The Pronoun

Seven minutes and three seconds. That is the length of the routine everybody remembers, recorded at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in May 1972 and released that September on Class Clown, which reached number twenty-two and stayed thirty-five weeks on the chart. George Carlin counted up the words that could not be said on television. It is not the routine that went to the Supreme Court.

That was its sequel, "Filthy Words," cut at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos in March 1973, longer, with three more words, and broadcast by WBAI in New York at about two o'clock in the afternoon. One listener wrote to the Federal Communications Commission. Five years later FCC v. Pacifica Foundation was decided five votes to four against Pacifica, and out of the defeat came the safe harbor American broadcasters still watch the clock for. Carlin was not a party to it. He filed nothing, was called by nobody, and paid nothing. The one criminal proceeding he was subject to, an arrest at Summerfest in Milwaukee in 1972, was dismissed that December.

The argument here is about a pronoun. The seven-words routine is not an attack; it is a man in love with English standing in front of four thousand people, inviting them to be delighted with him, and its governing pronoun is we. By the time You Are All Diseased aired in 1999, the audience had become you. The book fixes the change to an interval: intact when Jammin' in New York was taped in 1992, altered by 1999. Inside it sit the death of Brenda Carlin the day before his sixtieth birthday, a method that demanded a complete new hour from an empty page every cycle, and thirty years of having been right in public without anything changing. Moralist out of patience, or performer withdrawing from a room he had stopped liking: both cases are stated and neither is chosen. A man who spent forty-five years arguing that words belong to whoever says them ends with his family in court in 2024, establishing that his voice was his.