Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:54 pm Post subject: George Carlin
George Carlin Celebrates 50 Years of 'Anger' Management
Steve LaBate
25 Sep 2007
Love him or hate him, George Carlin has a knack for getting under people’s skin. Since the ’60s, when he decided to forsake the comedic mainstream, he’s never looked back, and never shied from speaking his mind or using his chosen form of expression, standup comedy, as a means to shake his audience into self-examination, whether through fiercely irreverent provocation or by inducing gut-splitting laughter.
The 70-year-old icon is a professed lover of words, linguistically bobbing and weaving—as graceful and fluttering as Ali in the ring or Elvin Jones behind the trap kit—through his record 13 HBO specials (look for the 14th in 2008) and his 50 years in show business. Now, highlights from his epic body of work have been compiled for the 14-disc set, George Carlin: All My Stuff. Carlin recently spoke with Paste from his home in Venice, Calif., to discuss the ins and outs of comedy, and his long, satisfying journey in life—a journey the ambitious entertainer/artist had already mapped out by age 11.
PASTE: Looking back, how do you feel about the work you’ve done in your career?
GEORGE CARLIN: The nice thing is it really shows a growth curve. The HBO [period] starts at a later time, when the hair’s already out of my head and down to my shoulders, so it picks me up at a certain time. But I’m very happy with it; most of it stands up very well; there’s only a little that isn’t timely. There are some things that have an anachronistic sound, but not many. I am who I am, and was who I was—past tense of Popeye—and I’m happy with it and proud of it. I only wish I were two people, so I could’ve done twice as much.
P: Watching your standup over the years, the rhythm and the wordplay, it sometimes feels like I’m watching a poet. Do you think good comedy is poetry?
GC: The thing about what I do, and this is true of some other spoken-word artists—this is more than just standup comedy. There’s an element of rhetoric, of oratory in it. It’s an essay, a spoken essay and it’s supposed to have some persuasive power, like a lawyer’s closing statement. So it’s not only a statement of what I believe, but it’s an attempt to make the beliefs I have seem more reasonable and acceptable. Now, as they say, I’m preaching to the choir anyway because I get people who are pre-sold on my way of looking at things. But it’s nice to find ways that are still novel to describe things we all know. That’s what’s fun about it, it’s speechmaking in a way, but with the saving grace of a lot of comedy: a lot of good lines, I really pride myself on good strong jokes, powerful words, not necessarily cursing—they’re necessary ’cause they’re great intensifiers—but words that carry picture power. Strong adjectives, multiple verbs.
P: You’ve said that you came to realize at a certain point that you “didn’t give a f— what people thought anymore.” When was this, and how did you reconcile that your desire to be the center of attention?
GC: I needed attention as a kid because I had an isolated life, which I enjoyed at the time. I liked the autonomy, the independence of being alone in the house. My mother had to work all day because my father was out of the picture. And I developed my left brain—mental activities, to be a little melodramatic, saved me. Loneliness could drive you crazy. So I used my brain to work my way out of that. I noticed I had the ability to get the attention of adults and amuse them, and I thought that was nice because it’s like, ‘isn’t he cute, isn’t he clever’—it’s an acknowledgement of yourself, and praise and back-patting, and it’s a good way for someone like me to first notice these skills that he had. And the guys in my neighborhood felt the same way the adults did earlier when I was a little kid—it was approval. It was applause, approbation, adulation—all the A’s I wasn’t getting in school, I was getting on the street corner. In school I was a clown, too, and I got their attention and never failed to deliver because when I did say something disruptive it was usually pretty funny. So I knew I had that ability, and how good it made me feel, so it was a natural homing process to go toward that. The plans I made were decidedly mainstream—to be like Danny Kaye was the oversimplification I gave it. But underneath that, what I became was a rebellious kid who swam against the tide and didn’t like authority and rejected it, got kicked out of preschool, kicked out of the altar boys, the choir, the Boy Scouts, summer camp—kicked out of the Air Force ultimately when I was 20. So the pattern was that I was a lawbreaker/outlaw type, and yet my dream was to be a people-pleaser like the people in the movies. [The two] didn’t go together, and I never noticed. I experienced it as dissatisfaction as I became more successful as a mainstream comedian, getting a lot of television work and getting on to variety shows. I only felt comfortable doing my bits on stage, but even they were very superficial because that was the era I lived in, comedians did that kind of stuff. They were good, I liked them, and they had a little edge of irreverence in them, but they were still people-pleasers. Then all of that changed in the ’60s, along with everything else in this country—this place underwent great changes, and it had to do with the very qualities I was denying: the anti-authority, out-of-step, “we don’t buy it” attitude. So I was able to surrender to that once I saw I had something to offer there, that I had other thoughts that could be in my comedy that weren’t just nice, happy, “how are you” things.
