Carlin had been a career loner. The old delicatessen guys, the Dangerfield protegés, and the Comedy Store regulars typically lived for the camaraderie, the one-upmanship, and the old war stories. Carlin was content to travel light, with his laptop and his reading material. When he wanted to air out some new jokes, he usually drove south, to the Comedy and Magic club in Hermosa Beach, where the crowd was less saturated with agents, talent scouts, and other guest-list types than the rooms in LA.
Having hit sixty, however, he was beginning to appreciate his place in the comic pantheon. He joined Robert Klein, Alan King, Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and others to film a mock opening sequence for Jerry Seinfeld’s HBO special
I’m Telling You for the Last Time
, in which the comedian holds a funeral for his old routines. Carlin was honored for lifetime achievement at the American Comedy Awards, and Comedy Central ranked him the second-greatest stand-up comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor. Though he was flattered, “It was a little embarrassing to be placed ahead of Lenny Bruce,” he admitted.
At the American Comedy Awards, Carlin posed for a photo with Pryor and Robert Klein. Klein leaned down to Pryor, in a wheelchair due to his battle with multiple sclerosis, and whispered in his ear, “You were the best I ever saw.” When they walked away, Carlin said out of the corner of his mouth, “That guy’s fucked up!”
“I knew he wasn’t meaning to be cruel,” says Klein. “George was sardonic about it. He actually made me laugh.” Even in the most dispiriting situations, for Carlin there was no such thing as no laughing matter.
Together with Hamza, he agreed to join the founders of a new comedy venture,
Laugh.com
, as a limited business partner. Marshall Berle, Milton’s nephew, who went from managing Spirit to handling pop metal acts such as Van Halen and Ratt, launched the
Laugh.com
Web site in the mid-1990s as an outlet for his uncle’s vast archive of Friars Club roasts. “I sold one to a guy named Bob Kohn, who lived in Pebble Beach,” says Berle. “He turns out to be the guy who comes in and saves the company.” Kohn was an Internet entrepreneur who founded the subscription download site eMusic. Together the two men enlisted a who’s who of comedy legends, including Red Buttons, Bill Dana, Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Norm Crosby, and Rich Little, as founding partners. Besides Kohn, another of Berle’s earliest customers was one Rev. Warren Debenham, a comedy historian from the Bay Area who donated a sizable portion of his massive collection to the San Francisco Public Library. After lending his name to the company, Carlin often called Berle with special requests from the Debenham collection, looking for obscure recordings by the Two Black Crows, an old blackface vaudeville act, or the Canadian duo Wayne and Shuster. “He’d come up with guys I never heard of,” says Berle.
Carlin had always looked to the farthest frontiers of comedy. Some of his earliest routines with Jack Burns deliberately trampled the line marking the no-man’s land of tastelessness. The “Seven Words,” of course, were a direct challenge to commonly accepted notions of propriety. As he reached what he felt was his pinnacle as a writer and performer, however, Carlin pushed harder than ever to make his audience contemplate the verboten. “I find out where they draw the line, then I deliberately step across it,” he said. “I try to bring them with me, and make them happy they came.”
“Our Last Best Angry Man Takes on God, Children, and Testosterone,” read the sticker on the CD version of Carlin’s next HBO special, the charmingly titled
You Are All Diseased
. He had looked around and decided that children were the last sacred topic in America, and he directed his attention accordingly. Kids are overprotected, overscheduled, and overrated, he fulminated, when they’re really just like other people—“a few winners, a whole lotta losers.” He quickly dispensed with any potential criticism: “I know what you’re thinking—you say, ‘Jesus, he’s not gonna attack children, is he?’ Yes, he is. And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking. I know what I’m talking about.”
One segment of the “Kids and Parents” bit featured Carlin’s rant about school shootings and the grief counseling that follows. Two months after
You Are All Diseased
had its HBO premier, two students at Columbine High School in suburban Colorado went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and injuring twenty-one before committing suicide, in the deadliest such incident in an American high school.
