Original subtitles

I think of myself as a median who wrote his own material.

And I found over time that what's really true is that I'm a writer who performs

his own material.

So that's kind of the way I define what I do. Beyond that, there's, you know,

entertainer. And there's a little scientist at work, too. I'm really lucky

whatever kind of genetic accident happened for me.

I was born in 1937, so I grew up in Manhattan, New York City.

Father was out of the picture.

He, then my mother, he'd been shown exactly where the door was located.

He was a drinker and a little too much temper.

And my mother decided I wouldn't be subjected to that. So she took off with

at two months of age.

and my brother at five years, down a fire escape, very dramatic, through a

backyard, in the backyards of 112th and Broadway, and into my uncle's car.

And all of those things, the fact that we were alone and on the run and on the

road and improvising, I think had a big impact on me, especially the fact that I

got in a large way to invent myself.

My mother was at work. She had a good... good career in advertising.

My father had been a very successful public speaker in advertising.

He was the national ad manager of the New York Sun and the New York Post.

So I had my mother at work, no father in the home, and I was able to kind of

create my own universe.

She told us all the time to always think for yourself and do for yourself and be

independent and know how to make a home and know how to find your way.

And I had some of that in me, and it just helped me to kind of create my

figured out my career when I was still about 11 or 12 years old. It wasn't a

perfect blueprint, but I had it pretty much mapped out, and it worked pretty

much that way.

Because in fifth grade, I wrote my autobiography. I think that's the time

it when you're 11.

And the last page was what I want to be.

And mine said, I want to be an actor, comedian, impersonator, announcer.

disc jockey or trumpet player.

And clearly the theme there is standing up in front of people and attracting

attention to yourself.

I love that. Thank you.

I was lucky that I grew up in the golden age of radio and the golden age of

television because the late part of radio was the best and the early part of

television was the best, and I had them both.

And radio, of course, it's commonplace to say that it left everything open to

the imagination because it was just... and you could form your own pictures.

In 1943, I'm six years old, and I'm beginning to get up and down Broadway on

own. The theaters along Broadway, they're movie theaters then, and a few

featured older movies that were in re -release.

Suddenly there was this...

the spate of horse feathers and duck soup and all the Marx Brothers movies.

I began to see them and the anarchy of that. That's the fact that they could go

through a hotel lobby, light a couch on fire, take a man's toupee off, and that

all people did was go.

Like this, you know, they weren't arrested or grabbed or anything. They

run. They were chased maybe by one guy.

So that appealed to me, the just sheer nonsense and the uprooting of norms.

It's 1947.

I'm about 10.

Danny Kaye appealed to me because.

of the verbal artistry. I was beginning to understand and be attracted to

difficult verbal things, interesting lyrics of popular songs.

I tried to learn Dry Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Bones Gonna Walk Around. I tried to

learn Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don't Wanna Leave the Congo. Anything intricate

verbally and difficult started appealing to me for some reason, and I didn't

even define it then, it just was going on. We lived on the cusp between The

Columbia University neighborhood and what we called White Harlem, West

Columbia University neighborhood was the entire University of Columbia, which

included Teachers College, which was directly across the street from my front

door. Barnard College, the women's college, is there. St. John the Divine,

largest cathedral in the world, 112th Street.

At the foot of my street, there was this 23 -story Gothic cathedral called

Riverside Church with the largest carillon in the world. Attached to it is

Union Theological Seminary, also at the end of my street, largest Protestant

theological seminary in the world, Jewish theological seminary on the next

street, largest in the world, Juilliard School of Music, all of these

institutional things of higher learning, higher attainment. And then down here,

we had the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and the blacks in the street and the

working -class Irish.

Interesting smells of cooking and the interesting music coming out of the

windows. And the Irish guys, my guys on the street corner, lots of us. The Irish

had big families, and there were hundreds of us within a 10 -by -10 block

And my mother, of course, wanted us to go up the hill, go up the hill, strive

upward, let your reach exceed your grasp.

And she would have loved that for us, and those were good aspirations.