P: How important is honesty in comedy, and do you think it’s your responsibility as a comic to tell the truth as you see it?
GC: Definitely yes to the second question. But with the first it depends. Think of how different comedians are from each other. If you think of the differences between Lenny Bruce, “Moms” Mabley, Carol Burnett, even Lilly Tomlin, Flip Wilson—every [comedian] who rises to a good height and lasts has something unique about their approach, their content, their outlook, what they want to do for you as an audience. That wasn’t true before the ’50s, and I was lucky to be in on the tailwind and to get propelled so that, when the time came to act as an individual, I was able to make that turn in the late ’60s. But I don’t think honesty plays into every comedian’s toolkit.
P: Should anything be off limits in comedy? Is there such a thing as going too far?
GC: I don’t think so. One of the tasks of a certain kind of comedian—I count myself among them—is to see where the lines are drawn and then cross them deliberately, and try to bring the audience with you across the line and make them happy you did. The other part is just getting them to laugh, and to see some things that they’ve seen in a different light up until that time. And part of it is to find out what bothers them, where their soft spots are, their hot buttons, and press them. I love doing that. That’s part of the rebellious ‘f— you people’ thing that’s somewhere in me: ‘You think that’s sacred? F— you. Your kids? This parenting shit? I love getting in there with a big gouger and just gouging out their insides and having them sit there, and having half the people enjoy it and the other half rethinking for a moment.
P: Since the late ’60s, there hasn’t been too much separation between the man you seem to be and the man we see on stage. Do you think that’s accurate, or is there a lot of separation for you between stage and personal life?
GC: There are a great deal of genuine similarities, but many people read the theatricalized impatience I have with a topic as anger. It’s an easy word to use, it’s a convenient catch-all, and they say, “What are you so angry about?” and I say, “I’m really not an angry person, I don’t live an angry life, I’ve never had a physical fight in my life.” Most things aren’t worth, to me, getting angry at, so what you see up there is a disillusionment and a sense of betrayal on the part of my fellow humans and my fellow Americans—that they had such gifts they were given and squandered them in the interest of superstition, meaning religion, and material gain. When I get onto those subjects it brings out that dissatisfaction, that disappointment, and because I’m on a stage and I have to accent it and theatricalize it, it comes out in a heightened form and sounds like anger. So that’s what they don’t know about me, that I’m rarely angry. No one who’s been around me for five minutes—or five years—would ever say they’ve seen me very angry very often. Life is too precious to be using your energy on stupid things.
P: Do you feel that part of the reason you’re not angry or depressed that often is because your work is therapy, a way of exorcizing the demons?
GC: Yeah. I think there’s no question about that. It’s an outlet. And there is the satisfaction of building on—it’s like a Christmas tree, adding a few more ornaments every week or so.
P: What do you consider the greatest moment of your career in show business?
GC: The thing I’m proudest of is lasting for a long time at a really high level, and being highly productive and getting better. There’s an interesting distinction between being an entertainer and an artist. On the face of it, I’m an entertainer, a standup comedian. I’m proud of that term. It’s one of the low arts, a vulgar art, an art of the people. But there’s also an artist at work in there. The artist is the writer—that’s the creative artist, and the performer is the interpretive artist. So there are two levels of art going on, and an artist is never satisfied and never content with the present. They’re in motion, heading somewhere, and usually they can’t tell you where, and they don’t know, so they’re just on this path of growth and evolution, looking further into themselves, and more deeply around them. It gets a little high-falutin’ here, some of these ideas, but they’re true. There’s an important moment for me, but it has nothing to do with the external world of show business. For years, I described myself as a standup comic, a comedian who writes his own material. I was proud of that because a lot of comedians don’t. And then, in the early ’90s, I realized what I really was—[the reverse], a writer who performs his own material.
Something I didn't think of that you guys over in the UK may not know is that George Carlin was also the Conductor/Narrator on the US version of Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends
George Carlin Questions “Received Reality” Of 9/11 Story
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
October 29, 2007
Grammy-winning American stand-up comedian, actor, and author George Carlin spoke of his doubts about the official 9/11 story during a recent appearance at Borders bookstore in New York City, just a few blocks away from ground zero.
Asked what he thought of the 9/11 truth movement and how Bill Maher’s show was interrupted by truthers last week, Carlin responded, “I always question the received reality." "The consensus reality is often intentionally misleading,” he added. Asked if he would support a new investigation into 9/11, Carlin was skeptical, stating, “They don’t investigate themselves in this country - it would be a whitewash, it would be like the Kennedy thing, it would be like everything. The people who are in charge do what they want and they will always do what they want, power does what it wants to and I wouldn’t trust an investigation,” Carlin concluded.
