josef Cachsucher."

People who complain about objectionable material on TV and in movies, especially when seen by children, usually cite "sex and violence" -- almost always, in that order. In other words, they object to depictions of sex, or even discussions of sex, more than they do to depictions of violence.

On the album, Carlin said, "People much wiser than I am said, 'I'd rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love than 2 people trying to kill one another.' I, of course, can agree. It is a great sentence. I wish I knew who said it first."

He went on to talk about words that are okay in some circumstances, but not in others. Like the aforementioned "balls." And "ass": Use it for "donkey," or for stubborn behavior, as in, "You're acting like an ass!" But not for somebody's rear end. Carlin also cited, "You can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick! No, no!"

Which brings me back to Carlin's refusal in 1971 to use "derriere," a French word for "rear end." By 1973, that word was considered safe to use on TV. By 1974, TV shows were using the Yiddish word "tuchis," and its American variations, "tush" and "tushy." By 1978, "butt" was okay.

As far back as a 1978 Christmas-themed episode of M*A*S*H, Father Francis Mulcahy (played by William Christopher) upbraided Captain Ben "Hawkeye" Pierce (Alan Alda) not to "speak with the jawbone of an ass," a reference to the Biblical figure Samson using such a jawbone to kill his enemies. 

And there was a 1976 episode when Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) was wounded in the rear end by sniper fire, but the word "ass" was not used there: You couldn't. Over the course of that show's 11 seasons, they used the words "bucket," "can," "derriere," "rear," "tush," "tushy," "tuchis," "butt," "kiester," "the back of my front" and "the permanent vertical smile" -- but not "ass."

There was an early episode where Hawkeye wondered why some things about the Korean War were getting to him, and others weren't, and Potter's predecessor as the unit's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), said, "Because you're a doctor."

Hawkeye: "What the hell does that mean?" (That expression was allowed.)

Henry: "I don't know. If I knew that, I'd be at the Mayo Clinic. Does this place look like the Mayo Clinic?"

If M*A*S*H were rebooted, and it were on HBO or some other "premium channel," they might do that scene again, but either "this place" or "the Mayo Clinic" would have had the word "fucking" inserted.

In a 1979 episode, and again in the show's finale in 1983, Alda got away with calling somebody, "You son of a bitch!" And was called that by a General earlier in 1983. I can't think of an earlier use of that expression on TV.

In the pilot episode of The Golden Girls in 1985, Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) used the word "pee." Since then, that word has been used many, many times. But on her first appearance on Match Game, in 1973, writer and comedian Fannie Flagg used "pee," and was warned by show creator and executive producer Mark Goodson that if she ever used the word again, she would never appear on the show again. She never used it again, and the word accepted on the show was "tinkle."

In a 1994 episode of Mad About You, Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) said to his cousin, Ira (John Pankow), "You piss people off." As far as I know, this was the first time the word "piss" was used uncensored on prime-time TV, but it was not used as a euphemism for urination. Mad About You was one of many shows to use "ass" for "rear end" once the rules were somewhat relaxed.

In 1990, in the pilot episode of the legal drama The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, series star Sharon Gless considered breast augmentation surgery, saying, "I wonder if I should get my tits done." So, we were down to six words. That show was on CBS, airing at 10:00 PM, so the standards were slightly relaxed. This was also true for a later CBS show, the medical drama Chicago Hope: In 1999, Dr. Jack McNeil (Mark Harmon) used "shit," uncensored. Now, we were down to five.

You still can't say, "fuck" or, "motherfucker" on prime-time TV, which is why, when the Die Hard movies are shown, Bruce Willis' catchphrase is limited to, "Yippie-ki-yay!"

In addition, in TV broadcasts where one of the Classic Seven Words is used, they begin by issuing a warning about the language, and saying, "Viewer discretion is advised."

Back to 1972: On July 21, Carlin performed "Seven Words" at Summerfest in Milwaukee, and was arrested. The case was dismissed in December, when the judge declared that the language was indecent, but that Carlin had the freedom to say it, as long as he caused no disturbance.

In 2004, the cable network Comedy Central conducted a fan poll to name the greatest comedians of all time. Carlin came in 2nd, behind Richard Pryor, who also used words, especially racially-charged ones, to shock people. In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine conducted a similar poll, which also ranked Pryor 1st and Carlin 2nd.

Despite a 2019 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History that depicted them opposing each other, they were friends and mutual admirers (who probably used cocaine together before they beat their respective addictions, and both made a lot of jokes about drugs), and even appeared together on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1982.

The ERB episode turned into a "battle royale," with "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Carlin; rapper Valin Zamarron, a.k.a. ZEALE, playing Pryor; comedian Gary Anthony Williams playing Bill Cosby; comedian Jackie Tohn playing Joan Rivers; and "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist playing Robin Williams.

Pryor died in 2005, Carlin in 2008.

*

May 27, 1972 was a Saturday. Football, basketball and hockey were out of season. These games were played in Major League Baseball:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 2-1 at Yankee Stadium. Joe Coleman Jr. outpitched Mel Stottlemyre Sr. Al Kaline left the game in the 1st inning due to an injury.

* The New York Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-1 at Busch Memorial Stadium. Willie Mays, traded to the Mets a few days earlier, did not play. Which left him better off than Lou Brock and Joe Torre, who both went 0-for-4.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 9-3 at Fenway Park in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski did not play, but Tommy Harper, better known for his speed, hit a home run.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Cleveland Indians, 4-2 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Terry Crowley hit a home run, but Brooks Robinson went 0-for-3.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-1 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente went 1-for-5. Willie Stargell appeared as a pinch-hitter, and struck out. For the Phillies, Willie Montañez hit a home run, and Don Money drove in the winning run with a groundout in the top of the 12th inning.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Atlanta Braves, 11-9 at Atlanta Stadium. (It was renamed Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1975.) Hank Aaron went 0-for-2, but he did draw 3 walks. The Braves did get a home run, from Marty Perez. The Giants got homers from Dave Kingman, Tito Fuentes and Ed Goodson. Sam McDowell outpitched Phil Niekro.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the San Diego Padres, 9-4 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Jim McGlothlin was the winning pitcher, and helped his own cause with a home run. Joe Morgan also supported him with a homer, Johnny Bench went 3-for-3 with a walk, and Pete Rose went 1-for-5 with 2 RBIs.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Montreal Expos, 5-3 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Texas Rangers, from 1961 to 1971 known as the "new" Washington Senators, beat the Minnesota Twins, from 1901 to 1960 known as the "old" Washington Senators, 16-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Harmon Killebrew went 1-for-2, and Rod Carew went 0-for-2, before each had to leave the game due to an injury.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Houston Astros, 7-3 at the Astrodome in Houston.

* The California Angels beat the Kansas City Royals, 4-2 at Anaheim Stadium. (It was renamed Edison International Field in 1997, and Angel Stadium of Anaheim in 2004.)

* And the Oakland Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-3 at the Oakland Coliseum. Mike Andrews, later to become a controversial figure in A's history, hit a home run off Catfish Hunter, and Dick Allen had an RBI single. But Dave Duncan hit a home run off Stan Bahnsen, Bert Campaneris hit one off a rookie named Rich Gossage, and Reggie Jackson went 3-for-4, including 2 doubles, 1 of them for an RBI.