Original subtitles

Welcome to XM's Performance Theater. I'm Sonny Fox, and we are honoring this

time around an icon, a fellow who has really changed comedy as we know it,

literally.

He's celebrating 50 years of entertainment this year.

He's gone through more changes than most people do in a lifetime, and he's

invited us along on those changes.

And sort of like the Beatles, we've gone through those changes with him.

He spent 50 years, think about that, 50 years making us laugh, and more

importantly, in some people's opinion, he spent 50 years making us think.

Would you welcome, please, Mr. George Carlin.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks for coming.

Sure. It's your first visit to XM, right?

Yes, it is. Is this okay, the distance and everything? Sure. Good.

You look pretty good for an old fart.

Well, first time I've done makeup for radio.

Old fart is... Oh, I forgot. You're not an old fart. You're... An old fuck.

Yeah, right. I'm an old fuck. Kind of like a fat fuck to old fuck.

The skinny fuck, short fuck, you know.

It's not old man. Old man is kind of like not an age or a period of your

Old man is a point of view, you know.

It's a way of looking at the world.

There are some guys who are old men in their 20s and 30s. You've seen them.

They've just got old man -ish ways.

Sometimes you see a little kid with glasses and a double -breasted suit, and

he's like a little old man.

So it's not old man, it's not old fart, which is kind of like... It's old

fuck, you know. In this respect, fuck is the synonym for the word fellow.

Well, you look pretty good for an old fellow. Well, I feel pretty good for a

-year -old guy, yeah. You're going to be celebrating 70 next month?

That's right, May, yeah. Wow.

Seven years old. Now, 50 years in show business, when I was doing some

I thought, how often do you speak to somebody who's worked with Ed Sullivan

Keanu Reeves?

Who's more fun, by the way?

Keanu is really fun on the set with Alex Winter. I was in Bill and Ted's

Excellent Adventure with the two of them. And then the sequel, Bill and

Bogus Journey. Right.

Yeah, they were a lot of fun. They were very strange. But, you know, they would

never calm down until they called for action on a shot.

They would clown and kid around and play grab ass and everything right up until

the last second. And then it would be like, and action. And suddenly they

be in the scene.

And it threw me, because I was trying to be an actor. I was trying to be serious

about what I had to do.

And I'd have to just stand there and kind of keep my mind on my first line,

because I'm not a trained actor.

We'll talk about your movie career, and we're going to invite people up for

questions throughout this whole thing. But I do want to go back to what started

this whole thing. You were born in New York.

That started it.

Is this collar okay?

Is this collar straight?

Looks great. I'm kind of fussy about the collar.

Your mother made a rather important decision when you were just a baby to

raise... With my dad? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a drinker, and he was

a very successful advertising salesman in newspapers, selling space.

And he was an accomplished public speaker.

After dinner speaker, they called him.

And he was a drinker and a bit of a bully. He never did beat her or touch

anything like that. But he kind of terrorized her and was abusive to my

So she didn't want that happening to me.

And when I was two months old and my brother was five years old, she took us

out the fire escape window in her father's apartment in New York, I

in her arms and my brother at her hand, down the fire escape into the backyard,

through the backyards out to Broadway and into my uncle's.

Packard and drove us off to the country, and she never looked back. Then she got

back into business and advertising and raised two boys during the last half of

the recession, the Depression, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.

So she did quite a job. Your mom's been quite an influence on you.

Yeah, well, she was the sole parent, of course.

She was absent because she had to work, so I did a lot of parenting to myself.

I engaged in a lot of mental activity to kind of fill the void, which

children will do, and I had radio to listen to.

But she was very conscious of language, as was her

father.

A New York City policeman, my grandpa, whom I never knew. I never knew any of

the grandparents.

I never knew my father either. I had the one parent in my experience.

And my grandfather was a cop in New York 20 years around, you know, way back

because they were all rather old when their kids were born. So as a result,

was in the 1890s.

And, yeah, he wrote out, my grandfather wrote out.

Many of the works of Shakespeare longhand during his lifetime because of

it gave him. That was the explanation he had. So that's an indication of the

language gene at work. And my mother inherited that. The Irish have that to a

great degree.

Some do, some do, some don't. But it's kind of a generalization, but it's true.

It's an Irish trait, language.

And gift to gab. My father had it, my mother had it. So it was natural for me

to... have that and then to, she reinforced it. These things have to be

reinforced as well. And she reinforced it in me. Now your brother, Patrick, was

five years older than you. Patrick, yes.

Usually when you have a brother five years older, you usually become the

punching bag. I know.

He was too busy out getting laid and fighting.

He didn't want to bother with that. He didn't have time for bullying, and it's

not in his nature, really. You know what he told me? He said, when you came home

from the hospital, and you know about how a young child

can react to a new baby in the house. There are kind of certain horror stories

you hear about how tough it is for the kid to adjust to that, and sometimes

there's hostility.

He said, I was so glad when you came home from the hospital. He says, I was

curious about you, and I used to watch you in the crib, you know.

So he has a wonderful, wonderful nature, but he inherited, I think, also my

father's temper, so he was more of a fighter than I was in the neighborhood.

was a physical guy in the bars and on the street corners. I

wasn't really of that type.

You, in fact, used one of Patrick's jokes last night on stage. Yeah, he's a

great guy. He's still alive, of course, up in Woodstock.

He said something that I wrote down a long time ago, and I just started saying

it recently.

He said, What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this

country and give them government jobs and just sit back and watch things

improve.

He's a pretty funny guy and very verbal.

Very, very verbal. More so than I even, I think.

You and him have sort of the same perspective on things, don't you? Pat

Yeah. Yeah, we both feel it's...

You know, we're both opposed to organized religion. We're both opposed

know, the way government had – the way –

The citizens have organized themselves in this country, which passes for

government.

I think the republic is a failure. We both, for the most part, think this

experiment was nice while it lasted, and we're not too impressed with the human

species because the record is rather...

rather not a good one and so uh we we uh we inhabit the same area in those kind

of philosophical areas and uh we we talk a lot on the phone a couple times a

week and and we have you see what we have i'm 69 years old now he's about

75 and we have common memories we have common

experiences

and nomenclature and things in our childhood that I can call him up and

a brand name that is no longer in existence, like Ipana, toothpaste.

I can call him, I can say, Tepat.

He'll say, yeah, wow, you know.

It's so great. We're both word over Irish. There's another generalization.

Irish are very kind of sentimental and like that, you know. And there's a

nostalgia that we love.

And we're both a bug for those artifacts of our childhood.

And it's just nice to have that. So common vocabulary, common background,

memories, you know. Do you remember? by the way, the spokesperson for IPANA on

television? I can be reminded, no. Lucky Beaver. I didn't know that.

Really?

We're radio kids.

I mean, we experienced television when we came home from the street corner, but

we didn't hang on the television set after school the way the next generation

did. We were radio kids, and then as fast as we could get out of the house,

were street corner guys.

Speaking of street corner, you hung around Morningside Heights.

Morningside Heights. But you had a different name for it? Well, they called

Morningside Heights Columbia University because of political reasons of their

own. We lived in what we called White Harlem.

It was the west side of Harlem. It was technically, in a manner of speaking,

white area of West Harlem. We had Cuban, Puerto Rican, a lot of Dominican, great

number of Dominicans in Manhattan now, and black, black Harlem, of course. So

lived in a kind of a...

A mixed area, especially as you got out from the Irish enclave. We lived in a

little, I would call it an Irish enclave.

Actually,

on LaSalle Street, at one time at LaSalle Street, one half of that street

white and the other half of it was black.