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I'm sure is no real surprise to hear that he thinks this way, but he's certainly taken his time to mention it!
Carlin's "Class Clown" album is still hilarious today. The "Growing Up Catholic" bits are priceless: "(1) It's a sin to want to feel up Ellen, (2) it's a sin to think about feeling up Ellen, (3) it's a sin to think of a place to feel up Ellen, (4) it's a sin to ask Ellen to the place with the intention of feeling her up, (5) it's a sin to take her to the place to feel her up, (6) it's a sin to try to feel her up and (7) it's a sin to feel her up. That's SEVEN sins in ONE feel, man!!!"
George Carlin honoured for his contribution to US humour
Veteran stand-up George Carlin is to be awarded this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The Kennedy Center, which hands out the awards, said the 71-year-old’s material and style made him a perfect recipient of the prize.
‘In his lengthy career as a comedian, writer and actor, George Carlin has not only made us laugh, but he makes us think. His influence on the next generation of comics has been far-reaching,’ said the centre's chairman, Stephen A. Schwarzman. Carlin issued a statement saying: ‘Thank you Mr Twain. Have your people call my people.’
The former cocaine addict has recorded 18 albums of stand-up, was the first ever host of Saturday Night Live – and now provides the voiceover for Thomas The Tank Engine in the States. But he is still best known for his controversial Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television routine. He was arrested for obscenity for performing the routine in 1972, but its later airing on a New York radio station led to a groundbreaking US Supreme Court case in 1978, which led to a nationwide 10pm watershed for indecent material.
Carlin will receive his award – which has previously been won by Richard Pryor, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Steve Martin – on November 10.
George Carlin, Comic Who Chafed at Society and Its Constraints, Dies at 71
MEL WATKINS and BRUCE WEBER
June 24, 2008
nytimes.com
George Carlin, whose astringent stand-up comedy made him an heir of Lenny Bruce, who gave voice to an indignant counterculture and assaulted the barricades of censorship on behalf of a generation of comics that followed him, died on Sunday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 71 and lived in Venice, Calif. The cause was heart failure, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. Mr. Carlin, who performed earlier this month at the Orleans hotel in Las Vegas, had a history of heart problems.
“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth,” read a message on Mr. Carlin’s Web site, GeorgeCarlin.com, and he spent much of his life in a fervent effort to counteract the forces that would have it so. In his always irreverent, often furious social commentary, in his observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and in groundbreaking routines like the profane “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” he took aim at what he thought of as the palliating and obfuscating agents of American life — politicians, advertisements, religion, the media and conventional thinking of all stripes. “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?” he asked in a 1980s routine, taking a jab at the Reagan administration’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras.
During a career that spanned five decades, Mr. Carlin emerged as one of the most popular, durable, productive and versatile comedians of his era. He evolved from Jerry Seinfeld-like whimsy and a buttoned-down decorum in the ’60s to counterculture hero in the ’70s. By the ’80s, he was known as a scathing social critic, wringing laughs from the verbal tics of contemporary language like the oxymoron “jumbo shrimp” (and finding another oxymoron in the term “military intelligence”) and poking fun at pervasive national attitudes. He used the ascent of football’s popularity at the expense of the game he loved, baseball, to make the point that societal innocence had been lost forever.
“Baseball is a 19th-century pastoral game,” he said. “Football is a 20th-century technological struggle. Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.”
Through the 1990s and into the 21st century, Mr. Carlin, balding but still pony-tailed, prowled the stage — eyes ablaze with intensity — as the comedy circuit’s most splenetic curmudgeon, raging over the shallowness of a “me first” culture; mocking the infatuation with camcorders, hyphenated names and sneakers with lights on them; lambasting white guys over 10 years old who wear their baseball hats backwards, baby boomers “who went from ‘do your thing’ to ‘just say no’ ” and “from cocaine to Rogaine”; and foes of abortion rights. “How come when it’s us it’s an abortion,” he asked, “and when it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?”
George Denis Carlin was born in New York City on May 12, 1937. His mother, Mary, a secretary, separated from his father when he was an infant, and he grew up with his mother and his older brother, Patrick, on West 121st Street in Manhattan. “I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio,” Mr. Carlin said. “My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.”
He dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force, and while stationed in Shreveport, La., he worked as a radio disc jockey. Discharged in 1957, he moved to Boston for a radio announcer’s job, then to Fort Worth, where he was a D.J. Along the way he met Jack Burns, a newscaster and comedian. They worked together in Fort Worth and Los Angeles, performing on the radio and in clubs and even appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar. The comedian Mort Sahl, whose penchant for social commentary Mr. Carlin came to share, dubbed them “a duo of hip wits.”
