Gorgeous George

Of course, that might seem like Jurassic-era horseshit
for this still-impish icon, a caustic instigator who continues to
satirically expound on the human condition, societal quirks and
English-language lacerations. When asked during this phone interview
(from Carlin’s home in Beverly Hills) about the seismic reinvention of
his comic persona, he audibly groaned. “I’ve been on the record a
million times and it’s in a million sources.” But it helps to
understand his reasons behind taking that long-ago road less traveled,
and where it has led him in the millennium. This weekend, for example,
Carlin will be everywhere in Central New York: two sold-out shows at
Verona’s Turning Stone Casino Showroom on Saturday, March 27; tickets
are getting scarce for his pair of performances at Ithaca’s State
Theatre on Sunday, March 28; and on Friday, March 26, multiplexes
nationwide will screen Carlin’s co-starring turn in Jersey Girl, the new Miramax Films comedy from director Kevin Smith, who also guided Carlin in Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

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PETER SOREL PHOTO

It’s quite a jump for a guy who early on harbored dreams
of becoming another Danny Kaye, a bouncy entertainer from the 1940s and
1950s whose impressive, laugh-filled legacy, alas, seems more like a
Trivial Pursuit question these days for recent generations. Indeed,
Carlin’s timeless appeal and forever youthful anarchy negate the fact
that he’s a product of the Depression, born May 12, 1937, in the Bronx.
A hard-knocks life as a dropout malcontent unexpectedly resulted in a
radio career in the late 1950s, where he was teamed with fellow jock
Jack Burns (better known in the 1960s as part of a comic tandem with
frizzy-haired Avery Schreiber and more recently as a voice for Crash
Test Dummies commercial spots); the pair branched out into the club
circuit, then amicably split around 1962. 

Reeling in the laughs: George Carlin undergoes very little physical transformation in these image from 1977, 1989 and his current publicity shoot.

Aside from nightclub shows, Carlin also then took what in
the early 1960s was considered the traditional show-biz TV path to
success: appearances on CBS-TV’s Talent Scouts (1962-1963) and On Broadway Tonight (1964-1965), the now-ancient precursors to American Idol; summer-replacement variety shows such as the John Davidson-hosted Kraft Summer Music Hall (NBC, 1966), with Carlin's mocic skits shoehorned between announcer Ed Herlihy's commercials hawking the miracles of Cheez-Whiz and Cracker Barrel, and Away We Go (CBS, 1967) with fellow regular Buddy Rich; and a supporting role in the 1966 first season of the Marlo Thomas sitcom That Girl
(ABC, 1966-1971). He also started making industry inroads with
memorable routines devoted to “hippie-dippie weatherman Al Sleet” and
radio station “wonderful WINO,” which he performed on then-popular TV
gabfests hosted by Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. It’s not easy these
days to witness images of the clean-cut Carlin from these 1960s
appearances, although it’s instructive to note that one of the
comedian’s last brushes with the mainstream was his first movie-acting
role as boppin’ carhop Herbie Fleck in the 1968 Doris Day family farce With Six You Get Eggroll, which mysteriously turned out to be Day’s big-screen swan song.

We’re all pretty much up to speed regarding what Carlin has accomplished after his eventual transformation from one of themus:
between 1969 and 1971, when he retired the business-suit persona and
embraced scraggly long hair, push-the-envelope material and his
scatologically verbose wit, kind of an unholy cross between William
Safire and Larry Flynt. Besides his touring, CD and video releases and
many HBO specials, Carlin has also dabbled in a host of other sideline
diversions, including hot-selling books (Brain Droppings, Napalm & Silly Putty), diverse movies (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Prince of Tides, Car Wash) and his own sitcom, with 27 episodes of Fox-TV’s The George Carlin Show
airing from 1994 to 1995. (There are similarities between his
blue-collar cabbie character on the TV show and the crusty grandpa he
plays in Jersey Girl.) He’s also endured three heart attacks,
suffered the 1997 loss of his beloved spouse Brenda and engendered
lasting notoriety and immortality for his “seven words you can never
say on television,” a routine that fueled the specter of government
censorship, definitions of “indecency” and subsequent interventions by
the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Which brings us back to Carlin’s own history: Even though
he’s told the same story about his childhood and early years over and
over, it’s instructive enough to bear retelling it one more time.
People can escape the norms of strait-jacketed conformity and
adhering to lock-step mass-media opinions to instead follow their own
peculiar muse. As Carlin has proved for 35 years, doing your own thing
and telling it like it is are ideals that never really go out of style.