And there wasn't a lot of hostility. I mean, there were occasional things and

there were attitudes probably that people held privately.

I don't know. I didn't never have that in my household. I never had those words

and those attitudes expressed.

So I didn't have them. But I know I heard the kids around me. But there was

never any open hostility because when you live. In the area between two very

different areas, you have to learn to get along.

It's a luxury to live in the middle of one of those areas and have all these

attitudes and have a chip on your shoulder. But when you live right where

two of them join, you're forced to sort of live in a third area, which is the

mixture. And it's very nice. It's a good way to start your life. Well, the

people in that area of your childhood certainly impressed you. You shared them

with all of us.

Father Rivera.

Was he really that lenient? You could actually see the line move? Yeah.

We had about six priests in the parish. Father Kelly, Father Ford was the

pastor, Father Russell, Father Smith.

And some of them came and went, and I don't remember the names, Father Daly

Father Halperin and Father Rivera, who was there primarily because there was

starting to be more of a Spanish representation. I don't use words like

and Hispanic. I say what we grew up with, the Spanish people, you know,

heritage. in their mixed blood there's Spain so I call them Spanish people and

Father Rivera was there to serve them and to pastor them or I should say to

to their pastoral needs and one of them was confession and Father Rivera didn't

understand I mean he understood English but he didn't He didn't sound like he

understood English.

And we would go to Father Rivera because he was notoriously, that's probably not

the right word, he was famously more lenient.

And you would get a lighter sentence, a lighter penance in confession.

And you could see people would switch the line, people on Father Kelly's line,

when Father Rivera...

would show up and, you know, they'd kiss the stole and put it on and go in the

confessional, you would see people race and rush over to Father Lavera's line.

Father Lavera, you know, he didn't question you. Some of the priests, you

they would question you. So how did you touch yourself?

How did you touch yourself, son?

He didn't go into any of that, how I touched myself.

No, you just started.

You know, he didn't want to know.

You just started doing a voice. You used to sit around the tape recorder and

record these voices, didn't you? Well, this was a turning point in my life, and

it's one that people should know about.

When I was a young boy, I was a mimic, and I could imitate people in the

neighborhood, authority figures, teachers, shop owners, other parents,

the beat.

And people on television, yeah, I could do little imitations. They were largely

imitations of other people doing imitations. That's how you learn to do

Cagney. You see another guy do it on stage and you say, oh, okay, and you

him. It's easier because they point out the highlights of speech. But

neighborhood stuff.

I was kind of the class clown in school, and then after school I was kind of

like the neighborhood wise guy, one of the neighborhood wise guys on the street

corner.

gather a little audience because I would put together little routines.

I had little parodies that I did.

I lifted things.

Everyone steals from comedians when they're starting. So I would steal

invitations in Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney and Peter Lorre, and I would do

fake commercials that I had heard or read in Mad. Well, Mad Comics came along

little bit later. There was another magazine called Thousand Jokes.

And I put together little routines, and they would say, Georgie, hey, Georgie,

do that thing about such and such. And I would stand up and do it, and it would

come out differently each time. And I developed this ability to stand. up in

front of a group of people and get their attention and get their approval.

That was important to me, apparently.

When I was a little kid, I'd go to my mother's office and she'd say, imitate

West, do the imitations, do the imitations.

And I would do the imitations for the ladies in her office and they would

noticed i don't remember noticing this per se but i must have noticed that this

got me the attention of adults because don't forget i was alone in that house

most of the day when i wasn't in school i came home and i was alone uh i got the

attention of these adults And I got their approval through their laughter.

were more or less saying, good boy, George, good going, way to go. Yes, he's

good. He's cute. Ain't I cute? Ain't I clever? That's what this job is.

So as a youngster, I wanted to be a comedian. I was probably only 8 or 9 or

years old when I began to form an idea that I wanted to be in the movies like

Danny Kaye and like Red Skelton.

And I called that being an actor, but it was actually being a comedian.

And pretty soon I found out the word comedian and I wanted to be a comedian.

And when I graduated from eighth grade.

The last thing I graduated from, by the way.

My mother asked me what I wanted, and one of the brothers at school, Brother

Conrad, had told us that he can get a clergyman's discount on cameras.

So I asked him if he could get a clergyman's discount on tape recorders.

Now, this was five years after the Second World War. Tape recorders had

as consumer items, but they were as big as a small Buick. They were large. They

were like this big, and you had to buy them in a showroom up above the street.

sale in stores.

bought this big web core, long story, and I'm keeping it long.

I used it to do voices and do

little sketches and skits and fake radio shows and fake newscasts and

commercials. And I used it to more or less train myself for the thing I wanted

to do. My mother was very progressive to have bought me that as a graduation

present. I mean, she was a far thinker to see that in me.

and go ahead and foster that and reward that, even though she wanted me, she

didn't want me to follow it, but she knew it was a healthy thing for me to be

doing. You've always been a planner.

You had this optimistic attitude that if you planned it well enough and you

meant well, it's going to happen. You believed that.

Well, I would only plan things I felt, you know, obviously, that I wanted and

thought I was qualified for.

But this is a good example of this career planning. When I was a kid, I

well, first I'll be, first I'll be, see, I wanted to be an actor. I called it

actor because I saw them in the movies and I knew they were movie actors. So

Danny. and these guys. I thought, okay, so first I'll be a stand -up comedian.

And don't forget, when I was a kid, the only place stand -up comedians worked

was nightclubs, those kind of really more or less sophisticated places where

saw in the movies, you know, and people danced and there was a singer.

And it was a comic. And I never got into those places. I was too young and it

wasn't in my world.

I knew about comedians from radio and from television later, but movies when I

was a youngster. So I aimed at that, and I thought, well, the way to get there

would be to first become...

First get into radio. That would be my first move because then I could practice

using my voice and I could learn to speak and do a lot of these things

an audience directly in front of me, which is the usual thing in radio.

not sitting in the studio and therefore I wouldn't be as nervous or afraid and I

could kind of build up my confidence and then I could become a stand -up

comedian because by then there were.

further venues for comedians i thought then i can be a stand -up comedian and

then i can go then if i'm really good at that then they have to let me in the

movies and that was the way i looked at they had to let me in the movies and

that was the plan and it became more sophisticated as i got went through 13

15 years and and started to actually think of ways to go about it now you

actually

revealed your life's plan in, what, were you 11 years old?

Yeah, when I was 11, it was fifth grade, Sister Nina, and I saw her, by the way,

just about three or four years ago. She came to a show of mine up in Wisconsin.

Yeah, she was 81, sharp as can be.

Sharp, thin, quick, you know. She said, yeah, you lived on the top of the hill.

They remembered me for other reasons, but she actually remembered that I lived

right up the block from the school.

Fifth grade, Sister Nina, I used to sing at the... The club meeting, once a week

they'd have a club meeting. And there'd be new business and old business and all

that kind of stuff. And then there'd be the entertainment.

You could do an imitation. You could bring in your banjo, play the piano,

song. I would always stand up and sing a song.

I sang manana in her class.

Manana, manana, manana, you soon enough for me.

And, you know, some of the guys thought it was goofy and some of them liked it.

In Sister Nina's class, we were assigned to write an autobiography. I think

fifth grade is about time to look back on your life.

So part of the autobiography was the last page, and that page was what I'm

to be.

And I said, I want to be either an actor, announcer,

disc jockey.

Imitator, I guess I called it, or an actor.

I want someone to start with actor.

Actor, comedian, imitator.

announcer or something like that.

So there it was, you know, right in front of everyone.

