Read 'Em and Bleep? Carlin's 'Seven Words' Spell Trouble

Twain Prize producers thought bleeping the late George Carlin's words would be "funnier." (By Jacquelyn Martin -- Associated Press)

That swats the ball over to Peter Kaminsky, executive producer of the Twain TV special for WETA (Channel 26). Kaminsky confirms that it was his production team's idea to show a bleeped version of Carlin's routine.

But it wasn't a question of propriety, he said; it was a question of humor: "The Kennedy Center didn't tell us to take anything out. We just thought it was funnier that way," he said. "It got a laugh from the audience. You know, hearing all those beeps, one after the other -- beepbeepbeep -- that was kind of funny."

So it was irony on top of irony? The concept being that you're calling attention to the scrubbing of language in a monologue about the scrubbing of language?

Something like that, offered Kaminsky, a former editor of the National Lampoon, which was never shy about using words that might have qualified for Carlin's list.

"We knew that it would have to be [bleeped eventually] to be seen on TV," he said. "We also knew that if we encouraged too much profanity on the show, people would be talking about profanity and not about all the great things that George Carlin did -- his appreciation of language, his physical comedy, his commentary on issues large and small."

Kaminsky said the presenters weren't absolutely forbidden to swear, "but we didn't want a profane run to things. We said: 'Keep it within bounds.' "

Several particularly pungent words, in fact, were written into the show's script. And few flinched when such presenters as Joan Rivers ad-libbed a few more.

Kaminsky and his fellow producers came another few steps up to the line by including a segment from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," in which host Stephen Colbert mentioned Carlin's passing and the seven-words routine. While Colbert never actually says those particular words, they do appear next to him on-screen, spelled out with strategically placed asterisks (example: "t*ts" ) that leave little to the imagination.

(Just for the record, washingtonpost.com expunged Jon Stewart's enthusiastic and repeated use of one of the words in a news video of the presenters' arrival at the Kennedy Center).

All in all, "George would have gotten a laugh out of the whole thing," said Jeff Abraham, Carlin's longtime publicist.

Abraham says Carlin was keenly aware of the delicate nature of the "Seven Words" bit, especially when it came to airing it on TV. Whenever TV producers asked for a tape of the routine, Carlin gave them an authorized copy with the edits already made, Abraham said.

"He never allowed his material to be bleeped" by others, he said. "He put them in before anyone did. He knew that if you put in a bleep arbitrarily, you could make it seem dirtier."

Which calls to mind something else Carlin once said: "People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think."