George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June
22, 2008) was an American
stand-up
comedian and
social critic. He
was also an
actor and
author, and he won five
Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.
Carlin was noted for his
black humor as
well as his thoughts on
politics, the
English language,
psychology,
religion, and
various
taboo subjects.
Carlin and his
"Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine
were central to the 1978 U.S.
Supreme Court case F.C.C. v.
Pacifica
Foundation, in which a narrow 5–4 decision by the justices
affirmed the government's power to regulate indecent material on
the public
airwaves.
The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for
HBO was filmed in 1977. In the 1990s and 2000s, Carlin's
routines focused on the flaws in modern-day America. He often took
on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized
the excesses of
American culture.
His final HBO special,
It's Bad for
Ya, was filmed less than four months before his
death.
Carlin was placed second on the
Comedy
Central cable television network list of the 100 greatest
stand-up comedians, ahead of
Lenny Bruce
and behind
Richard Pryor. He was a
frequent performer and guest host on
The Tonight
Show during the three-decade
Johnny Carson era, and hosted the first
episode of
Saturday Night
Live.
Early life
Carlin was
born in New York
City
, the son of Mary Beary, a secretary, and Patrick
Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. Carlin
was of
Irish descent and was raised in
the
Roman Catholic faith.
Carlin
grew up on West 121st Street, in a neighborhood of Manhattan
which he later said, in a stand-up routine, he and
his friends called "White Harlem
", because
that sounded a lot tougher than its real name of Morningside
Heights
. He was raised by his mother, who left his
father when Carlin was two months old.
After 3 semesters, at
the age of 15, Carlin involuntarily left Cardinal Hayes
High School
and briefly attended Bishop Dubois High
School in Harlem. Carlin had a difficult relationship
with his mother and often ran away from home. He later joined the
United States Air Force,
training as a
radar technician.
He was stationed at
Barksdale
AFB
in Bossier City, Louisiana
.
During
this time he began working as a disc
jockey on KJOE, a radio station based in the nearby city of
Shreveport
. He did not complete his Air Force
enlistment. Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors,
Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957.
Career
In 1959,
Carlin and Jack Burns began as a comedy
team when both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas
. After successful performances at Fort
Worth's beat coffeehouse, The Cellar, Burns and Carlin headed for
California in February 1960 and stayed together for two years as a
team before moving on to individual pursuits.
1960s
Within weeks of arriving in California in 1960, Burns and Carlin
put together an audition tape and created
The Wright
Brothers, a morning show on
KDAY,
Hollywood. The comedy team worked there for three months, honing
their material in
beatnik coffeehouses at night.
Years later when he
was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
, Carlin requested that it be placed in front of the
KDAY studios. Burns and Carlin recorded their only album,
Burns
and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight, in May 1960 at
Cosmo Alley in Hollywood.
In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing on television variety shows,
notably
The Ed Sullivan
Show and
The Tonight
Show. His most famous routines were:
- The Indian Sergeant ("You wit' the beads... get outta
line")
- Stupid disc jockeys ("Wonderful WINO...") — "The Beatles'
latest record, when played backwards at slow speed, says 'Dummy!
You're playing it backwards at slow speed!'"
- Al Sleet, the "hippie-dippie weatherman" — "Tonight's forecast: Dark.
Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some
widely-scattered light towards morning."
- Jon Carson — the "world never known, and never to be
known"
Variations on the first three of these
routines appear on Carlin's 1967 debut album, Take Offs and Put Ons, recorded
live in 1966 at The Roostertail in Detroit
, Michigan
.
During this period, Carlin became more popular as a frequent
performer and guest host on
The
Tonight Show, initially with
Jack
Paar as host, then with Johnny Carson. Carlin became one of
Carson's most frequent substitutes during the host's three-decade
reign. Carlin was also cast on
Away We Go, a 1967 comedy
show. His material during his early career, which included
impressions, and his appearance, which consisted of suits and
short-cropped hair, has been seen as "conventional", particularly
when contrasted with his later anti-establishment material.
Carlin was present at
Lenny Bruce's
arrest for obscenity. As the police began attempting to detain
members of the audience for questioning, they asked Carlin for his
identification. Telling the police he did not believe in government
issued IDs, he was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the
same vehicle.
1970s
Eventually, Carlin changed both his routines and his appearance. He
lost some TV bookings by dressing strangely for a comedian of the
time, wearing faded jeans and sporting long hair, a beard and
earrings at a time when clean-cut, well-dressed comedians were the
norm. Using his own persona as a springboard for his new comedy, he
was presented by
Ed Sullivan in a
performance of "The Hair Piece," and quickly regained his
popularity as the public caught on to his sense of style.