And there was a nice amalgam. You can tell that the thing I wanted most was

attention. That was really what that sentence was all about, you know. Ain't

cute? Ain't I clever? Look at me.

Well, you went into the Army. You got that out of the way. Air Force, yeah.

Force, sorry.

And luckily there was a radio station just off base.

It was in Shreveport, right? Shreveport, Louisiana, which sounds like kind of a

dopey place for this.

Actually, it was a very hot radio market. They had nine radio stations at

time and it was very competitive. And top 40 radio was just beginning and rock

and roll was just beginning because Elvis Presley's first hit came out in

believe, 55 or 56.

And there I was right on the cusp of all of that.

And I wanted to be this announcer, disc jockey guy, when I got out of the Air

Force. My plan was to go in the Air Force, do four years from 17 to 21, get

at the age of 21 and use the GI Bill to go to school to learn to be an announcer

and a disc jockey so that I would be learning when I was 21.

Now, I got in there, and when I was 18, I was in an amateur play downtown in

Shreveport in a very good...

Community Theater Company, by the way, Shreveport Little Theater. And I was

doing a play called Golden Boy, and in it was Joe Monroe.

And Joe Monroe was...

famous as a radio personality in Shreveport. I was out on the base. I was

Air Force out on the base. And in my off time, I would do this play.

And Joe was a famous radio personality. He did the morning show. He did the

afternoon drive time.

And I didn't know he owned the station.

So it was a really great station, KJOE, K -J -O -E in Shreveport. That wasn't

the clue?

Yeah. Well, you know, maybe there was a slight inkling in my mind, but I didn't

know that he was the outright owner. Actually, it was 51%. Now, that station

number one in a nine -station market in spite of the fact that it was a daytime

-only station. They had to come on the air every morning again at sunrise, turn

the transmitter on, and gain back all the listeners who had tuned out at

sundown. There are some stations of low power. This was 1 ,000 watts

and daytime only, but it was number one, and it had about a 50.

percent share of the market. And this is what... With nine stations competing

with eight other stations, they had 50 % of the listeners, yeah. I was going to

say, this is what it sounded like if you lived in Shreveport. Alex, you want to

roll that? It's the beginning of my show.

It's time to smile and swing a wine with Colin.

George Colin is on the air.

The coolest record man anywhere.

It's the coolest of all. Here we go on the George Carlin Show.

Okay, solid, how you doing? Lots of music coming up for you between now and

Got the brand new Everly Brothers record and we'll be playing both sides of it

for you. In addition to listening to Elvis' latest came out this week and

get things started with the new one by Chuck Berry. Stick around, good things

happening here on 1480 at Carlton's Corner.

Yeah, you didn't even talk up the whole bed.

No, I didn't use it. I liked when the brass came back in. I used to let the

brass come back in to build.

Those are great jingles. Listen to that band, huh? Pretty good band.

Yeah, well, if you went to the next market, the same band with a different

of... That's right. Yeah, the jingles were done in Dallas. It was a big jingle

mill. So there you were on the radio. Now, was that the first time that you

really got that feeling of not power, really, but...

Hey, I'm reaching people that don't know me. I don't know. Yeah. Well, surely.

Yeah. I mean, just by definition, of course. But the way the way the

of the thing happened, I was in this play and Joe Monroe was in it. So I said

Joe, I said, hey, Joe, I wonder if I could come down and watch you do your

show, because I'm going to be a disc jockey when I get out of the Air Force.

And that was my first step, being on the wrist. So I didn't bother telling him

about comedian and all that. I'm going to be at this, Jockey.

And I'd like to watch your show and pick up some tips and see how you do it. He

said, yeah. He says, come on down.

I still didn't know he was the owner.

I got there and watched his show, and he went off the air at sundown. Let's say

it was 6 .15 that night. It changes. It gets later and later as the summer goes

on.

And when the show was over and the station was off the air, he said, go on

the control room there. I'll stay here at the board. Go in the control room

there and the announcer's booth room and read these. Read some of this news copy

and read a couple of these local commercials.

So I brought them in there and I read them in my best, you know.

assumed announcer voice i was 18 i still had my new york i guess well i had a

non -regional accent that i had been kind of um um cultivating since i had

tape recorder but it wasn't perfect i still had some new york vowels that gave

me away but i read for him and he liked it well enough that he gave me a job on

the spot

Starting me, it was 60 cents an hour, which he knew cheap labor when he saw

But I forgot I was in the Air Force. I was eating free and sleeping free and

getting a little money too.

So it was fine with me. I would have worked free, obviously.

The job was weekends only, Saturday and Sunday, and five -minute newscasts. We

had five minutes of news every hour, 55 music, five minutes of news.

Reading the newscasts, the ones that were not sponsored.

The sustaining newscast was either for the U .S. bonds or join the Navy or some

kind of, you know, drive carefully, those kind of things. So I learned

reading those newscasts, how to read on the air and everything. And pretty soon

I got a noontime spot where they played nicer music. It wasn't top 40. They

played kind of like nice music. Joe was a musician, actually.

So that's how it all began for me.

And I saved all that time. I was when I got out of the Air Force and I got

kicked out a year early. I was going to say, you keep saying when I got out of

the Air Force, but the fact is you were kicked out of three high schools. That's

right. Kicked out of choir.

Choir. Kicked out of summer camp. Ultra boys summer camp. Ultra boys. The Boy

Scouts. And the

Air Force. That's called the hat trick.

Now, what was the terminology of the Air Force use? The Air Force discharge?

That was a general discharge under honorable conditions.

It wasn't a BCD, a bad conduct, and it wasn't a dishonorable.

So I got all my pay and allowances. But they let me out early because they were

looking to cut manpower, and they looked in the areas of people who were being

less productive than others. And I had stopped.

I was in a very elite maintenance squadron. We had to have the highest IQs

into the Air Force of anyone to get into K systems.

We ran. and maintained the bomb navigation system. They were analog

and radar systems and optics.

repaired them, and that was a very advanced system made by a lot of

It was in the Boeing 747, which was the medium bomber.

And I got out of the maintenance area. Once I got the job in the Air Force,

thought, well, that's pretty good. We got a guy doing kind of public relations

for the base, you know. This is good for the Air Force base to have a guy who's

being productive and not just knocking up local girls, you know.

So...

So I got out of my career field, as they call it, and because I had, I was not

productive in their minds, and so I could get out 11 months early. And I got

at 20, and at 20, I had my GI Bill of Rights, and I had three years'

in the field I wanted, and I had beat the game.

Very good. Yes.

It was a good start. It was a great start. It let me know that, man, you can

make some breaks for yourself.

And the next stop was KXOL, and you met in Fort Worth. I met Jack Burns in

Boston on radio up there, but I wasn't suited for that station. It was a

station with soap operas and stuff, and I went up there because you always want

to get to a bigger market. When you're in radio, the first thing you do is you

start recording your voice. You start taping to make your tape.

You start making your audition tape so you can get to a bigger market.

There's more money, more exposure, so you can move on. It's a farm system, you

know. So I wanted to get to Boston. I thought, well, I'll go to that station.

had a friend who got me in there. The guy was in the sales department.

And I figured, well, I can make a base there and I can look around Boston for a

top 40 station to go to. But it never worked out.

But I met Jack Burns there. We roomed together with a third guy, Ron.

Hit it off very well comedically, and I lost that job. I got kicked out of there

for taking the news unit, the mobile news unit, from Boston to New York on

weekend just to buy some grass. That was what I did.

So, you know, once the twig is bent, you know.

So grows the tree. And there I was.

