The Book of Carlin

written by Ken Carlson with Tony Hendra

“An audience is the only group I can tolerate, because the audience wouldn’t be the group if it wasn’t for me. Which extends to every other audience that has ever liked me. More and more as I get older, when people come up to me in public places to tell me how much they enjoyed some piece at a concert or club as long as forty years ago, I mentally see an audience of millions stretching away into the darkness. Individuals who in a sense I’ve met, and some spark has passed between us, actual humans in whose presence I’ve been and who’ve been in mine, 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 at a time, but also one-on-one. Whenever they laughed in that moment, I was speaking to them directly. Faces with favorites, I overhear them in the lobby sometimes: “Wait till you hear ‘There is No God.’” Or someone who loved “Al Sleet” when she was little. They’re part of the family. We’re kindred. Live performances does that for you as nothing else can. And I think very few comics in my lifetime can say that.” – George Carlin

Our lives are like a hotel. We check in, unpack our stuff, and stay a while; sometimes for pleasure, other times for business. While we’re there, other people check in. Most of them don’t stay in our lives long, checking out after a brief stay, never to return. In fact, a large number of guests are completely surprised that their stay has been cut short and would like to speak to the manager.

George Carlin knew he was leaving. He took the time to prepare his story his way with his friend, Tony Hendra. For those who don’t know Mr. Hendra’s work, perhaps you’re too young to remember his live performing days, or don’t tread into the world of publishing/humor, feel free to know him from the movie, This Is Spinal Tap. He played the band’s manager, Ian Faith; the guy with the cricket bat. For those who haven’t seen Spinal Tap, allow me to cover my eyes and sigh in despair.

Last Words presents the stripped down voice of George Carlin that few people knew. By stripped down, I don’t mean a weakened acoustic version of an original, repackaged for corporate palatability. It’s an honest, straight-forward account. This is not the easy-going Hippy Dippy Weatherman, not the conductor from Thomas the Steam Engine, not the stand-up artist going for laughs; but a driven, meticulous man, unapologetic about his choices. He recounts his upbringing in New York with respect. He is quick to praise the people he cared for and feels free to comments on those he didn’t. I wouldn’t bore you by saying this is required reading for anyone interested in comedy. Instead I’ll describe it using Mr. Carlin’s words, “It’s astounding! It’s amazing! But it’s... no... bullshit!”

The book opens with a strongly worded forward by Hendra I thoroughly enjoyed. I contacted him as he was preparing a tribute to his friend, George.

Q: In your introduction, you mention today’s “interchangeable comics who shuffle across Comedy Central’s various interchangeable performance areas...” Could you expand on that?

Hendra: It would be invidious to name names but I think it’s fair to say that at any point in the last three decades or so there has been a fairly constant population of comedians whom it’s hard to tell apart or keep track of or – frankly - care about. By comedians I mean individuals who tell jokes (observations with distinct punch lines as opposed to longer, more engaging forms) either about themselves or the more trivial and unsurprising aspects of the culture; who tend to be male and at least these days, tend also to be a substantial percentage over their ideal weight. Their locus shifts from time to time (Showtime at one point, HBO or Comedy Central at another) but their content doesn’t. George and I spoke at some length when we were dealing with the 80s section of his career about the explosion of brick wall comedy clubs from the late 70s on and the crowds of comedians they bred - generally uninteresting and unadventurous however many of the 7 words they may have used. Even though many claimed him as a major influence, very few impressed him. The proliferation of comedians in the 80s and 90s was only of relevance to him (as you know from the book) in terms of what competition they presented to him. For the most part they fell into the category of “No Threat” I don’t think that changed much throughout the remainder of his career.

Q: You said, “Unlike many of his peers, he [Carlin] died uncorrupted, uncompromised and unbowed.” Wouldn’t his track record with drugs and spending allude to a form of corruption, and, to a lesser degree, some of his career choices represent compromise?

Hendra: Drugs only cause corruption when they’re illegal. George definitely saw pot and acid as gateway drugs: both opened the gate to his self-realization as an artist. His bout with coke addiction didn’t corrupt him (except insofar as it corrupted his good judgment in the mid70s – Perry Como? Tony Orlando and Dawn?) That aside, my phrase has certain rhetorical flourish, intended to convey that right to the end George stuck to his guns, both in content and what he did for a living – performing live to living breathing people. He used media solely as an advertisement for his art, and never allowed his brief excursions into TV or movies to corrupt that art. Just as important, he never stopped writing and creating. He didn’t plateau out as so many major artists do; but was always restlessly moving on to something new. There were many pieces you could call George Carlin’s Greatest Hits, but you never heard George doing them. Imagine George in say 2003 telling an audience: “right now I’d like to do a little piece you may know called A Place For My Stuff” getting the requisite robo-applause and then going into a 20-year-old routine. Never happen.

Q: You indicated comedian was not an appropriate term [much as BB King wasn’t simply a guitarist] in describing Carlin? What term would be appropriate? Does “comedian” detract from his work because his accomplishments were so good or because the role of comedian or the industry is so diminished?

Hendra: Obviously the answer to your previous question answers this to some degree. GC wasn’t a comedian in the sense it’s defined above. But then, nor was he exclusively a satirist (another terminally misused word) although much of his material and certain aspects of his stage persona had a satirical purpose. It’s hard to come up with one word to do justice to his work. I’ve noticed that reviewers of the book tend to describe him with lists of words or terms (including terms like ‘performance artist’), suggesting that there probably isn’t one single designation to cover all he accomplished on stage. George himself wanted to be known and regarded simply as an artist. He saw this book less as the story of his life than the story of his art and how it evolved. The shameful lack of media coverage of it (at least on TV and radio) since its publication argues that our despicable cultural classism militates hard against even crediting him that much. To paraphrase Rodney D. it isn’t just comedians who don’t get no respect – it’s comedy itself.