Still, the Carlin-Burns team was only moderately successful, and, in 1960, Mr. Carlin struck out on his own. He made his first television solo guest appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1962, in the interim between Paar’s departure and Johnny Carson’s arrival; the host that night was Mr. Sahl. His second wasn’t until 1965, when he made the first of 29 appearances on “The Merv Griffin Show.”
At that time, he was primarily known for his clever wordplay and reminiscences of his Irish working-class upbringing in New York. But there were intimations of an anti-establishment edge. It surfaced, for example, in a parody of television newscasts, for which he invented characters like Al Sleet, “the “hippy-dippy weatherman”: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.”
Mr. Carlin released his first comedy album, “Take-Offs and Put-Ons,” to rave reviews in 1967. He also dabbled in acting, winning a recurring part as Marlo Thomas’s theatrical agent in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl” and a supporting role in the 1968 movie “With Six You Get Eggroll.” He made more than 80 major television appearances during that time, including on the Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”; he was also regularly featured at nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas.
He was one of America’s most popular comedians, but as the convulsive decade of 1960s ended, he’d had enough of what he considered a dinky and hollow success. “I was entertaining the fathers and the mothers of the people I sympathized with, and in some cases associated with, and whose point of view I shared,” he recalled later, as quoted in the book “Going Too Far” by Tony Hendra (Doubleday, 1987). “I was a traitor, in so many words. I was living a lie.”
In 1970, Mr. Carlin staged a remarkable reversal of field, discarding his suit and tie, as well as the relatively conventional and clean-cut material that had catapulted him to the top. He reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine steeped in drugs and insolence. A backlash followed; in one famous incident, he was advised to leave town when an angry audience threatened him at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., for joking about the Vietnam War. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned nightclubs for coffee houses and colleges, where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.
By 1972, when he released his second album, “FM & AM,” his star was again on the rise. The album, which won a Grammy Award as best comedy recording, combined older material with his newer, more acerbic routines. One, from “Class Clown,” Mr. Carlin’s third album, became part of his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” with its rhythmic recitation of obscenities. It was broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI. Acting on a complaint about the broadcast, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order prohibiting the words as “indecent.” In 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the order, establishing a decency standard that remains in effect; it ensnared Howard Stern in 2005, precipitating his move to satellite radio. Mr. Carlin refused to drop the bit and was arrested several times after reciting it onstage.
By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his jests about religion and politics, he talked about using drugs, including LSD and peyote; he kicked cocaine, he said, not for moral or legal reasons but because he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.”
Three of Mr. Carlin’s comedy albums of the 1970’s — “Class Clown,” “Occupation: Foole” and “An Evening With Wally Lambo” — sold more than a million copies. In 1975, he was chosen to host the first episode of the late-night comedy show “Saturday Night Live.” And two years later, he found the perfect platform for his stinging and cerebral, if sometimes off-color, humor in the fledgling world of cable television: the first of his 14 HBO comedy specials, “George Carlin at U.S.C.” was aired in 1977, the last, “George Carlin: It’s Bad for Ya,” in March.
During the course of his career, Mr. Carlin overcame numerous personal trials. His early arrests for obscenity (all of which were dismissed) and his problem with cocaine were the most publicized. But he also weathered serious tax problems, a heart attack and two open-heart surgeries; his health problems cost him five years of productivity between 1977 and 1982. Though he had been able to taper his cocaine use on his own, he said, he continued to abuse alcohol and also became addicted to Vicodin. In December 2004 he entered a rehabilitation center.
“Stand-up is the centerpiece of my life, my business, my art, my survival and my way of being,” Mr. Carlin once told an interviewer. And while it did always take center stage in his career, Mr. Carlin also acted in films, among them “Car Wash” (1976), “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989), “The Prince of Tides” (1991), and “Dogma” (1999).
He also wrote books, expansions on his comedy routines, including “Brain Droppings” (1997), “Napalm & Silly Putty (2001) and “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?” (2004), all published by Hyperion. A 1994 sitcom, “The George Carlin Show,” lasted a single season. He also did a stint narrating the children’s television show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.” Mr. Carlin won a total of four Grammy Awards. He was recently named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which he was to receive in November at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The Kennedy Center said Monday that the prize would be given posthumously and that the evening would be a tribute to his life and work.
In addition to his brother, Patrick, Mr. Carlin is survived by his wife, Sally Wade, and a daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall. His first wife, Brenda Hosbrook, died in 1997.
Mr. Carlin’s most recent work was especially contentious, even bitter, full of ranting against the stupid, the fat, the docile. But he defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
ahh shit, that's a real shame. I just sorted out my collection of his albums the other day and was thinking how much he had done. He was a real hero of comedy.
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