We, my brother and I, who were six years older, we weren't tight buddies, but we

were close, we headed down the hill to the fun and the heat and the adolescent,

the place where the testosterone could best be exercised, and we kind of

rejected all of that.

When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson

River, and it was filled with raw sewage, okay?

We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off.

And at that time, the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio

every year. But you know something? In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio.

No one, ever. You know why?

Because we swam in raw sewage.

It strengthened our immune systems.

The polio never had a prayer. We were tempered in raw shit.

a very good experience in first year high school. My grammar school was an

idyllic grammar school with wonderful

Beautiful nuns. But high school was these brothers and priests with the

brutality. And it was different.

And I didn't like it. I rejected it.

I knew after first year Latin, I hated second year. First year was great. It

all vocabulary.

Second year was Punic Wars and translation.

I didn't care about that.

They bored the hell out of me. And I wanted to get on with my life. I wanted

learn how to be a disc jockey, to be a comedian, to be an actor.

So I left.

I went in the Air Force as one of the ways to do that, to get away.

And my mother and I were by now at loggerheads. I wanted to get away from

And I just joined when I was 17. I got her permission to join.

I was in the Air Force. I was in Strategic Air Command, which was the

mother. of everything you know at that time there were no nuclear submarines

there were no silos with intercontinental missiles there were

and hydrogen bombs and they were dropped by either b -36s or b -47s i was in a b

-47 squadron those were the primary bombers at the time so we kept the peace

for quite a while. As I say, there was no triad of deterrence. We just had

bombers, and that was it.

I worked at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and we had the H -bombs, and

I saw them with blankets over them, but they would load them into these B -47s,

and they'd do these mock runs all the time because that was the principle of

SAC, always have a certain number of planes in the air and another certain

number on the ground ready to go.

And I was a mechanic on these planes. I jokingly say I helped keep the peace.

Because you'll notice that while I was in the Air Force, the Russians didn't

pull anything.

Before that, it was Korea.

After that, it was Vietnam. But while I was in, they said, let's leave them

alone. There's no question that my kind of...

makeup doesn't fit regulation and structure and authority.

It never did.

I rebelled. I happened to wind up with three court marshals. One of them was

falling asleep on guard duty during a unit -simulated combat mission.

I'm proud of that one.

Failure to obey a lawful order. Well, what are you going to do? What are you

going to do?

And thirdly, showing a certain amount of disrespect to a non -commissioned

officer. But I was very lucky I didn't serve any time, but these are not good

things on the record.

So it came time, and this is important to hear this, there was a period when

Dwight Eisenhower, who is now president, they decided to cut some defense

spending.

And they decided to cut some military, a certain number, 100 ,000 or something,

or whatever, a big number. And the Air Force, they said, cut some people out.

And they said, in the particular case of the Air Force, they were looking around

for people who had, they were three criteria.

One was, you've been out of your career field for more than two years. Well, I

had because I became a DJ and I didn't work at my job.

Secondly, been reduced in rank more than twice. Wow.

There you are.

And thirdly, does not intend to reenlist.

Perfect. So these people were eligible under an article, a regulation called

3916, a general discharge under honorable conditions.

And the colonel told me that shaky. We called him Colonel Matthews. He said,

we're going to let you go.

I said, well, it's just as well. But you can keep the uniform.

Went to Boston.

I wanted to be in a big market. It was square peg, round hole time for me. I

went to a place I didn't really fit.

I was a 20 -year -old with rock and roll roots, and I went to a station that

played quote -unquote good music and had network affiliation, still had soap

operas on radio from NBC.

So I didn't quite fit there, but Jack was on that station. Jack Burns was a

newsman. He and I roomed together with a third guy.

and found we had a great comic affinity.

And we found we had this ability to improvise.

And for the four months I was there, because I had to leave there,

unfortunately, before I had planned, Jack and I split up and didn't see each

other and didn't think of anything of it. I wound up in Fort Worth with a good

rock and roll job.

Hi, I'm George Carlin here, inviting you to become a member of our big, swinging

KXOL theme club.