In this period he also perfected what is perhaps his best-known
routine, "
Seven Words You Can Never
Say on Television", recorded on
Class Clown.
Carlin was arrested
on July 21, 1972 at Milwaukee's
Summerfest and charged
with violating obscenity laws after
performing this routine. The case, which prompted Carlin to
refer to the words for a time as, "The Milwaukee Seven", was
dismissed in December of that year; the judge declared that the
language was indecent, but Carlin had the freedom to say it as long
as he caused no disturbance.
In 1973, one man complained to the FCC after listening with
his son to a similar routine, "Filthy Words", from Occupation: Foole, broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica
Foundation FM radio station in New York City. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC,
which sought to fine Pacifica for violating FCC regulations which
prohibited broadcasting "obscene" material.
The U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the FCC action, by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling
that the routine was "indecent but not obscene", and the FCC had
authority to prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children
were likely to be among the audience. (
F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438
U.S. 726 (1978). The court documents contain a complete transcript
of the routine.)
The controversy only increased Carlin's fame. Carlin eventually
expanded the dirty-words theme with a seemingly interminable end to
a performance (ending with his voice fading out in one
HBO version, and accompanying the credits in
the
Carlin at Carnegie
special for the 1982-83 season), and a set of 49 web pages
organized by subject and embracing his "Incomplete List Of Impolite
Words".
Carlin was the first-ever host of
NBC's
Saturday Night Live, on
October 11, 1975. (He also hosted
SNL on November 10,
1984, where he appeared in sketches. The first time he hosted, he
only appeared to perform stand-up and introduced the guest acts.)
The following season, 1976-77, Carlin also appeared regularly on
CBS Television's
Tony Orlando & Dawn variety
series.
Carlin unexpectedly stopped performing regularly in 1976, when his
career appeared to be at its height. For the next five years, he
rarely appeared to perform stand-up, although it was at this time
he began doing specials for
HBO as
part of its
On
Location series. His first two HBO specials aired in 1977
and 1978. It was later revealed that Carlin had suffered the first
of his three non-fatal
heart
attacks during this layoff period.
1980s and 1990s
In 1981,
Carlin returned to the stage, releasing A Place For My Stuff, and he
returned to HBO and New York City with the Carlin at Carnegie TV special, videotaped at Carnegie Hall
and airing during the 1982-83 season. Carlin
continued doing HBO specials every year or every other year over
the following decade-and-a-half. All of Carlin's albums from this
time forward are the HBO specials.
's acting career was primed with a major supporting role in the
1987 comedy hit
Outrageous
Fortune, starring
Bette Midler
and
Shelley Long; it was his first
notable screen role after a handful of previous guest roles on
television series. Playing drifter Frank Madras, the role poked fun
at the lingering effect of the 1960s psychedelic counterculture. In
1989, he gained popularity with a new generation of teens when he
was cast as Rufus, the time-traveling mentor of the titular
characters in
Bill & Ted's Excellent
Adventure, and reprised his role in the film sequel
Bill and Ted's Bogus
Journey as well as the first season of the
cartoon series. In 1991,
he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the
children's show
Thomas the Tank Engine and
Friends, a role he continued until 1998. He played "Mr.
Conductor" on the
PBS children's show
Shining Time Station,
which featured Thomas the Tank Engine from 1991 to 1993, as well as
the Shining Time Station TV specials in 1995 and
Mr. Conductor's Thomas
Tales in 1996. Also in 1991, Carlin had a major supporting
role in the movie
The Prince of
Tides, which starred
Nick Nolte
and
Barbra Streisand.
Carlin began a weekly
Fox
Broadcasting sitcom,
The George Carlin Show, in 1993,
playing New York City
taxicab driver "George
O'Grady". He quickly included a variation of the "Seven Words" in
the plot. The show ran 27 episodes through December 1995.
In 1997, his first hardcover book,
Brain Droppings, was published, and
sold over 750,000 copies as of 2001. Carlin was honored at the 1997
Aspen Comedy Festival with a
retrospective
George Carlin: 40 Years of
Comedy hosted by
Jon
Stewart.
In 1999, Carlin played a supporting role as a satirical
Roman Catholic cardinal in filmmaker
Kevin Smith's movie
Dogma. He worked with Smith again with a
cameo appearance in
Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back, and later played an atypically serious role in
Jersey Girl, as
the
blue collar father of
Ben Affleck's character.
