Today’s album listening experience is an album I have known since I was 14 years old and had heard various tracks from, on comedy radio shows, as apposed to comedy radio stations. Back in the day, radio stations which played music would devote time to other lesser-known or lesser-heard genres outside what was regularly played. This was called foreground programming and it consisted of 30 minutes to about 3 hours of long form programming and it could include a jazz show, a metal show, an hour of radio from the past, talk or trivia, or even comedy.
This brings me to George Carlin and his 1972 album Class Clown, which begins with the title track and ends with Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television, with the latter becoming probably his most famous routine. It even would get a friend of mine fired from a radio station, but that is a story for someone else to have told in a podcast. https://youtu.be/nIgmo0AIGRw
I like the whole thing and my favourite bit is the one which opens the album. After all, when you were of a certain age in school, you wanted nothing more than to disrupt the education of not just yourself, but others in your class. Besides, there were many tools you had to accomplish this goal, which you did not have to go to the store to buy either. You just needed to be creative and learn how to make certain sounds with your body, like the classic fart sound. There were many ways to make that sound and the fart under the arm is probably either the easiest, or the most difficult one to do. On another sound, I could never pop the cheek. I could make the sound, but not how he did it.
He even gets into knuckle cracking, belching and making milk come out your nose at lunch time. I had never heard of the latter, until this album and that crosses the line for me.
He also talks about the act of swallowing and that there are two parts to it. I wonder how high he was when he had written this, as it would take a lot of slowing things down, in order to really pay attention to how, when you are swallowing water it doesn’t just go down. It needs to be checked out and if it is seen to be passable, it can go down the shoot.
Elsewhere, he talks about his education and going to a catholic school, like no other. In that, there was no cruelty and everyone was allowed to ask questions without being told to shut up (so to speak). There is more, but I encourage you to give this album a listen on your own.
The final track is the 7 words and I”m not going to put them here, as there is no need. Besides, that is why I want you to listen to this classic comedy album and if you have only heard more recent George Carlin material, you will be surprised at how good-natured his delivery was, due to him being straight and clearheaded for this album when he had recorded it on May 27, 1972 at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and between it and Led Zeppelin IV, Atlantic Records had made money off of those two albums especially. I could get into how George got arrested for doing the Seven Words bit at an outdoor summer festival in Milwaukee and eventually getting off, because the judge was open minded enough and thought it was hilarious. However, there are books on George Carlin which go into that much better and whose writers are more eloquent in describing what had happened than me. I wasn’t there and in fact, I wasn’t even born yet or even a twinkle in an eye so, commenting on that is out of my hands.
Anyway, I hope that you and anyone else who likes comedy will give this album and George Carlin a try. Not everything George did sounds the same, including his vocal delivery and back in the 70s, he certainly sounded different from what he would later do, with his rasp and having to raise his voice. I could get into how different his vocal timbre was, from 1993 onward, but that’s a whole other story and I don’t wish to go down that rabbit hole. Anyway, enjoy hearing from a class clown, who apparently was a class clown back in his day at school.
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