Well, wait a minute. You didn't go there because the pot was so good in New

York. You didn't know anybody in Boston, right? I didn't know anybody in Boston,

and I wanted to be with my buddies down in New York. So we were five of us

driving all through Harlem looking for grass because we knew where to go.

135th Street was the stop. We had certain stops we could make to buy

And we're driving around, and this thing, it says on the outside, it says W

-Z -E, NBC News, you know.

And we're looking for grass, and we're all like guys, you know.

early 20s, so it was a lot of fun. But I got fired from there, was out of a job

for a while, and then I got called down to Fort Worth, where another guy from...

radio in Shreveport, had moved on, a sales director, and he wanted me for

station in Fort Worth, so he brought me down there. So number one station, I got

the homework shift, seven to midnight, answered my own phones, took all my own

requests and dedications, and suddenly one day Jack Burns showed up from

He says, I'm going out to give Hollywood one last chance at me. That was his

attitude, which is the way to look at things.

and his tires were bald, so luckily a news job had opened that day, and he got

that job, and he was my nighttime newsman.

And you know the rest. We went down to an after -hours comedy joint, which was

really a coffee house called The Cellar in Fort Worth, and we did impromptu

sketches every night, impromptu skits and two -man stuff.

And it was so successful, we left radio. We said, screw this.

You know, we had great jobs. We were making like $300, $400 a week. It's

and we're in Fort Worth, a good market.

And we could have gone on from there. But we decided to quit radio because

go to Hollywood and become stars because we have this filthy act that we did.

Filthy. It was just and those days, filthy comedy was not didn't have a

for it at all.

And there we were. How naive, but how wonderful when you're in that age period

to just get in my newly bought Dodge Dart Pioneer.

with the tinted windows and the AM FM radio, and drive to Los Angeles on spec.

You know, on speculation, we had about $300, and we got lucky out there. I

got lucky every time I turned around.

Well, when you went out there, you got a job at a club.

Yeah, well, no, what happened was this. First, we went out there, and we were

looking. to see how we could get into show business.

We knew we had this act we had written, and in the daytime we'd write stuff and

learn. It was terrible.

We would go to places and look at other people, and we would hang around Dinos

on the strip and figure Frank Sinatra might come in. We hung around the Brown

Derby one night, and Rock Hudson came floating through.

You know, we were just using up our money. And one day we went back to the

apartment, and the rest of our money had been stolen out of the sock drawer.

Good hiding place, George.

And we had no money.

So we thought, well, gee, we hadn't counted on that.

And we had vowed not to work, just to go straight into show business.

We didn't want jobs. None of that bellhop stuff. None of that car hop.

that stuff. We won't go into radio out there. But what happened was the only

thing we knew was radio. And the only thing we really felt we deserved was

radio. The second biggest market in the country, I mean. It was sheer lunacy to

expect to just get into that market.

But we went around. We went first to KFWB, number one in the market, top 40

station.

And we didn't have tapes or anything. They didn't want us, you know. So we're

walking along. We see this radio station, KDAY.

Right near Hollywood and Vine.

It's actually Selma and Vine, between Sunset and Vine and Hollywood and Vine.

walked in there, and that's where my star on the...

Walk is now out in Hollywood. Really? I had them put it out in front of that

radio station. It was kind of nice.

We went in there, and they were looking for a morning comedy team.

I mean, it's just all luck, you know? You just get lucky, and you're on a

They were looking for guys like us. We did a tape for them. They loved us. They

called us the Wright Brothers instead of our real names. They called us the

Wright Brothers. But it did a big publicity campaign, ads in variety, full

-color ads and everything, and put us on the air. And here we are on the air.

Let's see, it would only have been about two months after we got there.

And it was just sheer madness. You know, there we were. That wasn't good enough

for you. No, no.

What we did was still work on the act. We're going to work on the act because

this is only a stepping stone, you know. And now we're making about $500 a week

each, you know, and that's good and we're great.

But we're practicing this act after hours. This was also a daytime station,

the way. Even though it was at 50 ,000 water and it had a big signal out on the

West Coast, it was a day timer.

And we went off the air at sundown and in the studio.

We would work on these routines. We were getting serious now.

And nearby, about two blocks away, was a coffee house.

That was the way for us to get in. They were now coffee houses. It was the era

of the beatniks. And coffee houses liked offbeat entertainment.

And we knew we could get in there and do our stuff for the owner maybe and get a

shot. Just get a hootenanny shot. Get a single shot, you know. And we went over

there and he liked us and he hired us for two weeks.

We're still rehearsing our act.

And a guy came walking through the studio because it was an office building

you could see the studios on your left and there were little offices here. He

was a song plugger. He was a guy who used to do PR for songwriters and stuff

record labels. And he saw us and he used to be the road manager for Rowan and

Martin. And he says, I think you guys could make it, you know. So we gave him,

he became our manager.

We went in this little coffee house. They held us over for six weeks.

Lenny Bruce came. in and saw us. Mort Sahl came in and saw us. And based on

that, Lenny Bruce, we got a contract with GAC, one of the biggest agencies in

the country. They had New York offices, Chicago and Beverly Hills offices.

And we got into nightclubs where we quit radio again. We quit. We said, no, I'm

sorry about that. We've got something to do. And we went on and began a career

that worked out very well. Two years together, we were on The Tonight Show

Jack Parr that October.

We drove out of Shreveport in March.

We drove out of Shreveport in March, and that October we were on NBC television

at night on the biggest show for a comedian. It's just stupid, you know.

But, man, it can happen.

I've heard the term luck of the Irish. It started with you. I know.

I think the luck comes from heredity. You know, that's the first.

draw you get of luck, good luck or bad luck. Jack Burns, by the way, if you're

not old enough to remember, went on to do Burns and Shriver, who you may have

seen on Ed Sullivan's show, doing their taxicab routine. Taxicab. Jack was the

bigot in the back, or Avery was the cab, cab, cab.

Yeah, well, you know, these commies out there, the commies, you know. He did

that character very beautifully, and he had a good career. And he played Warren

when Don Knotts retired from Mayberry RFD. He played Warren. He was the new

deputy.

And he's had a good career writing and producing things. Now, you went on to

become a solo act. Yeah. We each of us wanted to eventually become soloists. Ed

Sullivan. Yeah. How in the world did that happen?

Well, that's a part of the process as you become known. This was the era of

variety television.

And there were two important syndicated TV shows at that time, Merv Griffin and

had a show.

It was a 90 -minute nighttime show, and it was syndicated as opposed to being on

the network.

And so was Mike Douglas. Mike Douglas had a daytime show that was syndicated,

both out of Westinghouse Television.

And I did about 15 Merv Griffins, and I did about 15 Mike Douglases.

By the time the networks noticed me, the producers for the network, the guy who

produced the Jimmy Dean show, they got me on there, and I did a monologue on

there, and then they kept me over, and I did another monologue the next week,

and there I was on ABC television.

And from there, those same producers did a summertime show the next year. It

took Andy Williams' place on the Kraft Summer Music Hall.

Andy was on year -round, not year -round, but everything except the

TV season. And we took his place during the summer, calling it the Summer Music

Hall with John Davidson.

And I was the house comedian and the writer.

And from there, that's when Ed Sullivan notices you or the Carson people notice

you or Hollywood Palace or whatever other variety show you were going to get

There were a lot of variety shows then. Carol Burnett, Jimmy Rogers, a lot of

them. Do you remember meeting Ed Sullivan the first time? Oh, yeah, sure.

Tell me what it was. He was just what he looked like.

But he took a, I held out. They wanted me on that show. Here I am, you know,

still now in my early developmental stage, although I was on national

a lot.