Big contest, big prizes, big fun for you and all of Fort Worth's teenagers.

Jack showed up there on his way to Hollywood to be a star.

And there was a news job just opened up that day.

And he took it. We developed the act there. And two months later, we decided

leave radio and drive to Hollywood in my new Dodge Dart Pioneer two -door with

the tinted windows and the AM -FM. And we drove to Hollywood. And, you know, we

took that fabled American.

trip west, and it worked. It worked for both of us.

Don't forget what had just come before Burns and Carlin, before 1960, in

The individual comedians who wrote their own material and projected individual

personalities had emerged.

Mort Saul, Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, Nicholson May, Bob Newhart, Dick

Gregory, Jonathan Winters. These comedians in the late 50s and early 60s

reshaped comedy, given it a new feeling, a new touch. And this was the beginning

of what Tony Hendra calls boomer humor, which was the sicko, irreverent, holding

things up to ridicule and attacking them, as opposed to the kids today and

crabgrass and my wife shops too much. As opposed to that, nothing sort of

comedy. This was comedy about values, the world, and in a lot of cases, self.

We did things about the freedom.

rides, integration.

These are now much dated terms, but they were very on the edge then, integration

and the KKK and the John Birch Society.

So we tried to express our own sense of irreverence and

rebellion. We were very successful.

There are a lot of stories in my life that are too perfect in

terms of how fast some things happened and how lucky I've been.

We, in late 1959, early 1960, we were in this little apartment we rented. We'd

watch the Jack Parr show.

And the Jack Parr show was the place you wanted to go and be seen and heard

then. Prior to Johnny Carson, it was the Tonight Show. It was after Steve Allen.

It's where the new comedians were sometimes introduced.

And you'd be watching it and everybody.

And what we would do is improvise interviews on the Parr panels. If we

let's say, like Johnny Carson.

But Jack Parr. And we would make believe one of us was Parr and the other was

one of us.

And he would say, well, tell us, Jack, how did you two guys get together?

And we would say stuff like, well, I was bawling at his wife and he was humping

my mother. And we would just do these outrageous improvised things about being

on Jack Parr. That was February.

In October of that year, we were on that show.

That's just unheard of. We hadn't formed the act yet.

We certainly hadn't left Fort Worth. We were sitting there in our underwears

with beer cans, Lone Star Beer, making these things up. And in October, March,

April, May, June, July, August, September, October, eight months later,

on that show.

So Burns and I did very well. We worked all the best nightclubs. We worked the

nightclubs that Variety reviewed.

And we only stayed together two years.

We went straight to the top.

And then we, no, not truly. We went very close to being on our way to the top

and then decided, you know, we both, yeah, screw it. I wanted to be a single.

I'd wanted that for a long time. I was now married about a year.

And I took... over whatever momentum the team still had I did a couple of sort

of meaningless national television appearances and I was kind of drifting

was in this nightclub stage but it was 1963 now 1964

and the first

hint of change was occurring, the free speech movement at Berkeley.

I'd always been a pot smoker, by the way, from the time of my neighborhood.

I'd always had a pot as part of my life, and I think it's a value -changing

drug. I think it's a self -limiting drug, but it's a value -changing drug,

think you see the world differently, and that was beginning to happen in the

world, and I was restless with this straight path, because I had a kind of a

-track

existence I figured out later. In order for me to follow this kind of mainstream

dream, I had to play their game. I didn't call it that then. I didn't know

things then. This is how it was happening, and I define it in

But I had to kind of follow their...

blueprint, which was you went, I mean, where else are you going to go? You're

going to go to television.

You're going to get on variety shows. I did things like the Perry Como specials.

I did the Jimmy Rogers show. Hey, the way I broke through nationally was in

1966, in the summer of 66, I was on a show called Craft Summer Music Hall with

John Davidson.

We wore white pants all the time. Guys had striped vests and straw hats and

things. I had to sing Winchester Cathedral.