2000s
In 2001, Carlin was given a
Lifetime Achievement Award at the
15th Annual
American Comedy
Awards.
In December 2003, California U.S. Representative
Doug Ose introduced a bill (H.R. 3687) to outlaw
the broadcast of Carlin's seven "dirty words," including "compound
use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with
each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical
forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund,
participle, and infinitive forms)." (The bill omits "
tits," but includes "
asshole,"
which was not part of Carlin's original routine.) This bill was
never voted on; the last action on this bill was its referral to
the
House Judiciary Committee on the Constitution on January 15,
2004.
The
following year, Carlin was fired from his headlining position at
the MGM Grand
Hotel
in Las Vegas
after an altercation with his audience.
After a poorly received set filled with dark references to suicide
bombings and beheadings, Carlin stated that he could not wait to
get out of "this fucking hotel" and Las Vegas, claiming he wanted
to go back East "where the real people are". He continued to insult
his audience, stating
"People who go to Las Vegas, you've got to question
their fucking intellect to start with.
Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to
essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of
fucking moronic.
That's what I'm always getting here is these kind of
fucking people with very limited intellects."
An audience member shouted back that Carlin should "stop degrading
us", at which point Carlin responded "Thank you very much, whatever
that was. I hope it was positive; if not, well blow me." He was
immediately fired by MGM Grand and soon after announced he would
enter rehab for alcohol and prescription painkiller
addiction.
For years, Carlin had performed regularly as a headliner in Las
Vegas.
He
began a tour through the first half of 2006, which culminated in
his thirteenth HBO Special on
November 5, 2005 entitled Life
is Worth Losing, which was shown live from the Beacon Theatre in New York City, and in which he stated early on that "it's been
341 days since I got out of rehab", that being the same rehab he
entered after being fired from MGM. Topics covered included
suicide,
natural
disasters (and the impulse to see them escalate in severity),
cannibalism,
genocide,
human
sacrifice, threats to
civil
liberties in America, and how an argument can be made that
humans are inferior to animals.
On
February 1, 2006, Carlin mentioned to the crowd, during his
Life is Worth Losing set at the Tachi Palace Casino in
Lemoore
, California
, that he had been discharged from the hospital only
six weeks previously for "heart
failure" and "pneumonia," citing the
appearance as his "first show back."
Carlin provided the voice of
Fillmore, a character in the
Disney/
Pixar animated
feature
Cars, which opened in
theaters on June 9, 2006. The character Fillmore, who is presented
as an anti-establishment hippie, is a
VW
Microbus with a
psychedelic paint
job, whose front license plate reads "51237" — Carlin's
birthday.
Carlin's
last HBO stand-up special, It's Bad
for Ya, aired live on March 1, 2008, from the Wells Fargo
Center for the Arts
in Santa Rosa, California
. Many of the themes that appeared in this
HBO special included "American Bullshit," "Rights," "Death," "Old
Age," and "Child Rearing." Carlin had been working the new material
for this HBO special for several months prior in concerts all over
the country.
On June
18, 2008, four days before his death, the Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts
in Washington, D.C.
announced that Carlin would be the 2008 honoree of
the Mark Twain Prize
for American Humor, which was awarded on November 10,
2008. Carlin thus became the award's first posthumous
recipient, a decision the Kennedy Center made after consulting with
both Carlin's family and
PBS (which aired the ceremony).
The comedians who honored him at the ceremony included
Jon Stewart,
Bill
Maher,
Lily Tomlin (a former Twain
Humor Prize winner herself),
Lewis
Black,
Denis Leary,
Joan Rivers, and
Margaret Cho.
Personal life
In 1961, Carlin married Brenda Hosbrook (August 5, 1936 – May 11,
1997), whom he had met while touring the previous year. The couple
had a daughter, Kelly, in 1963 but
aborted
a second pregnancy (in an underground, illegal, operation) in 1970,
feeling they were unable to handle a second child at that stage in
their life. In 1971, George and Brenda renewed their wedding vows
in Las Vegas. Brenda died of
liver
cancer a day before Carlin's sixtieth birthday, in 1997.
Carlin later married Sally Wade on June 24, 1998, and the marriage
lasted until his death – two days before their tenth
anniversary.
In December 2004, Carlin announced that he would be voluntarily
entering a drug rehabilitation facility to receive treatment for
his
dependency on alcohol and
vicodin.