E-mail in-boxes were soon filled with forwarded messages attributed to Carlin (or, alternately, to a Columbine student who witnessed the attack). On first glance, “The Paradox of Our Time” read like it could have been Carlin, with its rhythmic reliance on juxtapositions: “We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. . . . We’ve added years to life, not life to years.” But Carlin had nothing to do with it. The homily was eventually revealed to have been written by a Christian pastor from Seattle named Dr. Bob Moorehead, who was subsequently dismissed from his post in the wake of sexual assault allegations. Carlin, who had concluded his latest performance with a long diatribe about the awesome bullshit propagated by organized religion, was vehement in denying his connection to the Internet chain letters, which spread exponentially. For one thing, he pointed out in a post on his Web site, he was emotionally divorced from the future of mankind. Besides, he wrote, “It’s not only bad prose and poetry, it’s weak philosophy.”
For some time Carlin’s name remained an Internet sensation, with anonymous e-mailers attributing various jokes and lists to him. One hoax involved an inane manifesto from “a BAD American . . . George Carlin.” Misleading information about Carlin on the Internet was understandable for one very good reason: He had earned a reputation, and not just among devoted fans, for profundity. Even in his thirties and forties, he had been comedy’s wise man. Now, officially entering his senior years, his white hair and beard made him seem that much more a comic philosopher. “Life is a festival only to the wise,” wrote Emerson. Carlin saw his country as a never-ending festival for his own amusement. When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show, he said. “If you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat. And some of us get to write about it and talk about it.”
Carlin “had an instinctive knowledge of how persuasion, propaganda, and influence work, from all directions, by all parties,” says Jello Biafra, former frontman for the punk-rock group Dead Kennedys. The comedian’s punk attitude—his insistence on telling his audience the truth as he saw it, regardless of its popularity—was ahead of its time, says Biafra, who was a candidate for the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2000 and has since campaigned vigorously on behalf of Ralph Nader.
Though Carlin was occasionally asked whether he would ever consider a third-party candidacy, his response was always the same. He had no faith in the voting process. He hadn’t voted in a presidential election since 1972, when he voted for George McGovern; he had volunteered in 1970 on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Jesse Unruh, the California Democrat who opposed incumbent Ronald Reagan, but found the experience discouraging. It was senseless to blame the politicians, he said on one of the specials: “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, then you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant politicians.”
Not only did he distrust liberals as much as conservatives—he wasn’t interested in third parties, either. The “fashionable” and “faintly dangerous”-sounding Libertarianism was, for him, “just one more bullshit political philosophy.” He sided only with H. L. Mencken, who declared, “I belong to no party: I am my own party.”
Carlin’s extensive history of expressing his distrust of religion made him an unofficial spokesman for nonbelievers. “When it comes to God’s existence,” he joked in
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?,
“I’m not an atheist and I’m not an agnostic. I’m an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me.” Science, logic, and reason were his religion. Despite his disdain for New Age ideas, he told one magazine that he felt like a “star child.”
I read somewhere that every atom in us—because we’re all made mostly of heavier elements—came from the inside of a star. Had to be. Couldn’t come from any other place. So we’re all star children, and we’re all identical in that sense. We have identical atoms. And they’re just rearranged differently. You’re the same thing as a Coke machine down the hall in your office, and a cigarette butt in the Buffalo airport.
He sincerely tried to believe in God, Carlin said at the end of
You Are All Diseased
. But there were these nagging little clues to the contrary, such as “war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. . . . If this is the best God can do,” he said, “I am not impressed.”
If God was the cause of so much catastrophe and cataclysm, he was happy for the spectacle. His working title for the next HBO special was
I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die
. For the cover of the compact disc, he began working with the San Francisco punk collage artist Winston Smith, who has done artwork for
Playboy
and the bands Green Day and Dead Kennedys. A man with an apocalyptic vision of American folly, who took his assumed name from the protagonist of Orwell’s
1984
and still wears a fedora, Smith is another example of Carlin’s kind of guy. When Carlin explained his idea for the cover art, Smith knew they were simpatico. Among the reams of images from old magazines he clips and saves for his work, “I’ve got volcanoes, earthquakes, you name it—I’ve got all kinds of disasters,” he says.