This was all very vanilla America. I didn't know how uncomfortable that was

making me. I just knew how uncomfortable I was.

And finally that all had to change.

And what happened was the culture changed around me. It began to really be

significant. The anti -war movement, the introduction of acid and mescaline and

so forth, and I myself did some acid and some mescaline, which I think hastened

my change, gave me the ability to...

to feel these things and put them into motion and that's what happened in the

late 60s i abandoned this other dream of mainstream path to danny k and thought

i'll be myself i'll start talking about what's in my heart so i was working at

the copa and this stuff is you know it's just horrifying they're just staring at

me so i began to tell them but it didn't belong there. I began to say to them,

look at these places, this kind of places. This place went out of style 20

ago. They just don't know it yet. I said, if Cesar Romero dances past me one

more time and I see Dennis Morgan throwing someone out the front door, I'm

getting out of here.

I said to them, I said, I belong in the colleges. That's where I'm going, and

this is where, this will be history for me. And I would lie on the floor and

underneath the piano, which was on my... If it's a nightclub like that, you're

on the same level as the audience. It's not a stage.

It's a little dance floor.

And I would lie on my back under the piano and read the label under there and

describe the underside of the piano.

Another time I brought the phone book out and I began to read from the phone

book. I was in high then.

I had already done my psychedelics months before, but I was...

I was really acting out a terrific protest of my own, and I begged them to

me go. I'd say, let me out of the contract. And Jules Podell, this

owner, he was over there with his ring. He'd bang on the table when he wasn't

pleased with something.

And I'd say, bang away, bang away, why don't you let me? They wouldn't let me

out of the contract because they knew they'd have to pay me off.

So the last night during the second show, they just slowly faded my lights

the middle of my act and slowly faded my microphone.

And I said whatever the white equivalent of free at last is, free at last.

And I was okay.

That was a big one.

I still had other things to do. I had other contracts to fulfill.

I had that. I had an incident at a Playboy club in Wisconsin.

And then I had the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which was the final thing.

Howard Hughes owned the hotel. Howard Hughes Invitational Golf Tournament.

These assholes were there.

These drinking golfers.

Two very bad categories.

And they weren't pleased with me saying the word shit.

The way I said it was very clever. I said, you know, I don't say shit, folks.

Buddy Hackett says shit down the street. Red Fox says shit. I don't say it.

I'll smoke a little of it, but I'm not going to say it.

And pretty soon they're, oh, this and that.

And I told him, I said, you're a bunch of fucking assholes. I said, a bunch of

businessman assholes. You don't know shit. Whatever I said, something like

And I left, and that was it.

That broke the back of the whole thing. That was the final point when I was able

to say, I'm going to the colleges and the coffee houses.

And I told my wife, I said, if all I ever do the rest of my life is fill

houses every weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I'll be happy.

It's all I want to do. I'll do that. I knew there was a ready -made audience

there and changing culture. I didn't sit around and call it a changing culture,

but the sense was in the air of what was happening.

And I knew there was a place for individuality in comedy and speaking in

first person.

I had this act that was still good. That was what I thought it was the middle

-class act.

And I had these newer things that I'd been working on, and there were now a

chance to develop them in coffee houses.

And I conceived the album to myself of FM and AM, which was my first album. And

the idea of it was to show that I was going from being an AM...

kind of a radio person, that is to say, very commercial and mainstream

-oriented, to what, in that time, FM was.

So FM represented that place I was going.

AM was where I had been.

And I just reversed them and called them FM and AM.

And I did the two sides of the album. One of them is the older act, and the

other side is the newer stuff. It wasn't exactly revolutionary, but it was new

for me and different for them.

The second one, Class Clown, came out in 73, which was the one... that had seven

words you can never say on television on it. The third one came out a year

later. That was Occupation Fool. That's the one that had filthy words on it,

which became the Supreme Court case.

The first four albums all became gold, and that was my golden breakthrough.

That was the first... Well, that was my second heat, because I had been through

these other... you know, pretty nice exposure on the 1960s there with Burns

then by myself and the Perico and all that stuff.

