Before He Was Hippie and Dippy

My knowledge of George Carlin goes back to high school days, when people played comedy albums at parties (as a smell wafted through the air from a then-illegal substance I didn’t use). Later, I saw clips of him from aged TV shows where he had short hair and a thin tie. And, improbably to me, I discovered he worked with Jack Burns in the pre-Avery Schreiber days.

I wondered when he first appeared on television and, on hunting around, was surprised to learn he came from local radio; I’d never read any of his background. The photo you see to the right is from the Shreveport Observer of March 1, 1957, which reported Carlin had “ambition and initiative” but had never been in radio before being hired to do afternoons at daytimer KJOE.

He performed in theatre in Shreveport, sometimes as George D. Carlin. He’s almost unrecognisable in the photo to the left for a play in August 1956. His name begins to appear in radio listings in Boston in March 1959, jocking afternoon drive at NBC affiliate WEZE immediately after Pepper Young’s Family. NBC made wholesale changes to its programming and the last mention of Carlin at WEZE is in August, in late evening immediately following the weekday version of Monitor. He jumped that month to an evening shift at KXOL in Fort (Don’t Call Us Dallas) Worth.

Burns worked at WEZE, too. The two teamed together at KXOL, but didn’t stick around there that long. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Elston Brooks followed their early career and reported on February 28, 1960 “KXOL’s George Carlin and Jack Burns have left the station to break in their new comedy act on the West Coast.” It doesn’t look like they appeared on TV while in Texas.

Either they got noticed quickly or had a good manager (in the early days, it was Murray Becker). 1960 fell in the Golden Era of Comedy LPs and the pair signed a record deal. Variety of June 29, 1960 reported:

Era: Burns & Carlin
Hollywood, June 28.
Burns & Carlin, new comedy team currently headlining at Cosmo Alley nitery, inked a recording pact with Era Records and cut “The Cool World of Burns and Carlin” as their first album. Discussions are on for Mort Sahl to pen the liner notes.

There was significance about the mention of Sahl. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Variety of August 3, 1960 mentioned “New comedy team of Jack Burns & George Carlin, is set to etch nitery turn for Era Records during four-week Playboy Club, Chi, booking in November.” Whether this was the same album is unclear, but the internet tells me it wasn’t released until 1963.

If you’re wondering about their act, Variety reviewed it in their July 27, 1960 issue. You didn’t hear “seven words you can’t say on television.” In fact, it doesn’t sound like you even heard one.

JACK BURNS & GEORGE CARLIN
Comedy
35 Mins.
Cloister, Chicago
Two young, attractive fellows, in first significant booking to date (they’ve been out only a few months, show good potential as a comedy pair, albeit a need for some help in the script and concepts departments. As act now play its’ okay parody, but trend of modern comedics should cue duo toward the sharper satire which they only skirt.
They open topically (Jack Kennedy, southland sit-ins, etc.) seguing to situational stuff, none of it particularly venturesome, even by commercial saloon standards. They rib Huntley-Brinkley, the “beats,” tv pitchmen, Murrow’s P-to-P teleshow (Person to Person), and a tv kidshow with sicko angles that was their funniest at review session.
As of now there’re somewhere between stock commercial and off-beat, and not enough either way for sock register in either league. Some of the lines are potent (for sporadic yocks), but most of the promises are fairly ordinary. Some eye-popper viewpoints and perhaps fresher tandem concept could spark a basically talented team. Meanwhile, duo could profitably cut at least five minutes from present turn. Pit

It sounds if the act was being kept mostly family-friendly, which would make it ideal for television.

This still doesn’t answer the question of when Carlin made his first TV appearance. The Star-Telegram’s Brooks blurbed on September 28 “George Carlin and Jack Burns, the KXOL-exes who formed a nightclub comedy team, have an L.P. comedy album and an appearance on the Perry Como show coming up. Playboy magazine has written them up.”