Carlin did not vote and often criticized elections as an illusion
of choice. He said he last voted for
George McGovern, who ran for President in
1972 against
Richard Nixon.
Religion
Although raised in the
Roman Catholic
faith (which he describes anecdotally on the albums
FM & AM and
Class Clown), Carlin became an
atheist and often denounced the idea of a God in
interviews and performances, notably with his "Religion" and "There
Is No God" routines as heard in
You Are All Diseased.
Carlin also joked in his first book
Brain Droppings that he worshiped the
Sun, one reason being that he could see it. This
was later mentioned in
You Are
All Diseased, along with the statement that he prayed to
Joe Pesci (a good friend of his) because
"he's a good actor," and "looks like a guy who can get things
done!"
In his HBO special
Complaints and Grievances,
Carlin introduced the "Two Commandments," a revised "pocket-sized"
list of the
Ten Commandments ending
with the additional commandment of "Thou shalt keep thy religion to
thyself."
Themes
Carlin's material falls under one of three self-described
categories: "the little world" (observational humor), "the big
world" (social commentary), and the peculiarities of the English
Language (euphemisms, doublespeak, business jargon); all sharing
the overall theme of (in his words) humanity's "
bullshit", which might include murder, genocide,
war, rape, corruption, religion and other aspects of human
civilization. He was known for mixing observational humour with
larger, social commentary. His delivery frequently treated these
subjects in a
misanthropic and
nihilistic fashion, such as in his statement during
the
Life is Worth Losing show:
Language was a frequent focus of Carlin's work. Euphemisms that in
his view, seek to distort and lie, and the use of language he felt
was pompous, presumptuous or silly, were often the target of
Carlin's routines. When asked on
Inside the Actors Studio what
turned him on, he responded "Reading about language". When asked
what made him most proud about his career, he said the amount his
books have sold, close to a million copies.
Carlin also gave special attention to prominent topics in
American and
Western Culture, such as obsession with fame
and celebrity,
consumerism,
Christianity, political alienation, corporate
control, hypocrisy, child raising,
fast
food diet, news stations,
self-help
publications,
patriotism, sexual taboos,
certain uses of technology and surveillance, and the
pro-life position, among many others.
Carlin openly communicated in his shows and in his interviews that
his purpose for existence was entertainment, that he was "here for
the show". He professed a hearty
schadenfreude in watching the rich
spectrum of humanity slowly self-destruct, in his estimation, of
its own design, saying, "When you're born, you get a ticket to the
freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front-row seat."
He acknowledged that this is a very selfish thing, especially since
he included large human catastrophes as entertainment. In his
You Are All Diseased
concert, he elaborated somewhat on this, telling the audience, "I
have always been willing to put myself at great personal risk for
the sake of entertainment. And I've always been willing to put
you at great personal risk, for the same reason!"
In a late-1990s interview with radio talk show host
Art Bell, he remarked about his view of human life:
"I think we're already 'circling the drain' as a species, and I'd
love to see the circles get a little faster and a little
shorter."
In the same interview, he recounted his experience of a California
earthquake in the early-1970s as: "...an
amusement park ride. Really, I mean it's such a wonderful thing to
realize that you have
absolutely no control... and to see
the dresser move across the bedroom floor unassisted... is just
exciting." Later he summarized: "I really think there's great human
drama in destruction and nature unleashed and I don't get enough of
it."
A routine in Carlin's 1999 HBO special
You Are All Diseased focusing on
airport security leads up to the
statement: "Take a fucking chance! Put a little fun in your
life! ... most Americans are soft and frightened and
unimaginative and they don't realize there's such a thing as
dangerous fun, and they certainly don't recognize a good show when
they see one."
Carlin had always included politics as part of his material (along
with the wordplay and sex jokes), but by the mid-1980s had become a
strident social critic, in both his
HBO specials and the book compilations of
his material.
His HBO viewers got an especially sharp
taste of this in his take on the Ronald
Reagan administration during the 1988 special What Am I Doing In New
Jersey? broadcast live from the Park Theatre in Union
City
, New
Jersey
.
Death and tribute
On June
18, 2008, it was announced that Carlin was to be awarded the 11th
annual Mark Twain
Prize for American Humor by the Kennedy Center
on November 10, the ceremony of which would be
later broadcast on PBS as George Carlin: The
Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize in February 2009.