And now here comes this third wave or another surge of exposure on a big

And this was the one that counted and meant the most and lasted that led the

rest of the way because it was true. It was about the real...

Whatever the heck this is, you know, artist, entertainer, whatever.

That person was being represented correctly and accurately for the first

In looking for these words, I kept finding new categories.

We have so many ways of describing these dirty words.

Well, we have more ways to describe dirty words than we actually have dirty

words. That seems a little strange to me.

It seems to indicate that somebody was awfully interested in these words.

They kept referring to them. They called them bad words, dirty, filthy,

foul, vile, vulgar, coarse, in poor taste,

unseemly, street talk, gutter talk, locker room language, barracks talk,

bawdy, naughty, saucy, raunchy.

rude, crude, lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off -color,

risque, suggestive, cursing, cussing, swearing,

and all I could think of was shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker,

and tits.

All I know is I had a piece of material called Seven Words You Can Never Say on

Television. It was an honest analysis from my standpoint of...

the inconsistency of our standards.

And as reflected in language about the body, the body's functions, especially

it pertains to sex, religion has crippled people.

because it's given them shame and guilt about their bodies and fear.

And this is expressed in these taboos that we have, including language taboos.

And I just thought it was fascinating that we have these. I was able to

the seven.

that had no other saving meanings to them, such as balls has another meaning

it, pussy has another meaning, and I tried to explain that in the routine,

these words, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, they

are what they are, they don't have additional secondary meanings.

And so I wanted to... That interested me. So I thought, wow, what do you know?

Well, I'll just isolate them. And it happened that I was able to arrange them

an order where they had this wonderful euphonious sort of shit, piss, fuck,

cunt, cucksucka, motherfucker tits to them. And I exploited that.

And it was a way of, I guess, doing a lot of things. I don't know. I didn't

down and have conscious...

motives, except this will be fun to do, this is interesting, I do this well, and

this sort of needs to be said, not because society needs it, but because I

to hear someone say this and I'll be the one, you know. A radio station in New

York played it, a listener -supported station, therefore no commercials.

WBAI played that entire cut in the afternoon on a show called Lunch Pail,

they warned the audience. They said, this show today is about

language taboos and some of the inconsistencies and so forth.

And we're going to play something for you. If you're not ready for that sort

thing, don't like that, think you won't like it, please don't listen. Turn your

radios off now.

A professional moralist was driving around with his teenage son in the car.

Someone from a thing, I think it was called Morals in Media.

If not, it was something very much like that.

He heard it, listened to the whole thing.

Apparently he and the son were not morally affected by it.

And in a market in New York with car radios included that probably numbered

or 30 million radios, this was the only complaint the FCC received.

And for whatever their reasons were, they just sanctioned the station $100

and a little mark against your record when you come up for renewal.

The station refused the sanctioning and decided to fight.

the FCC.

That's really what happened.

And they won their case in district court. It went to whatever level first,

then to district court, which is the Court of Appeals in D .C. It's a three

-judge court, and they won that case, the radio station won, two to one. So

FCC was overturned. The FCC went to the Supreme Court of the United States.

in 1973 with this case and it took five years to go through the mill in 1978 the

supreme court voted five to four that the fcc had the right to regulate

what they termed indecent language it wasn't obscene because it didn't meet

those tests but it was a new kind of a new category of filth i was sort of

they had carved out a new category of filth for me uh initially for me uh

indecent language you know the perverse person in me loves the fact that

that i'm a part of i'm a footnote in american legal history the only case in

supreme court ever based on a comedian's routine and

that they had to read these words out loud in court.

I'm just proud of that. The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission,

all by itself that radio and television were the only two parts of American life

not protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the

Constitution.

I'd like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.

The FCC, an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the president,

decided on its own that radio and television were the only two parts of

life not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

And why did they decide that? Because they got a letter from a minister in

Mississippi.

A Reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he

didn't like.

Well, Reverend, did anyone ever tell you there are two knobs on the radio?