Como debuted that season on October 5. But neither Carlin nor Burns were on the show. The stand-up comedy was supplied by Shelley Berman. It would appear their TV debut was in New York. The syndicated TV Key Previews column mentioned in the highlights for the day’s programmes on October 10, 1960:

11:15 p.m. (NBC) JACK PAAR SHOW—Arlene Francis gives Jack Paar a night off and plays host to visiting Irish playwright Brendan Behan and actress Constance Cummings. She also introduces Broadway singers Rita Gardner and Kenny Nelson for a duet from their show, and Burns and Carlin, a comedy team, for an act. (Color)

Brooks’ column two days later opined: “We know that Jack Burns and George Carlin, the Fort Worth comedians who appeared on the Paar show Monday night, must have hot material or else they coudln’t [sic] have gone so far so quickly. But they may have suffered from strict TV censorship Monday night.”

Network executives are extremely timid by nature. What could they have found in the act that could be censorable? No, they didn’t do a “water closet” joke like the one Paar told that was cut by NBC earlier in the year and caused him to walk off his own show. The answer may be contained in a Variety review published February 15, 1961.

BURNS & CARLIN
Comedy
25 Mins.
hungry I, San Francisco
Jack Burns and George Carlin are disciples of the Lenny Bruce-Mort Sahl “sick” school, and handle their fresh, if derivate, material quite nicely.
They come on with a Huntley Brinkley bit, which quick1y switches Into a Kennedy-Nixon bit, then go into a Hollywood sci-fi film, some ordinary Faubus gags and some takeoffs.
Interestingly enough, Carlin does a rather extended impression of Sahl—interesting because six years ago on the same stage Sahl was breaking in his act. This comes as a kind of jolt to Frisco nightclub goers with any sort of memory and sitz-power.
Burns goes on to a David Susskind impression, in which Carlin acts as a German Nazi) professor being interviewed: here’s where the racial and religious gags, a la Bruce, play their role. They wind up with what they call an “Ode to Madison Avenue,” which consists two tv kiddie-show pitchmen pitching booze and narcotics in the 5-6 p.m. slot. This is fairly funny, even deft, at midnight in a nightclub. Elsewhere, no.
All of this, of course, is more social commentary than straight-out comedy. The team uses very few one-liners, depends on audience knowing their frames of reference. Burns & Carlin, therefore, are okay for the hip cellar circuit, but would have a tougher time using this material on tv or even radio. Their delivery and timing are good and they figure to acquire more poise with time. Stef.

We’ll end this post with the words of syndicated New York columnist Hy Gardner. He caught Burns and Carlin’s show on October 31-November 1, 1960, and analysed it the next day. It was under rather unusual circumstances. Gardner was out on the town when there were shootings at saloons at Broadway and 52nd Street.

We missed the police action by a hundred yards and a couple of hours. At midnight we were sitting in a near-by basement bomb shelter known as the International Cafe. Here a minor Presidential rally was being staged by the president of A. G. V. A. [the vaudeville performers association]. Joey Adams was reintroducing the Guild’s Monday Night Auditions, giving talent scouts, bookers and newspapermen an all-too-rare opportunity to see and hear new talent. We were especially taken with a new comedy team, Jack Burns and George Carlin. These clean-cut youngsters are refreshing in their attitude, their material and their delivery. They write their own topical routines and, without showing a single symptom of sickness, draw continuous howls of merriment. Their take-offs, for example, of Huntley and Brinkley and Nixon and Kennedy, are classics in comedic caricatures, sharply etched but not cutting enough to show scars. Carlin’s impression of Mort Sahl (on whom we wrote a similar rave review when Mort first appeared in a Greenwich Village boite) would stop any show, anywhere, in any medium. And Carlin does it the hard way—without a sweater!
In our opinion the team of Burns & Carlin is destined to become the hottest partnership in the business—and if and when they do, their union can take a bow for giving them a chance to shine, then rise. . . . The boys say: “It’s wonderful to live in a country where you can overthrow the government by farce.” It’s also wonderful to live in a country where a keen sense of humor can make a celebrity out of a nonentity overnight.

Burns and Carlin broke up in 1962, and Carlin made his solo debut at the Gate of Horn in Chicago on March 20. Will Leonard of the Chicago Tribune caught the show and proclaimed Carlin “is as funny by himself as the two were together.” That may be true but, as time wore on, fans appreciated Carlin’s caustic and blunt “social commentary” more than they did his “straight-out comedy.” He was a king of honest observations that continued until he died in 2008.