Q: Carlin’s legacy places him alongside Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor as the greatest comedians ever. Knowing that, and having a personal relationship with him, how much pressure or responsibility did you feel in working on this book?

Hendra: I felt no pressure at all. For one thing however ferocious GC was on stage, he was a generous and approachable guy off. Second, we were not only friends but I’d been through many of the same experiences and changes he had. Plus I had racked up a few credits in comedy myself, though not in the same forum as him so while I shared a craft with him, I had some perspective on stand-up. Thanks to Going Too Far, (which he used to call “your big book”), I’d not only talked in depth with scores of other major American comedy and humor figures, but I’d thought about comedy a lot - as he did all the time – particularly the post-war American comedy of which he was so dominant a figure. And the process itself was fascinating: very spontaneous and organic - more like conversations between equals than interviews between star and ghost-writer. If you have a chance check out the You-tube channel I put out of audio clips from the tapes at:
www.youtube.com/afewlastwordswithGC
They’ll give you the flavor. Bottom line: George saw this process less of feeding me a prepackaged story of his life to write up, than as one of discovery. He occasionally said things like, “It’s fascinating to find out just what I was doing in the late 80s.” The privilege of co-authorship was that I became a collaborator in the process of his sorting out for himself exactly how his art had evolved. My responsibility both in chapters I’d worked on while he was still alive and - far weightier - completing the whole after his death was to stay faithful to his goal of – as he puts it somewhere on the tapes - “explaining myself to myself - and to my audience.”

Q: Carlin mentioned having to deal with the media and inane questions from sources like the “Pittsburgh Post and Nasal Drip” [Great line!]. Do you get the sense that part of the reason he chose to take an active role in his sortabiography was out of mistrust or lack of confidence in the media to get it right?

Hendra: That quote characterized a particular kind of inane question rather than general inanity (‘Do you ever do material about people in the news?’) I don’t recall George having any particular beef with the media beyond his total skepticism: that they told Americans what their rulers wanted them to hear rather than what they needed to hear. I do think that the sociopathic character he played on stage (“I really like it when a lot of people die”) was brilliant satire both of the media’s obsession with death, disaster and what newsmen used to call bang-bang AND of the viewers’ macabre relish in lapping it all up. So - pretty low opinion of the media. I don’t think he ever felt that they would “get it right” in the first place. Does anyone?
Q: Most autobiographies have moments of crisis when dealing with personal relationships, especially if some form of alcohol or drug abuse, perhaps emotional distress, is involved. There’s a paragraph or more where the subject attempts to explain or apologize for his actions. Whether it’s sincere or true is left to the reader, but there seems to be none of that here. Do you agree with that, and knowing Carlin as you did, were you surprised?

Hendra: George never tried to explain away or exonerate himself from, his addictions – or (far more important and interesting) the effect his single-minded dedication to his craft had on his loved ones. One reason that celebrity-memoir mawkishness is absent from LW is that George had clearly thought deeply about his degree of blame in these areas and embraced it. I’ve said elsewhere that although George was a committed atheist and devotedly non-Catholic, some of his mental habits remained rooted in his Catholic upbringing and early education. One of them was called “examination of conscience” (which you’re supposed to do in preparation for going to Confession). In approaching these periods of his life, George was very honest about his responsibility for his weaknesses and the aftershocks to his family later on. He didn’t have to be challenged about them. There was none of the reflexive evasiveness or laying off the blame on circumstances or parents - any of the usual I’m-a-victim-too defenses.

Q; You said he was the “antithesis of Happy the Carefee Clown”. What did you mean by that?

Hendra: I simply meant that George was at the other end of the professional spectrum from those comedians who keep it light and play it safe and say things like “Laughter is the best medicine.” George was deadly serious about being incredibly funny. Laughter for him was the best enema.

Q: Dylan Brody, a comedian from the 80’s who currently works as a storyteller out of LA, tells the story in his act of leaving a tape of his early work for Carlin, his hero, to review at a club. Carlin called Brody at home to tell him he liked it, then called the people at Letterman to put in a good word for him. Would you call that indicative of the Carlin we didn’t know, at a personal level?

Hendra: It sounds exactly like the friend I knew. He didn’t mentor very many people but when he did it was direct, kind and genuine. As he never tired of saying he had no problem with people one on one: it was just groups he couldn’t stand.

Q: The image of historical figures changes with time. Nixon went from evil thief who threatened to bring down democracy to the hero who opened the door to China and suggested by some to be the Commissioner of Baseball. Setting aside how Carlin should be remembered or how the media will write about him, how will you remember him?

Hendra: Nixon never stopped being a mass-murderer (rather than mere evil thief) who opened the door to China to distract the world’s attention from the genocide he was perpetrating in South-East Asia. It seems an inauspicious parallel. I find very few people have a negative view about George except those you’d hope (and he would’ve hoped) had good cause to feel negatively about him.
However ferocious and deadly his insights, there was always something oddly lovable about George that made his satirical rage convincing and inclusive. Wherever he went, he always ended up with the audience rooting for him, on his side against whomever he chose to rip apart. It was said of Jonathan Swift that he had “savage indignation” and I would like that to be said of George too – with the proviso that George usually had you on the floor while being savagely indignant which somehow I don’t think was the good Dean’s forte. What I really want him to be remembered for though, are his words. I believe he was a populist commentator, wordsmith and artist on the level of Mark Twain and I hope to be able to play a small part in establishing that as his legacy.