Q:

For Jersey Girl, you play Bart Trinke, the father
of Ben Affleck’s character and grandfather of Raquel Castro’s cute kid.
Did you identify with the role? What did you bring to this part?

A:

Well, you know those questions are questions I don’t have
answers to, because it’s not a thing I think about. You just kinda show
up and say, “OK, I’m this guy.” And whatever parts of you and your
experience—or if not your actual experience, your imagined experience,
the things that you’ve seen around you that weren’t part of your life
but other people’s—those things you just kind of make it up, you just
do it. It’s like being in a play in the fourth grade when they tell you
to play a policeman; you make believe you’re a policeman.

Q:

This is your third movie with director Kevin Smith, so I’m assuming you like working with this guy.

A:

Oh yes, he’s a lot of fun, very easygoing; he’s got a nice tone on the set, and he’s a smart guy. Just pleasant good work

Going thespian: The stand-up's acting career includes his stint in Fox-TV's The George Carlin Show with the comic surrounded by (clockwise from left) Paige French, Michael Hagerty, Christopher Rich, Anthony Starke, Alex Rocco and Susan Sullivan.

Q:

Does he allow spontaneous improvisations when you’re working?

A:

Yes, if you wanted to, he would certainly be open to it.
Most directors would give you a few takes to do something you’re
thinking of, and then draw you back in if they have to. But I’m pretty
much satisfied with what’s on the page, and if I have a little
something to change there or something I’d rather say it in a different
way, I’ll speak up. But I’m not an actor who’s been trained over the
years in the craft of acting, so I kind of approach it in an exact way.
It’s the way I approach my work.

Q:

You sold out both shows at the Turning Stone and will
probably do the same on the next day in Ithaca. You must be doing all
right.

A:

Oh yeah, I do 90 shows a year, we sell ’em all out. The
theaters are generally around 2,000 to 2,500 people, and when they’re
not that big we do two shows. 

Q:

What’s a typical George Carlin stand-up show these days? Do you throw in local material?

A:

No. Screw those people. I’m not there to talk about the
local mayor. I do my show. I write my shit. So what I do is, I do for
me; I’m there for me. I come around and I do my show, and they change
every two years. 

What I do is, I produce a show that we license it to HBO
once every two to 2½ years. We’ve done 12 of them over the last 25
years; No. 13 is being worked on now and it’s already really kinda home
free. I do about an hour and 15 minutes and it’s always growing and
changing. As soon as an HBO show has been finished, I take a little
breather for a month or so and then I begin to drop things out of that
show and add new pieces. And I do that one by one until after about two
years I’ve got a brand-new show.

So I don’t do oldies, I don’t do things that I don’t
remember or couldn’t learn again because they’re too far back in my
memory, I don’t do local stuff. I come there and do my thing, and it
changes a bit but the general approach is similar to the other shows.

Q:

What’s the age range of your audience? Do you get college kids these days?

A:

I don’t really like college kids. We get college-age
kids, but they’re not college kids. People stop coming to shows when
they’re about 35 or 40; they don’t come to see comics, and they
certainly don’t go downtown because they’re all living in the suburbs
and they’re all afraid. So we get a lot of people around 15 to 30 years
of age, and then from 30 to 45 there’s a bunch, which is diminishing as
they get older into the 40s. But it’s primarily young, with all new
people being generated about every 10 years.

