Don’t blame George Carlin for coming off onstage as one of the meanest, crabbiest men on the face of the Earth. It’s society’s fault.
To his way of thinking, we, as a population, have wasted our potential for greatness. We’d rather use our mental capacity to create feather dusters that pull up dust like a magnet than come up with a better way of life for everyone.
“Do you know we have 324 different breakfast foods?” Carlin asks rhetorically. “If you were to count every size of every type of (breakfast food) that everyone puts out–they’re not all in one store, of course–there are over 320 of them.
“And that to me is just a sign of decay,” grouses the veteran standup comic, whose 40 years in comedy earned him a tribute earlier this year at the Aspen Comedy Festival.
It’s a good thing society is so messed up in Carlin’s eyes, because it has given him fuel for a type of comedy that for the last several years has revitalized him, making him edgier and more aggressive than he ever has been in his career. Not a bad trick for a man who just celebrated his 60th birthday.
Mind you, Carlin is not terribly upset about this so-called squandering of potential–although you wouldn’t know it from the ranting he does onstage, or the ravings in his new book, “Brain Droppings” (Hyperion, $19.95).
“I don’t think of it as anger because I don’t experience it as anger. I experience it as dissatisfaction and distaste and contempt for what I think of as a failed species,” Carlin said in a recent interview in a nearly deserted North Side restaurant.
While picking at a plate of fruit, Carlin, his sweatshirt, cap and jeans calling to mind the 1950s Beatnik era that spawned him, said: “I sort of gave up on the species. And as a result, it turned into a kind of contempt for them, to let this happen to this wonderful brain that we were given. What do we do with it? Salad-shooters and sneakers with lights in them and team jackets . . .”
“Brain Droppings” is loaded with such scorn. Writes Carlin: “They try to blame movies and TV for violence in this country. What a load of s—. Long before there were movies and television, Americans killed millions of Indians, enslaved millions of blacks, slaughtered 700,000 of each other in a family feud and attained the highest murder rate in history. Don’t blame Sylvester Stallone.”
Carlin’s dissatisfaction with society gave him a skeleton on which to hang what he calls an “aggressive” voice for his reinvented standup persona. But it took another comic to lend credence to this aggression: the late, legendary screamer Sam Kinison.
Kinison also had an aggressive style of standup, complete with harsh language, but with thoughtful observations underneath. Watching Kinison work inspired Carlin. He decided to adopt a similar in-your-face tone, but without the flat-out screaming that was the late shock comic’s stock in trade. So Carlin now comes off angrier in concert than he did in the 1960s, when he delivered a gentler, less bitter, brand of comedy.
“I said, `Aw, yeah, you’ve gotta raise your voice,’ ” said Carlin. “Because it’s a noisy culture. There’s a lot of clutter in this pop culture. And if you’re going to compete for their ear, their attention, you’ve got to sort of raise your voice, one way or another.
“I didn’t say, `OK, I’m going to talk louder.’ But I just began to give vent to some of these feelings more, and to find that they felt good to do and that people tolerated them well. And especially if you had some underpinning of ideas. It’s not enough simply to yell, it’s not enough to simply appear angry.”
Never too old
In adopting this new voice, Carlin rediscovered his love for standup and performing. And to do it rather late in life is an even greater achievement, although Carlin chalks that up to simply growing.
“I just have to assume a lot of it has to do with accumulated experience, maturity, a certain wisdom. And just learning your craft. It’s a trade and there are stages,” said Carlin, who dropped out of the 9th grade because he wanted to be a performer–which wasn’t in the curriculum at the Catholic high school he attended in his native New York.
“It’s probably immodest–it is immodest for me to say it–but I think I’m a master at this,” he added. “I think I’ve attained that status as a comedian.”
There aren’t many who can deny Carlin’s assessment, no matter how immodest.
The comic has appeared in 10 HBO comedy specials, more than anyone else. Two of those specials have won CableACE awards. He has made 18 albums and has won two Grammies (he has been nominated 10 times). One of those winners, his 1992 album “Jammin’ in New York,” first affirmed for Carlin that he had taken the right course in his comedic evolution.