Of course, I'm sure the Reverend isn't that comfortable with anything that has

two knobs on it.

But hey, Reverend, there are two knobs on the radio. One of them turns the

off, and the other one changes the station.

Imagine that, Reverend. You can actually change the station.

It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was

founded upon. Look it up in the library, Reverend, if you have any of them left

when you finish burning all the books.

Media operators, the people with these radio and television stations, need to

please their advertisers.

They can't scare them away.

They don't want to scare away this audience they're supposed to deliver.

So they have to regulate themselves.

And that, I don't think this thing with my case changed very

much about what they would have done for themselves because their self -interest

says we have to watch it.

there are people we can lose out there.

And cable was what changed everything for me and other people. But in terms

of that, these premium channels that didn't require commercials...

therefore had a way to do content that you could see on Broadway, you could

in a novel, but that you couldn't hear in a place that was selling biscuits and

tires and beer and insurance, you know.

I began with HBO in 1977.

I think the service itself started in 76.

And once again, this incredible good luck of mine occurred.

in that you can't be the hot new guy on the block forever you're never the

fastest gun in town for eternity someone else shows up or the world changes and

so i had my hot my gold four albums and i had two a little bit less than gold

and uh and i wasn't really going anywhere in my thinking

okay so where am i going by this time disco had shown up and that's a to me a

symbol of the fact that The revolutionary thing had worn off.

Whatever about it was going to stick was in place and it was going to stick. And

now we were off drifting.

And that's what I was doing.

Creatively was drifting.

And cable came along and did something practical for me. It replaced the

mass medium of albums for me.

Gave me a way to reach large numbers of people with my act as it existed.

Albums essentially just record what you do and send it out.

Cable takes a picture of it and sends it out.

So I had a way to stay in touch.

I kept doing The Tonight Show.

I would host it a lot, and I would be a guest and so forth.

And I was able to keep touring, and I was able to stay on the road 200, maybe

150 nights a year and earn money and fill places.

And slowly I was just learning.

how to be a better writer and to produce more material because I had a need. I

had to stay out there.

And cable gave me a way of keeping interest up on a math scale

and getting my things on the shelf. I like the fact that they're recorded.

They're finite. You can look at them. They're on the shelf. There's my first

show, 77.

There's 78.

And at the same time, it helped me mark time and kind of keep exploring and

finding a voice.

Two things happened around very close to 1980.

I developed a relationship with a new manager who had been a promoter of some

my shows, not all of them, in the second half of the 70s, Jerry Hamza.

out of Rochester.

I got disenchanted, became disenchanted with my current management.

And Jerry, I told him I was going to look for a round for manager. He lived

Rochester, New York. I'm in Los Angeles.

And I didn't think of him for that.

And I told him I was going to look for a manager and everything.

And he said, well, what about me?

I said, well, you know, you're in Rochester and stuff.

And I don't know if you want to do that. And he said, let me come out to L .A.

and let's talk about this.

Jerry and I then discovered that I had a big IRS debt.

I'd done a lot of cocaine in the 70s and had not done responsible things with my

own affairs.

No one cheated me, but the managers, the money managers, different group,

business managers before Jerry, were rolling over my IRS debt.

which term still is unusual to me that you can say, oh, we'll give it to you

next year. I don't know what that means. But anyway, I wasn't paying it.

It built up a bit, and then there were things they had disallowed, what we call

exemptions, deductions, based on tax shelters, like my daughter's horses and

place we bought to put them and everything, all that stuff.

Goofy. And disallowed things, and now there's more money.

And penalties and interest that are retroactive.

to when you made the claim, not to when they decided it was a bad one, when you

made it.

And on top of that, these were pre -Ronald Reagan, in a way. God bless him.

put that in big quotation marks.

These are pre -Reagan tax rates. These are $0 .20, $0 .30.

This is a dollar where you earn a dollar, they get $0 .70.

So I was just going to never catch up.

Penalties and interest, penalties and interest, penalties and interest.

We located the IRS people, the dealership, let's call it, that was

function with me in the Rochester office.

