Muck Rock - Documents from the FBI reveal that J. Edgar Hoover took personal offense to comedian George Carlin following his appearances on “The Carol Burnett Show" and "Jackie Gleason."
Carlin was a stand-up comedian whose set list included topics as diverse as language, religion, psychology, and politics. He is renowned for his "Seven Dirty Words" routine, which played a vital role in the 1978 Supreme Court case FCC v Pacifica Foundation.
According to documents requested by Shawn Musgrave, the FBI first took notice of Carlin following his 1969 Jackie Gleason appearance where he "referred to the Bureau and the Director in a satirical vein." They maintain that the bit was "considered to be in very poor taste" and "it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance."
The files twice cite Carlin's joke "'I'm J. Edgar Noover. I have just come back from a stakeout with Ramsey Clark - that is a cookout in the backyard.'"
The documents also reveal that Hoover took it upon himself to respond to a complaint from viewers in Cocoa Beach, FL who were upset with Carlin's "'take-off' on the FBI, the Director, and the 'ten most wanted'."
The viewer complained about "such a flagrant display of poor taste and degradation of one of our finest governmental investigative agencies, which maintains dignity, pride, and honor." The viewer even went as far as to accuse Carlin of "contributing to the breakdown in this nation's respect for law and order."
3 comments:
George Carlin was a clever fellow but he possessed the pig gene.
People with the pig gene like to talk dirty even when it's not relevant to their humor.
...dignity, pride and honor?! PLEASE! J. Edgar sailed that ship down the toilet wearing mommies dress from the beginning of the FBI. The FBI is just another government agency, sometimes doing there job but as we're finding out, routinely violating the spirit of the Constitution. This is just one of a number of agencies headed by narcissistic bureaucrats who credo is 'the end justifies the means.' Hoover infamously teamed up with the likes of McCarthy, Reagan, and others to make the country 'free from communism' and other grievous sins that they, and only they, had divine insights of what was good and bad. Ask the family of Ethel Rosenberg whose only sin was being married to Julius, for which she was executed. There is a long line of grievances against J. Edgar, but 'patriots' seem to overlook when reciting the gospel according to Hoover. No! He was just another in a long line of self-rightous bureaucrats with limited cognitive capacity and hypocritical allegiances that was allowed to stay too long in government employ to the harm of others. Doing a few good things does not merit one being canonized when the corpus of their life is doing vast harm to others. The bureau would have been better had he left or been removed shortly after it got up and running.
...BTW...one other thing. Carlin wasn't just a clever fellow. He was acutely aware of the 1st amendment and Hoover's attempts to determine extrajudiciously decide what could be said be who without being bothered by the pesky judicial system. The FBI has a role to play in government, and if it would concentrate on doing that only without trying to insert themselves into a position of law enforcement and judicial, they might not have such a rotten reputation for destroying peoples lives. They are in many ways akin to the IRS, and agency we now know is running absolutely out of control with no decent constraints at all.
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