Q:

Are college kids the same as they were 30 years ago, still questioning authority?

A:

Nah, the whole country’s different now, as you know, it’s
all changing. These people now, all they’re interested in is a good
job, a good career, a pension, an IRA, and whatever fuck else it is
they want. But there’s no imagination, there’s no intelligence, really.
I mean, there’s a certain amount of an accumulation of knowledge,
people can pass certain tests in college, I guess. But outside of the
sciences, there’s no real interesting college people.

I never play colleges per se. If I go to a college
location, it’s because we have an open promotion that includes the
public at a college facility, and that’s different. But when you have
all college kids in a room, they just suck. They’re the worst audience
in the world.

With Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in 1989's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Q:

With Ralph Nader again running for office and John
Kerry’s armed-forces record and 1970s anti-war stance in the news, the
counterculture is back in the spotlight. But you’ve never left it.
What’s your take on today’s society?

A:

Well, I’ve never been in step with things. I don’t
believe in most of the things that Americans believe in: don’t believe
in God, don’t believe in the flag, don’t believe in this country; don’t
believe in our troops or any of this kind of shit. I’m just kind of an
independent soul floatin’ around out here; I take the whole thing as a
big joke, a big freak show, and it’s fun to watch. 

You know, the nice thing is this culture is destroying
itself, disintegrating around us, and it’s fun to watch as it “circles
the drain”—that’s the metaphor I like to use—as the circles get faster
and smaller, and to watch it go where it belongs. Which is oblivion. 

A Hidalgo-esque image of Carlin from 1987's Outrageous Fortune.

Q:

Thirty years ago you had problems in Milwaukee over
obscenity {during a July 1972 performance}. Now you’ve got fallout from
Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl appearance and Howard Stern getting dumped
by Clear Channel radio outlets. Has anything changed in the last 30
years or are we like in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where we’re repeating the same scene over and over again?

A:

Americans are, unfortunately, like a very Christian
nation, and Christianity has crippled them. One of the things religion
does to people is to give them a sense of shame about their bodies:
guilt and fear of the human body, demonize it, think of it as evil and
dirty. So there are natural results that grow out of that sort of
thing. And one of those effects is this culture-wide, kind of knee-jerk
reaction. 

And the nice thing is, it’s really a filthy culture
anyway. I mean, you know it’s a place full of porno, with people
getting on the Internet for their porno, and massage parlors, and
hookers sitting on the corner and shit. And then they jump up and down
when somebody shows a tit on a commercial station. 

That’s the thing, you see: It’s always these commercial
interests. Television is not really an entertainment media; it’s an
advertising media used to generate and sell goods, and the
entertainment is there as a hook. Same thing is true of newspapers and
magazines; they’re not really what they claim to be, they’re an
advertising media. So when you intrude into advertising with a
violation of these Christian superstitions, you have a clash because
the advertiser doesn’t want to upset a potential customer. So if that
tit thing happened on any other channel that didn’t have commercials on
it, it wouldn’t have been a problem and you wouldn’t be hearing about
it. 

Q:

Unlike other comics out there who just go out, do their
punchlines and go home, you’ve got a way with words: It’s literate,
loving, rhythmic, like the type of wordplay from a Groucho Marx or a
W.C. Fields. Who were your influences who led you to your comedy?

A:

Well, I don’t think that influences lead you there. I
think you kind of have a thing going on genetically in you; some of it
is fostered at home and reinforced by your environment and people
around you. The people who interested me as comedians when I was a kid
were, for instance, Fred Allen, the radio comedian who was very bright
and did articulate humor; Henry Morgan was the same way. And then
because I was a kid at the time, the broader comedians appealed to me,
too. I liked Spike Jones, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope in the movies, and then
Martin and Lewis came along when I was in my teens, then Jonathan
Winters a little bit later than that. 