On June 22, 2008, Carlin was admitted to
Saint John's Health Center in
Santa Monica, California after experiencing chest pains. He died
later that day at 5:55 p.m. of
heart
failure. Carlin was 71 years old. His death occurred one week
after his last performance at
The Orleans Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas, and he had further shows on his itinerary. According to
his wishes, Carlin was
cremated, with his
ashes scattered, and no public or religious services of any kind
were held. Two of the networks he performed on changed their
schedule in tribute to Carlin. HBO devoted several hours to
broadcast eleven of Carlin's fourteen HBO specials from June 25 to
June 28, 2008, including a twelve-hour marathon block on their
HBO Comedy channel. Meanwhile, NBC scheduled a rerun of
the premiere episode of
Saturday
Night Live which Carlin hosted.
Both
Sirius Satellite Radio's
"Raw Dog Comedy" and
XM Satellite
Radio's "XM Comedy" channels ran a memorial marathon of George
Carlin recordings the day following his death. Another tribute was
the "Doonesbury" comic strip on Sunday, July 27, 2008.
Louis C. K.
dedicated his stand-up special
Chewed Up to Carlin.
Lewis Black dedicated his entire second
season of
Root of All
Evil to Carlin.
An episode of
Larry King
Live paid tribute to Carlin, featuring comics
Jerry Seinfeld,
Bill
Maher,
Roseanne Barr and
Lewis Black. Carlin's daughter and brother were
also interviewed by King. The next day,
The New York Times published a
tribute to Carlin written by Jerry Seinfeld.
The Kennedy Center awarded Carlin the Mark Twain Prize on November
10, 2008. It was the first time the award had been given
posthumously. The ceremony was broadcast in a 90-minute program on
PBS February 4, 2009, and featured retrospective film clips of
Carlin, as well as testimonials by
Jon
Stewart,
Bill Maher,
Garry Shandling,
Lily
Tomlin,
Denis Leary,
Joan Rivers,
Lewis
Black,
Richard Belzer and
Margaret Cho.
An oral history, edited by Carlin's daughter, Kelly, is scheduled
to be published in 2009. The book will contain stories from
Carlin's friends and family, and cover the considered high points
of his career, as well as the considered low, including his drug
and alcohol addiction.
For a number of years prior to his death Carlin had been compiling
and writing his autobiography, planning to release it in
conjunction with a second long worked on project, a one man
Broadway show–tentatively titled
New York City
Boy–covering essentially the same topics. After his death his
collaborator on the projects,
Tony
Hendra, edited the autobiography for release as
Last Words (ISBN 1439172951). The book
covers Carlin's life up to around
Life is Worth Losing,
with the final chapter detailing would-be future plans, including
the planned one man show. The book was released one year and four
months after Carlin's death.
Collection of works
Discography
- See George Carlin
discography
Filmography
Television
HBO Specials
- "All My Stuff", a boxset of
Carlin's first 12 stand-up specials (excluding George Carlin:
40 Years of Comedy) with bonus material was released in
September 2007
- In 1998, Carlin had a cameo playing one of the
funeral-attending comedians in Jerry Seinfeld's HBO special
I'm Telling You
For The Last Time. In the funeral intro (the only thing
being buried is Jerry Seinfeld's material) Carlin learns that
neither friend Robert Klein nor
Ed McMahon ever saw Jerry's act. Carlin
did, and enjoyed it, but admits "I was full of drugs."
Bibliography
For several years before his death, Carlin had been working on a
memoir,
Last Words, in collaboration with writer
Tony Hendra. Hendra secured permission from
Carlin's family to go ahead with the book. It is scheduled to be
published by
Simon &
Schuster's
Free Press
imprint on November 17, 2009.
Audiobooks
Internet hoaxes
Since the birth of
spam email on the
internet, many chain-forwards, usually rant-like and with blunt
statements of belief on political and social issues and attributed
to being written (or stated) by George Carlin himself, have made
continuous rounds in the junk email circuit. The website
Snopes, an online resource that debunks historic and
present
urban legends and myths, has
extensively covered these forgeries. Many of the falsely-attributed
email attachments have contained material that runs directly
opposite of Carlin's viewpoints — with some being especially
volatile toward racial groups, gays, women, the homeless, etc.
Carlin himself, when he was made aware of each of these bogus
emails, would debunk them on his own website, writing to his
readers that "Nothing you see on the Internet is mine unless it
comes from one of my albums, books, HBO specials, or appeared on my
website", and "it bothers me that some people might believe that I
would be capable of writing some of this stuff."
References
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