And they wanted me on the Ed Sullivan show. And I resisted because I had heard

that they were very brutal with comedians about cutting their time at

minute. You have six minutes, they come and tell you to cut a minute because the

monkeys went long, you know.

Sorry, but the baboon went long. You're going to have to cut.

So I didn't want that because I did set pieces. I didn't do a series of jokes

that I could cut five of them out to take out a minute. I did a piece that I

memorized that was six minutes long, and that was it. And you couldn't take out

anything. So I didn't want them going around.

doing that to me.

That would usually happen, you know, you have dress rehearsal in the afternoon,

and then you would have the broadcast at night, live, 8 o 'clock.

And it would happen between dress and air, they would tell you to maybe cut a

minute. And then between air, when they started at 8, and the time you went on,

8 .40 or something maybe, they would come tell you to take out 30 seconds

or something. So it was, I didn't want that. And I was fearful enough doing

television.

I finally gave in, and I wound up doing 11 Ed Sullivan shows, and I wound up

really writing some very poor material.

I mean, my standard really fell off, because there you are, you're offered

more Sullivan shots, and the money is great, and you know the exposure is

important, and you want to...

you know, do that. So, you know, you go ahead and you write a piece, and it's

not quite what it ought to be. Well, yeah, but I was surprised going back and

listening. You did the hair poem the one time.

That's toward the end of the show. Yeah, the hair poem and the thing about the

ecology.

Yeah. I was surprised.

Did they give you any flack about that? I mean, did you have to review that? No.

By then, I had my beard, and I had begun to grow my hair, and I had stopped

wearing a jacket. It was more of a vest look.

You know, it wasn't kind of like street clothes. They were a little nicer, but

they were nonetheless a shirt and a vest, you know.

At that point, they had, you know, he always accommodated. They always

accommodated the change.

Elvis Presley was on there and the Beatles and the Stones.

And they always, you know, they still did an opera singer. They still did

juggling plates. Popo Gigio.

What I did was, you know, they told me I had a choice between two jokes. At

dress rehearsal I did, among other jokes, I did two jokes that were

one of them was about Governor George Wallace of Alabama who was running for

president and was a racist and a segregationist.

And he had a favorite saying. He would always talk about the liberals.

by referring to the pointy -headed intellectuals. He called them pointy

intellectuals up there in Washington.

You know, he was a populist. He appealed to a populist kind of a racist thing.

So he called them pointy -headed. And I said in this routine, I said, talking

about George Wallace, I said, you talk about pointy heads. Have you ever seen

the sheets those people put over their heads?

So that was one joke. That was one joke in the monologue. Another joke in the

monologue was...

About Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali was the champ at that time. His name was still Cassius Clay.

And he was the champion of the world. And they took away his championship

because he wouldn't go to Vietnam.

He refused to go. And he was, of course, right to do that, I think.

Now, what I said about it was this. They told him, you know, no more, sorry, you

can't, no more boxing, you know, because you won't go and do your thing in

Vietnam. So I said it this way. I said, Muhammad Ali.

His job was beating people up. That was his job, beating people up.

They wanted him to go overseas and kill people.

And he said, no.

I don't want to kill people. I'd rather just beat them up.

And they said, all right, well, if you won't go and kill people, we're not

to let you beat them up.

And they told me, between dress and air, they told me, they said, this is the

oddest censorship I ever experienced. They said, you can have one of those

or the other, but not both.

It was volume. It was the strangest thing.

So obviously I chose the Muhammad Ali joke, which is a far smarter joke than

point he had.

So that was my memory of the last show I did. He went off the air. Actually, I

did the second -to -last Ed Sullivan broadcast, although we didn't know it at

the time.

We found out later that, you know, when he was canceled.

Now, here we're into the 60s. I'm taking longer than I planned because there's

so many things.

You're into the 60s.

You've been getting high since you were, what, 14?

Yeah, 13. And you were going through, sorry.

These things are important.

A year does make a big difference. That's right.

But here you are. You're 30 years old.

The Summer of Love is going on, 67, 66.

Everyone who's involved with that is generally about 20 years old.

And their parents are 40 years old. In the nightclubs I was working. And you're

in the middle. Yeah. And you're playing to the parents, and you made a decision

at that point that you were playing to the wrong audience. Yeah.

Just a small back story to that.

I remember the Danny Kaye dream as a child. I wanted to be like Danny Kaye.

that was what I was pursuing in show business, and that's where I had come to

that point. I found out in the interim on the way that I wasn't such a great

actor, and I wasn't going to be in the movies, but I found out I was a pretty

good writer of comedy and that I could probably do that and figure that out for

the rest of my days and let that be my thing with some movies thrown in.

So I got to that period, and I had dropped some mescaline and some air. It

had a lot of my friends. And I hung around with mostly malcontents like

All my life I had been, you know, remember I got kicked out of all those

Because I defied authority all the time. I wasn't in step.

I was constantly out of step with this society and the authorities in it. And

that was my B life.

My A life was I'm going to be like Danny Kaye, which if you think about it is a

mainstream path.

That's something that you do. That's a people pleaser thing. You have to learn

to please people and go on and get bigger and bigger audiences and become a

famous movie star. And that's how you do it. But I had a B life that I didn't

know about.

I didn't realize that this was bifurcated. I had a B -life, which was,

these people, you know? Fuck all these people. I don't buy this shit. Now, that

person was being kind of like suppressed without my knowing it. I mean, I lived

it out in my private life. I hung out with musicians, and their hair started

get long, and the music started to change in the 60s, and the music was

and I was hearing people who were using their artistic talent to further their

ideas. and their philosophies, Buffalo Springfield and the Beatles and Bob

and Joan Baez and so forth. You know, that's starting to dawn on me that I'm

using my ability to further these thoughts and ideas that I agree with. I

thoughts on that, too, and I'm not doing that. I'm entertaining these

businessmen and shit in these nightclubs doing people -pleaser shit. So

something struck at that time, and it was probably the acid, you know.

And I realized that I was in the middle, that these people were in their 40s. I

was entertaining the kids in their 20s. The people in their 20s were embracing

the anti -authority that I had lived. So I said, well, this is where my audience

should be.

I didn't redo. I wrote a new act. I put a lot of my thoughts and feelings, and

it became autobiographical. That was the first thing that a writer does usually

is to write about himself, even if it's thinly disguised. Mine was open. I

talked about being a Catholic, being a school kid, being a New Yorker, and the

things that had affected me and that I enjoyed about school and those

experiences. But during this awakening of yours, you fell victim, like a lot

of us did,

When you're doing drugs and whatnot, it's not always conducive to

Yeah, once you get to something that you can't put down.

The beer in the pot, my lifelong buzz was beer in pot.

You can put that down. You can regulate that. You can say, okay, well, today I

have to do this.

To start, I'll just have about two beers in the morning and smoke a half a

joint, and then I'll do that, and then I'll get high.

But when you get to things like cocaine, or any of the other ones we all know,

and you get to the addictive drugs, it's a different story. And that's what

happened in the early 70s, once I had started my record career.

One of the fallout things that happened as a result was Carson.

He sort of...

distance himself from you when you're going through this change? Well, when I

went through these changes, my appearance, you know, my hair got

beard grew, and my clothing became closer to the, I guess you'd call it the

hippie ideal, you know.

And some people in show business, some old, you know, the old -timer, not old

-timers, but the old -school people, you know, they thought that I was making a

very crass decision to...

as I heard it from one guy, to cash in on the hippie thing.