So the people who you enjoy perhaps have some passive
influence on you, but it’s not identifiable. You know, you kind of just
do your thing anyway, and it all happens unknown to you how you’re
being shaped.

Q:

The transformation from the clean-cut George Carlin in
the mid-1960s to the comedian we’ve known for 30 years: Did you drop
off from the landscape to become who you are now?

A:

I’ve been on the record a million times and it’s in a
million sources. Here’s what happened. I never really was in step with
anything as a kid, I broke every rule, I broke every law, I quit
everything or got kicked out of everything: Boy Scouts, the Air Force,
the choir, altar boys, summer camp, three schools. I didn’t fit, I
didn’t like regulation and authority, so I rebelled against it and I
went my own way. 

But at the same time I had this dream to be like Danny
Kaye, to be a mainstream comedian. I didn’t know the word “mainstream”
and I didn’t make a distinction; I just lived out my life. And in
pursuing a dream like that in the 1950s, because there was no
counterculture outside of the bohemians, and I wasn’t equipped to do
that, I lived this life of trying to please people and get on
television and become a standard comic. 

So when the world changed underneath me, then this
earlier guy—this other person underneath everything, the guy swimming
against the tide, the out-of-step dude, the original me—when I saw the
culture around me changing and maybe making room for guys like me and
accommodating us, I was able to evolve a little and let that side of me
grow. It took two years. I didn’t go away to a mountain and come back
different, you know, that’s not authentic. What I did was I let it
happen organically, on television. I did 30 or 40 TV shows in those two
years, talk shows in the afternoon, talking about this and showing the
changes as they happened: the hair grew longer, the clothes changed,
the material changed. So it was an evolution that took place from about
1969 to 1971. 

Q:

What about your CDs and concert videos?

A:

I own all my masters, I own all the HBO shows, and I
package them and I put ’em out for people who are interested. The DVDs
and VHSs, which don’t mean as much as DVDs now, they’re all out there;
almost all 12 of my HBO shows; and all the albums we have packaged them
in different ways. They’re available as single CDs with the original
covers, and the six gold records from the 1970s have been packaged
together. And every time I do an HBO show I pump out a CD, so there’s
been 25 albums, because a lot of albums came out independent of HBO. In
other words, I had a lot of material that wasn’t on HBO shows, so I put
them on separate albums.

So that stuff is just out there and that’s what you do
when you work: If you’re an artist, you want people to hear and see
your stuff. So the fact that I own all my own stuff means I make the
decisions, and I like that because then you don’t find yourself in the
79-cent bin at Kmart unless you’re the one who decides to put it there.

Q:

You’re a pretty lively guy. It doesn’t seem like you’re heading for retirement any time soon.

A:

Well, retirement is for guys who hate their work.
Retirement is for people who say, “I can’t wait to retire, I’ve got an
IRA, I got this and that.” That’s for the drones, for the people who
get stuck in this job thing, serving the culture, serving the system.
And then they look forward to retirement because they hate their jobs.
Me, I’ve got a different kind of life. Even though I’m an entertainer,
it’s kind of like an artist’s life: I get to create my own world, and I
get to cut it off when I want or change direction or change form.

So I’m 67 now, and maybe Jersey Girl will get me a
couple other interesting movies to look at and I can exercise a little
more of that, I got a couple more book ideas I’d like to do, I have a
Broadway one-man show I’d like to do. So I have choices and I might get
around to them and I might not. I could have a stroke tomorrow. 

Q:

Is there a connection between your performance in With Six You Get Eggroll and Doris Day’s immediate retirement from moviemaking?

A:

{Hearty laughter} Good for you for knowing Herbie Fleck!
The carhop, that’s the one I did my very first time with a movie camera
around, and I was totally ill-prepared for that and unaware of what it
required, so I was kind of lost. But yeah, I think she took one look at
that and she said, “It’s time to move on and raise some doggies.”