More important, Carlin has over the course of four decades influenced scores of standup comics with his mutating repertoire of material, which began with media spoofs and takeoffs in the early days, segued into counter-culture rabble-rousing during the late 1960s and 1970s, and ultimately metamorphosed into the current high-powered musings on the oddities of life.
Carlin acknowledges that Chicago figured heavily in the early part of his career.
Born to a mother who loved exposing Carlin to vocabulary and language (which explains his reputation for finely written material), Carlin was drawn toward comedy while working as a Top-40s disc jockey during his stint in the Air Force in 1956 at the age of 19. Three years later at a radio station in Ft. Worth, he was doing comedy bits on the air with then-newsman Jack Burns.
“For me it was a way of getting started a little bit sooner than I would have as a single (act),” Carlin said. “And for Jack it was a way to satisfy some of his acting ambition.” Carlin also wanted to use standup as an entree to the movies–he had visions of a career along the lines of Danny Kaye, he said.
(Acting hasn’t worked out terribly well for Carlin, he admits, although he has appeared in “With Six You Get Eggroll,” “Outrageous Fortune” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” He also had his own comedy series on Fox, and was nominated for two Emmys for playing Mister Conductor on the kids’ PBS show “Shining Time Station.”)
Standup also gave Carlin, who was a loner as a child, a way to garner appreciation from others.
“It was always the first choice because of the satisfaction it (gave) me to have people sort of pat you on the head and say, `Isn’t he cute? Did you think of that? Wow!’ “
Making it on his own
Carlin and Burns lasted two years together, making an album and benefiting from the comedy revolution wrought by incendiary comic Lenny Bruce. When they split up in 1962, Burns hooked up with Avery Schreiber at Second City in Chicago–the two of them going on to become the comedy duo Burns & Schreiber. Carlin, meanwhile, went “down the street” to the Gate of Horn on Wells Street to work solo.
“The Wells Street scene was attractive to me, the folkies,” he said. “You see, that other part of (myself) was already pulling me, that underground guy; that dissident voice was already saying, `Isn’t this just a little more fun over here?’ “
In the mid-1960s, Carlin developed such bits as “The Hippy-Dippy Weatherman,” which were embraced by the coffeehouses and folk clubs which also welcomed his jazzy style of joke delivery. At the same time, he became a favorite comedian on television.
As the 1970s dawned, Carlin’s material started to reflect the country’s anger over Vietnam as well as its changing moral values (his “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” is a classic of that era), much to the displeasure of some nightclub patrons, club owners and law enforcement officials (some bits that contained obscenities or controversial material resulted in arrests, firings and clashes with audience members).
The down side
The mid-1970s saw the emergence of two negative factors: Carlin’s comedy began leaning toward blander material (“What do you do when you run out of things to say? You start talking about your own navel and your own toenails and stuff”), and Carlin getting more involved with drugs, particularly cocaine and marijuana.
“I don’t know how all this stuff plays against the creative side,” Carlin said. “I think marijuana is a useful writing aid, as long as you balance it off with periods of editing yourself when you’re not high.” Carlin “struggled” with drugs during a five-year period, quitting “by degrees.”
Today, as Carlin performs in the shadow of the approaching millennium, he does so without his wife, Brenda, at his side. She died May 11 at the age of 57 from complications of liver cancer. They had been married 36 years, and have a daughter, Kelly.
“Brenda died very quickly,” Carlin said quietly. “She was my buddy. We had a great, great partnership, and I miss her. It’s a very strange process to go through.
“This is new territory,” Carlin said with a long sigh, noting that the loss may cause him to move back to his native New York.
“I think that’s where I need to be for my creative future,” he said. “To feel those streets and go downtown and see somebody in a little place where there’s only seven people sitting there and (a performer) is pouring his heart out. That stimulates me.
“When I see other artists, one of two things happens: Either you look at him and say, `Well, no threat here,’ or you look at him and you say, `I’d better get home and get to work.’ . . . I love that feeling.”