That was their way of looking at this from the outside. They weren't attuned

the kind of, you know, pot.

is a value -changing drug. It's a hallucinogen. It's a mild hallucinogen

acid, and it's a value changer. And if you smoke from the time you're 13 to the

time you're 30, you have formed certain attitudes. And it just reinforced my

malcontent, my outsidership, the feeling of being outside and not belonging.

So these people had never had that, so they couldn't see that there might be

some integrity in what was happening to me. And they thought, well, he's just

trying to cash in. Don't worry about it. They'll see you through him.

You're doing a Bobby Darin. Yeah, right. Just going to the mountain and coming

back. I am different.

And it wasn't that. It took two years for this change to take place physically

with the growth of the beard and hair. And I did it on television.

There were syndicated shows I was doing by that time. Virginia Graham had a five

day a week show. Della Reese had a five day. And so did Steve Allen. And on

these shows in this change period, I would explain what.

it was that I don't belong in nightclubs. I belong on the colleges. I

the campuses.

The beard would get longer. The hair would get longer.

And by the time two years was up, I was there. But in the meantime, regular show

business, which I cared very little about, but Johnny Carson was important.

was another platform that I wanted to show my kind of like new self.

And they got afraid.

when they heard about it, because they thought, oh, he's on the acid, he's on

the acid.

And they don't know what you're going to do. And I came in to see Johnny one

time, and what happened was my wife had redone, she had written a press kit.

That was very kind of telling about my new change, my new direction, what I

wanted to do. And I was going to handle myself and just kind of be my own

manager. And the press kit, I wrote a very funny thing about why I wanted to

to the colleges. I want to go to the colleges because you can steal lab

equipment and stuff. And it was just a very bizarre letter. And I signed it

my left hand like a two -year -old, you know.

And so they saw this at Carson and they thought, this guy is fucking nuts, you

know.

And they dropped me. I had already done probably 10 or 15 Johnny Carson's, maybe

more than that. And they dropped me. And it was a year before they could see

this other new self take hold, get some credibility by virtue of the fact that I

was working in coffee houses and filling them. And then I did concerts and I

filled them. And then they said, oh, okay. And they let me back on. Yeah, but

you made the mistake. Well, I shouldn't say it was a mistake. That's for you to

decide. But you got all coked up and ran into Johnny's dressing room. No, I

asked to see Johnny in his office.

I asked to come over because I wanted to present my case. But I was full of coke

and I was real speedy, you know. And probably my legs were going like this,

know, and everything.

And I had a tie -dye shirt that was really...

and bizarre looking, you know.

And he, that just confirmed what they thought. They thought, oh, for Christ's

sake, look at this, you know.

So I had to fight my way out of that by being accepted in the place I said I

would be, which was, you know, younger.

I'll call it a more youth -oriented.

Culture, you know. Well, Johnny obviously knows talent because you ended

coming back and hosting. You filled in as guest host. How many times? I don't

know. It must have been 20 times I guest hosted. I've done 140 of those shows,

counting Jay Leno, starting with Jack Parr. Did you enjoy co -hosting? Was

too straightforward?

No. I enjoyed the status.

that it gave me, and the exposure to talk about whatever other things I

to talk about.

But it wasn't coming. And I was loaded on coke on a lot of those shows that I

-host. I did one show when I was loaded, and David Carradine was one of the

guests. All right?

I believe he was on acid that night.

I only just say I believe that. I've never asked him. He came out in this one

these, you know, he was in that kind of...

Far Eastern in that period. Kung Fu thing. Yeah, well, this was more like

Eastern. It was kind of a diaphanous sort of a flowing white garment, you

And he came out, and he was sitting there on the couch with his legs in the

crossed position up on the couch.

And I can swear to this day that each time I asked him a question, that he

was answering the next one.

You know?

Yeah.

That's how fucked up I was.

And you do have a list of the questions, so you kind of know what's next because

you do rehearse what you're going to ask.

But I don't know how that would be possible, but it seemed like he was

that.

I must try it. I wonder if there's anyone out in eBay land who has an old

of that for some odd reason. I'm a lot old. Can you imagine Mr. and Mrs.

in bed watching you? And you guys are on.

By the way, speaking of being coked up, the very first Saturday Night Live, you

were the host.

Coked all week.

Did they have to bang on your door and get you to come to rehearsal? They said

they did.

It's been said to me.

I believe it because you do lock all the good bolts and things and shit when

you're getting real paranoid, you know.

Yeah, I had great coke, too, and I did it all week. And I didn't like what I

on the show, and I was afraid to do sketches.

I told Lorne the first day, I said, don't put me in sketches. I'm not good

that. I really didn't feel very confident about acting ability, and I

know sketch acting is different from acting acting, so I didn't make that.

that accommodation in my mind. So I just said, leave me out of everything. You

know, just let me do little spots.

Let me do little monologues, 30 seconds, a minute and a half, two minutes here

and all through the show.

And that's what they did for me. They left me out of the, uh, the sketches,

I can see myself. I can see me, myself grinding my teeth on that. Um, first

broadcast. If you ever see the DVD, watch for the guy grinding his teeth and

catching, catching his breath, you know, kind of like, you know,

I believe you told me you had a collection of videotape collection of

over the years showing your hair, different lengths and whatnot.

I did. I must have lied.

I think I might have been referring to the fact that you can do that if a

wanted to, they could do that.

The Great Recession.

Well, during this time in the 70s, when all this, you were finding yourself and

going through these changes.

You did a couple of movies. You did Car Wash with Richard Pryor.

And you and Richard had worked together, though, before.

Well,

The way I – Jack and I – Jack Burns and I broke up two years after we formed the

act because he wanted to go to Second City and I wanted to be a single.

I had gotten married in the meantime and I wanted to be a single

and have a – for Brendan and I to have a baby, and I had to get out

on my own. We were in Chicago at the time, and that was the birthplace of

City, and he was very qualified for improvisational theater, very much more

qualified for that.

So we split up. We worked two weeks at the living room with Vic

DeMone. We made $750 ,000.

for the team a week, and that was a really good level for us.

Great to be working with an act like Vic Damone. He was, as some of you may know

or not know, a great singer who Frank Sinatra said had the finest pipes of any

male singer. And he had a string of hit records and a lot of things that were

really fine work.

And Vic, Jack and I broke up the night we closed at the living room. We broke

peacefully. And the next night I opened.

down the street from the living room in the nightclub district at a coffee house

called the Gate of Horn.

I opened up with Miriam McCabe and Peter, Paul and Mary. And I was the

act. I was the opening act.

And from there, I went on. Jack went on Second City, met or, you know, met Avery

there. And that became a story.

And what was it?

Oh, Richard Pryor. Well, that was a period that began then of two years of

drift. I did not have a partner. I worked out some of the contracts that

and I still had pending, places like the Playboy Clubs. I worked them alone, but

then I never got renewed, and I didn't have much work. And so I decided in New

York after...

I was married. My wife is from Dayton. We would stay in Dayton when there was

work in the Midwest, and we'd stay in New York at my mother's house when there

was no work in the East.

And I decided that the only way to do this right was to take a stand.

Now, don't forget, I'm still in my clean suit and tie, short hair period.

And I decided if I could get a little place in New York, in the Greenwich

Village, where I could work out all the time like a coffee house, and I could

develop myself there and get people to come in, get Merv Griffin to come in and

see me, get Carson Show to come in and see me.

That's what I need. So I did that. I took a stand. I found a place called the

Cafe Orgogo. I spent two years there on and off. I could work and go away from

there for two months. I could come back for a week. I could go away for two

weeks, come back for three days. I could work anything I wanted.