The state of L .A. where they're used to going after celebrities.

Rochester folks.

Not that Jerry knew them, but a little less awestruck and able to, I don't

function more like real business people.

We started working on this debt.

And he would stave off, he would give to the IRS just enough, just enough to

keep him from the door. Had a lien on my house for 20 years. They never executed

it. Jerry kept them at bay with a certain amount of money to pay my just

in a proper way, and secondly, to help me function.

But over time...

I began to get some traction.

In 82, Jerry said, we need a product. We need something I can hold up and show a

guy. He put me in Carnegie Hall, and we did the third HBO show in 1982.

And then he had something to show. My wife, Brenda, she produced those earlier

shows. She produced the 82 show, 84 show, Jerry and She, and she was very

active.

it began to you know i began to the hbo fed the box office the box office fed

the hbo numbers we get it we get an advance on the next hbo show that would

finance us for a while not that we it was the sole thing but that would help

with what we were doing and we eventually knocked these taxes lower and

and lower i only finished them last year this is 2003 it was the 22 year

I won't call it a nightmare because I never took it personally.

You know, I never said, ah, these taxes, the government, they don't... Pay your

taxes, folks. Don't whine. Don't complain. It's still the best place to

with all the drawbacks. But there it was. I owed the money. I paid it. I

want... I wasn't a scofflaw. They never got my house. They never came for it.

They never did anything of that type.

The lien came off eventually.

But... The point of the whole story is that I had this reason to stay out on

road. I couldn't entertain this idea, oh, I'll do a little acting, I'll see if

there's any interest over at this studio, and then I'll write this,

I'll, you know, and I'll go down and do a comedy club.

And I had that option. I had to work, and I had to, Jerry was ingenious, and I

had enough.

Cache from these HBO shows and from my history in seven and like ten years

earlier that propelled me we produce enough money to begin to knock this

down and Then came 84 the show called Carlin on campus 86 88 and now

I'm beginning to find my voice Did you ever notice when you go to somebody

else's house? You never quite feel a hundred percent at home. You know why no

room for your stuff

Somebody else's stuff is all over the place.

And what awful stuff it is.

Where did they get this stuff?

And if you have to stay overnight at someone's house, you know, unexpectedly,

and they give you a little room to sleep in that they don't use that often.

Someone died in it 11 years ago.

And they haven't moved any of his stuff.

Or wherever they give you to sleep, usually right near the bed there's a

and there's never any room on the dresser for your stuff.

Someone else's shit is on the dresser.

Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?

I thought to myself, gee, I spent about 40 years with this need to tell people

things. And when I did it in the least efficient way, I traveled to where they

lived and stood up and said it to them.

Now, the first book, Braindroppings, only had two things in it that had been

stand -up material before, stuff and baseball and football.

And I put them in because they were semi -signature pieces. People identified me

with them. The nice thing about writing from your own ideas, I guess from any

ideas, but from your own ideas, from your nuggets, is that in trying to edit

them and fix them so they work, new thoughts occur.

They grow like the neural networks in the brain do they find connections that

you didn't think of originally and suddenly a sentence or two is a

The paragraph might sit And as you go and you weigh a field somewhere in your

files and you find another paragraph, you think, wait a minute, what was that

other thing?

And back to that. And that's what's great about this process. And that's

great about the brain.

My acting.

Well, to go back to my boyhood dream, because I wanted to be like Danny Kaye.

saw Danny Kaye in Kid from Brooklyn and a couple of those movies, 47, 48, 49. I

was 10, 11, and 12.

And I thought, I can do that.

And so that, to me, that was actor.

I didn't think of Ray Moland, Gregory Peck. I thought of guy in the movies,

movie star, actor.

I'll be an actor like that. I'll be a comic actor. I didn't know that

distinction, comic actor. I'm going to be an actor. How am I going to do that?