The HBO show date was set for November 2001, with the CD to come out a month later. Smith was fast approaching his deadline for the cover art when, on the morning of September 11, he got a call from Carlin. Both men were watching the live footage of the collapse of New York’s two World Trade Center towers. “He was hastily getting me to get our stories straight,” says Smith, who was not surprised when Carlin said he’d have to change the name of the show. (Carlin eventually settled on
Complaints and Grievances
.) “I thought, under the circumstances, that was probably a wise decision,” says Smith. “His reaction was, ‘Yeah, the record company—they got no balls.’”
For weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the country was paralyzed by a collective sense of disbelief, and humor seemed to many commentators like an unacceptable extravagance. Comedians fretted publicly about their role at a time when few felt like laughing. A teary David Letterman told his audience, “I don’t trust my judgment at a time like this.” When Bill Maher agreed with a guest’s contention that the Al Qaeda hijackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center could not reasonably be called “cowards,” as President George W. Bush had suggested, the host of ABC’s
Politically Incorrect
was widely denounced. Declining advertising support soon led to the show’s cancellation.
A little over two months after the 9/11 attacks, Carlin took the stage at the Beacon Theatre for his third HBO special there. After acknowledging the unavoidable topic—the “turd in the punch bowl”—he vowed to plow ahead with the job he was paid to do, ensuring that his audience had fun. “Otherwise, the terrorists win,” he said, sucking on the words like expired milk. “Don’t you love that stuff? It’s our latest mindless cliché.” Having trimmed nearly ten minutes of material that applied to the old working title, he did a segment of gross-out humor on scabs and “lip crud” and a lengthy bit about rubbernecking at traffic accidents that he’d done as a warm-up on a recent
Tonight Show
. The centerpiece, however, was a long list of “People Who Oughta Be Killed,” including those who use credit cards for small purchases and “guys named Todd.” He ended by resurrecting an old idea, a carefully reasoned explanation of how to pare the Ten Commandments down to two. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, he argued, is really just harmless fantasizing; without it, “what’s a guy gonna think about when he’s waxing his carrot?” The dirty old man was not about to temper his audacity according to the terrorism alerts—though he did show solidarity with his hometown by pulling on a New York City T-shirt as the end credits ran, to the carnivalesque tune “The Sidewalks of New York.”
Shortly after Winston Smith finished his work on the
Complaints and Grievances
album art, he was invited to see Carlin perform at his new venue in Vegas, the MGM Grand, where several patrons mistook the white-bearded collage artist for the headlining comedian as he made his way through the casino. Midway through the show, Carlin grew frustrated with a woman who was talking loudly to her companion, ignoring the performer. “Lady, would you shut the fuck up?” Carlin finally blurted, followed by “other, much ruder things,” according to Smith. “People realized he wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the laughter kind of died down.”
It was by no means Carlin’s only incident at the MGM, where he’d been performing since finishing his decade-long run at Bally’s. For four years he stuck to his contract at the MGM Grand, but it was a mutually disagreeable association. He’d been inciting walkouts for years—one reviewer of a show in Topeka described a scene including “picketers and counter-picketers” outside the theater and “perhaps a dozen folks” who walked out during the performance. At the MGM, Carlin perfected the art of driving faint-hearted ticket holders toward the exits. The constant complaint was that the show was too dark. “Riffs included suicide and beheadings,” wrote one local reviewer. At the end of the run, Carlin took the opportunity to renew his contempt for the city and the mindless escapism it stood for: “People who go to Las Vegas, you’ve got to question their fuckin’ intellect to start with,” he said. “Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fuckin’ moronic.” A woman in the audience reportedly yelled, “Stop degrading us!”
Facetiously, Carlin thanked her, indicating he hadn’t actually heard what she said. “I hope it was positive. If not, well, blow me,” he said.