There was sometimes $5 a night, sometimes just a hamburger, sometimes on

weekend. if you were working with Bill Evans or someone like that. So I did

for two years, and I got Merv Griffin in, and that's what gave me my start. At

the place I'm talking about, the Cafe Ogogo, Richard Pryor was in the same

I was. Richard Pryor was still an unknown comedian who hadn't done any

television, and he was in his inoffensive.

his inoffensive period.

He was in his doing Rumpelstiltskin. He did a little plug.

There was a famous Richard Pryor early piece called Rumpelstiltskin. That's

got him on the Merv Griffin show. He was down there working out. We would smoke

some joints up there in the high staircase in the basement of this place,

would do our bits. Occasionally we'd be on stage together. I don't remember much

about that. But the people came in to see Richard Pryor one night from Merv

Griffin. And they gave him an interview the next week. So he got his interview.

And then I'm still laboring, laboring, laboring there. And he gets the show

them, and he goes and does the show.

Well, by the time he got the show, in between his interview and the show, I

gotten my interview.

But then he had his show.

So I was one step behind him. So then he got his second show. Then I passed my

interview, and I got my first show. So the two of us grew out of that room into

this syndicated television exposure, which was nationwide.

and was always watched by the networks.

And that was how the two of us sprung to life. Well, one of the good things

about the 70s, you released those albums that most people hear on XM Comedy all

the time.

FM and AM, Class Clown, Occupation Fool, Toledo Window Box.

In fact, I believe it was, I don't know if you know, but it was yesterday or

this week is the 25th anniversary of Class Clown. Yeah, that's nice to know.

Those were four gold albums. I had four gold albums in a row, 72, 3, 4, and 5.

And then I had a couple after that weren't gold. That was what I call the

David years, Little David Records, owned by Flip Wilson and his manager, who

then became my manager, and I was signed to the label.

And, yeah, that was the thing. You see, you need a way – if you're going to do,

quote, unquote, material that – should be uncensored you know i don't i hate

this designation adult you know or x -rayed or something but if you're going

do realistic spoken word art uh you need if you're going to get a mass audience

you need a medium and the medium at that time was records right you certainly

couldn't do it on television that was commercial and they didn't allow that

of uh language or those ideas if it were if it was just the ideas that were

dangerous to them so um I got my mass audience through the records. The

fed the box office at the college concerts. The college concerts fed the

sales. And it went around. Plus, you do some television and talk about both.

I'll be in Buffalo. I'll be in Toronto.

And I'll be in Niagara Falls. And by the way, FM and AM. But she did it a little

more gracefully than that. So the whole thing worked. Then I ran out of.

Then I ran out of record career. You know, you can't be the hot new guy in

forever. You can't be the fastest gun because a faster gun is coming to town

a few years.

So my record career began to kind of wane in the 70s, as did the

The disco came into play, and the people who are the true hippies and the true

radicals, they kind of retreated to the hills, and the other ones went and got

MBAs and stuff like that.

And there I was, sort of. not knowing who I was and who I should become, you

know, to be true to myself.

So I drifted a while, and that's when cable started.

That's when HBO started at 75 or 76, and I got on there in 77.

And now I've done 13 of them. That's my way of reaching the mass audience.

Right. The first one was George Carlin, 77.

George Carlin again, 78.

Carlin at Carnegie Hall, 82.

Carlin on campus, 84.

Playing with your head, 86. What am I doing in New Jersey?

1988.

Doing it again, 1990.

Jamming in New York was 92.

Did that 40 years of comedy special in 96. Back in town, you are all diseased

99. Complaints.

That got a lot of complaints and grievances in 2001, and life is worth

2005.

I've been told that the Jammin' in New York was a special one for you. Well, it

was, you know, one of the big turning points, you know, I'm an entertainer

because I work in the entertainment circuit, but there's an artist at work,

Not all entertainers are artists. Some are just entertainers, and they kind of

experience their creative lives in a static way. They get to a certain place,

and they kind of stay there.

Other people who have an artistic element or component.

Grow because artists always grow and go somewhere. Artists are on a journey.

They don't know where it is going. They don't know. They don't want to know.

They just know there's something else. There's something more. There's more in

me. There's more to talk about. There's more to look at. A painter, a composer,

they grow. They live. They grow. It's an ongoing thing.

So that is true for me as a writer. That's the artistic part of me as the

writer. Well, what am I answering again? I'll get to it.

Just help me out. You were talking about the HBO special.

Yeah.

So the artist goes through phases and changes.

And I found my comic voice as a younger person in the coffee houses. I found my

comic voice. And then that comic voice lasted until the late 60s, early 70s

I made that change to the countercultural type material.

That was a shift. That was a paradigm shift. And that was a change in voice,

comic voice and the writer voice.

And then through the 70s, I developed that and then said, and I kind of lost

track of what would be next. I didn't know. I kind of drifted, and I was

grasping. Then in 92, even though I did these HBO shows, and they were plenty

good. I like them. I still would stand behind every word of them. But there

wasn't a new voice yet. There was just like an improved voice that was ongoing.

In 1992, I discovered.

Silence on the stage. I discovered that you could have long periods of silence.

The show I did, Jammin' in New York, had a long, more or less serious piece

called The Planet is Fine, The People are Fucked.

And it was about the fact that the planet will outlive us. Don't worry

planet. People who tell you they're worried about the planet are not.

worried about themselves and their habitat.

They want a clean place to live, and that's fine. But don't be talking about

you're going to save the planet. You're not. The planet will outlive you, and it

will heal itself.

And that piece was very thoughtful and very interesting, and I loved it. But I

had to learn that there were times in the show when it was okay not to get

laughs.

Because one of the jobs I have, besides getting laughs, is to engage the

imagination, just in general to engage the person's imagination. If I make them

laugh along the way, that's part of the deal for me. But I learned then that I

had a kind of a more serious writer voice in me. And that's when another

took place. And the shows that follow that came in the 90s are representative

that. There's more of a social commentator.

in them. There's more of a, if you will, a quote unquote philosophy beginning to

emerge. And that was another important shift for me that is still playing out.

Plus, it was the first live one. It was the first live one. It was New York

City. It was the first one done in New York City for me. I did it at Madison

Square Garden, not in the big arena, but in the theater there that holds about 6

,500. So it was a big audience. It was live and it was my hometown.

And I was king of that town for a night, you know.

It really felt good. I looked out my hotel window that night, and I thought,

yeah, yeah, you know, this is my town. One of those kind of scenes you'd see in

a movie, kind of a cheesy scene. Sort of an adult version of when your mother's

friends used to pat you on the head and go.

Absolutely. It was just a graduated version.

I still haven't covered books or movies, but I promise to let people ask

questions about going on and on. Are there anyone here that wants to step up

have a question? Anybody?

They're in awe of you. Okay, great.

State your name, please.

Hi, my name is Alan. Hi, Alan. First of all, it's very rare that you get to meet

somebody that is an idol.

Thank you. And 30 years ago, I was introduced to Matt on that first HBO

that you talked about, and I just thank you for 30 years of making me laugh.

That's very nice.

I'm curious about some of the comics that you've worked with.

Who's the funniest that you...

look back at and you think man that guy is you you knew when you saw him that he

was going to be as good as you know you've ever seen well the one the only

one that comes to mind i'm sure if i searched my memory or if i had a better

memory i'd have other examples but lewis black was someone i saw early in his

exposure and i knew this was a unique and

strong voice, to say the least. So Louis Black, I love him. I love that sort of

theatricalized anger.

And and the things he talks about, he's got a good mind. I like good minds.

He's one that I think of. I never hung out with comics. I still don't. I'm a

loner. I'm a real kind of loner and an outsider.

I never hung out in comedy clubs. And of course, I didn't ever worked in them.

So I didn't need to hang out in them. But it also I was just never attracted

that. The comic culture, the comedians who like to hang out together.

So I don't have a lot of knowledge.

He didn't have a lot of occurrences of being able to see someone early, I'd say

that. But Louis Black was one that definitely sprang to mind.

Louis tells a great story how CBS wanted to do a series based on him.

And he had to go and audition for the part of himself.

And he didn't get it.

That's great. Luckily, it never made the air. I recall that.

Anyone else?

Sure. Don't wait for me to ask. Just walk up to the microphone. Hi,

my name's Chris.

You've had the chance to see the entertainment industry evolve

your career.

And one thing that's... I've heard said, and whether it's true or not, is that

if you saw a lot of people who are icons today, such as yourself, if you started

today the way the system is set up, you might not get the opportunity. You maybe

never would have had the chance to become who you are. That's right. Do you

think that's a fair assessment, or do you think the entertainment industry in

general has improved or just changed or gotten worse over your career?

Well, depending on the individual, that's both true and not true.

I would say with user -generated content and the viral quality of the Internet.

that a person who is self -made, let's use that for a shorthand, a person who

wants to be self -made has some avenues that certainly I didn't.

But on the other hand, life and the world and show business were simpler

so it was easier to see where the path ought to be.

I mean, there was only one way I was going to get started, and that was to

on a radio station, and in the midst of having that career going, to look around

at places where I might have a chance to learn.

could be a stand -up. You know, there were some nightclubs and there were some

coffee houses.

So the world and the choices were limited, which was probably good for me.

But I think if I had had the same tools genetically and had them reinforced as

they were for me in this era...

and I had these impulses to show myself off, I think I may have found a way, but

God knows how different it may have been and how much longer it may have taken.

It's a much more complicated place. I don't envy, I wouldn't want

to come of age at this time.

Although I see a lot of advantages in it that we didn't have. I see that and I

understand that. But I'm very happy that I came of age in the period I did

because you could grab it. You could kind of put your hands on all of it

much effort. Now it's pretty elusive and pretty fragmented.

Now you mentioned, you said, I don't give up is the word, but you didn't take

the movie.

idea of being a movie star quite as seriously. I was an actor. And you've

movies here and there, and you've done voices in animated films.

You were the Volkswagen bus.

In Cars. In Cars, right. Fillmore.

But recently you played Ben Affleck's dad in Jersey Girl. Yeah, I liked that.

That was a serious role. Well, that was written for me, and I could show my

sweet side.

A bit of irascibility, but there was a sweetness to the role. It was a

grandfatherly role.

It was written on a model of his father, and so it was kind of more suited for

who I was at the time. The other thing I'm proud of having done, I did a

Hallmark miniseries called Streets of Laredo, which was a continuation

of Lonesome Dove.

And it was the authentic continuation.

There's an ersatz continuation that was kind of bogus, but this was the

authentic one.

And I did a part of an old scout, and I really felt good about that. And then

Prince of Tides, I played the gay neighbor, Eddie, and I was really happy

the way that came out. But I wasn't really born to be an actor. If I had

all my life, it would have been a different story. If I had learned

and training, yes, but I didn't have the tools.

I'm Michael. Hi, Mike. Mr. Carlin, we know a lot of your comedy comes from

things that really piss you off. What are some of the things that really piss

you off that you haven't really talked about on stage lately?

Well, you catch me short because I don't have my computer at hand and I can't go

look for a lot of stuff.

I'm blessed with some pretty deep files.

I don't suffer writer's block, believe me.

This current show I'm doing, I went in there and I dug out the whole 75 minutes

all at once during a week's time, took it all out and began doing it the way it

was, those 75 minutes from scratch.

So I'm very proud of that productivity record.

I think it's not so much what I'm angry about, because anger implies that you

have a stake in the outcome, that you care.

And I don't really care.

I don't. I mean, it comes across as anger.

Obviously, there's a theatrical, it's a heightened kind of intensified

theatrical anger that you need to convey these thoughts. But I'm not personally

an angry man. I'm not personally angry about these things. I think they're...

They're wonderful because I root against the species.

I finally came to a realization, and this freed me as a writer. This was part

that transformation in the 90s. I realized I didn't really care about this

outcome. on this planet. I didn't care what happened to the species. I think

this is a species that was given great gifts and had great potential and

squandered them. I think this species squandered them. I think it chose poor

ways of organizing itself socially and politically.

I think it made a wrong turn when it came to buying the okey -doke that the

spiritual leaders gave, the high priests.

We turned it over to the high priests and the traitors. It's commerce. and

religion that have ruined and spoiled the potential of this species.

And in this country, the same two things are true. But this country is writ

large. And this country is the leader in the decay of the soul, if you will,

just use that metaphorically.

It's just, I just don't care.

What happens to this country? I don't care. I don't give a fuck. So, you know

what the anger, the only anger there is, and I recognize one in my voice there.

You know what that is?

It's really a reflection of disappointment and disillusionment and

down by my species. You know, we had such.

Great possibilities.

And they're not being realized.

You know, they talk about poets and philosophers.

Well, aren't there poets? Yes, there are. How much influence do they have?

None. There are more people writing poetry in America than there are reading

Well,

I guess that's true in a lot of fields.

It's just, I think that's the anger. It's a frustration.

It's a letdown. You know, it comes from, you know, how could you do it? That's

why I usually always use the second person. You know, I talk about the

and I say, you know what you did? I don't say, you know what we did here in

country. I say, you know what you people did? I put it on them. It's not my

problem.

So anyway, that's just a taste of what eats around the edges for me.

And if you don't know, if you want more of George's philosophy, the books,

Brain droppings, napalm, silly putty, when will Jesus bring the pork chops?

And sometimes a little brain damage can help was actually originally a

promotional item. It was actually a magazine -size item to be sold at

but I wanted to put out some material in there.

So I do pictures in, too, because you have to have pictures in.

It's kind of a pseudo book, quasi book.

So if you want to know more of the philosophy, he was just spewing. Some of

is in there, yeah. Yeah, right. Just read those books, because I would like

end on that note, but there's a couple of other questions.

One of them that you don't like to be asked is, have you ever thought about

this is going to end, when you're going to retire?

Oh, no, I don't mind being asked that.

No, like I say, the artist is never satisfied.

If you begin to be satisfied, you know, something's wrong with you.

If you pardon this highfalutin terminology, I'm talking about the

you know.

Pablo Casals, the great cellist, master of the cello of the last century,

one of the outstanding musicians of the last century, he was in his 90s, and he

was still doing...

a few recitals, and he would practice three hours a day. He practiced his

three hours a day. And someone said to him at some point, they said, Master

Casals, you know, you are a past master.

You are the maestro.

Why, at your age, do you bother practicing three times a day? I mean,

hours a day.

And he said, well, I'm beginning to notice some improvement.

And that's the answer. I mean, why stop?

Only if nature stops me, if I lose the ability to write or speak, some

alteration in plans will be necessary.

But I've already imagined, because they do have this for people who are totally

paralyzed, that the movement of your eyes, you can look at a keyboard that's

projected and you can type by moving your eyes to the letters.

And they'll have that perfected by the time I'm paralyzed.

I'm assuming that.

To quote George Carlin, art doesn't have a finish line.

No, right, yeah. It's just a race, but against yourself with no reward except

the satisfaction of explaining yourself in some symbolic form or direct form in

my case. Painting is more symbolic.

Would you leave us with what you would put on your gravestone? What's your

epitaph supposed to be?

He was here just a minute ago.

Thank

you

very much. Thank you all.