Well, I'm funny. I'll be a comedian first. If I'm funny enough, they'll have

let me be a funny actor, because first you're a funny guy, and then they'll

me, okay, so that comedian first. Now, how am I going to get to that? Well, I

love these disc jockeys I listen to. I'm really good with my voice. My mother

bought me a tape recorder in eighth grade, and I learned how to run it and

to project and do a lot of things on the tape recorder. It gave me confidence.

And so I'm thinking, I can be a disc jockey first, and that's safe, because

you're kind of separated from the audience. They can't...

see you and you know you know less risk and then if i'm good enough at that

they'll have to let me be a comedian because i'll be a funny disc jockey and

then if i'm a good enough comedian i'll be an actor and so i had this path in

this dream i got on television in 65 66 67 68 69 i'm hot on television and

that's my time now i'm still on autopilot autopilot says you're going to

actor And that meant now I'm ready to try out for sitcoms and movie parts.

I was an actor on That Girl. I was her agent in one episode.

I did a movie that same year or pretty close with Doris Day and Brian Keith

called With Six You Get Egg Roll.

What I found was I wasn't an actor.

I didn't have the tools. I had no technique to fall back on. I had no

to fall back on. I had only this idea that this is my birthright.

I belong here. I'm an actor.

And now I find that it's not just learning the lines. And by the way, I

even doing true characterizations like actors do. I was doing characters.

I found that it's not just these lines. The guy says to you, That was good. Now,

let's do that again. He says, come down the stairs a little slower while you're

saying the line.

When you get to the bottom, pause on the second step up and look over there. The

phone is ringing. Notice that, but look over toward the kitchen. You think maybe

she's in there.

And by the way, cheat your look a little bit.

I can't remember the lines that I'm going to think about all that shit. I'm

completely not going to be natural at all, and I wasn't. And I couldn't do it,

and I hated it, and it was horrible. It was just like being on the Perry Como

special. I was out of place.

And I didn't know how to define all that. I couldn't label that at the time

myself. I just felt it. It was awful.

But I knew enough to know that I didn't belong there, and I knew enough to know

they're not dumb enough to keep hiring a guy like this.

So I...

I slowly just kind of put that to rest.

When the 70s happened and the records happened, here's my next burst of heat.

Now I can be an actor again if I want. But unfortunately, I have a beard, long

hair, and I dress like a hippie, and I am known as a hippie. No one's going to

cast me as...

the library trustee they're going to cast me as a hippie or an fmdj or

so it's all going to be typecasting and i still couldn't act so car wash came

along i did that because they let me write my own dialogue and create my own

scene it was one day i could get in get out and they left me alone and you can

have a beard if you're a cab driver so i did car wash but Essentially, the

comedy had taken over and this other stuff was going on. I still like to

about it. I was good in Prince of Tides later on because by then I was myself. I

had a little better access to myself or whatever the heck an actor is supposed

to do.

And then I did a really good part in a Hallmark miniseries called Streets of

Laredo. I was good in that.

Because there was something on the page.

There was something emotional to do.

I'll never really be an actor. I'll never really be a great writer. I'll be

serviceable writer who can get his thoughts across in a nice way, sometimes

better than others. And I'll always enjoy 60 or 90 minutes on stage, and

always be good at that.

In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the

general.

To be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his

receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the

shotgun.

With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy

territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack, which

punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

In baseball, the object is to go home.

And to be safe.

I hope I'll be safe at home.

Safe at home.

My dream is this Broadway show.

I'm going to do a Broadway show in the fall of 2005.

This is a...

qualitative shift for me. It's not going to be a Broadway show like Robin

Williams and Jerry Seinfeld did one night on Broadway where they sort of

used Broadway as a prop to get it in the title.

This will be a show that runs, I hope, six or eight months with two acts, a

single theme.

I'm going to do a show called Watch Your Language.

And what that means is keep an eye on your speech, your American speech. Watch

your language.

And that's all it is. It's an exposition and my take on a lot of aspects of

American speech, the way politicians talk, media, advertisers and marketers,

politically correct speech, the influence of euphemistic language all

board, and then just the way we talk, which is a lot about our popular

vernacular. And this is...

the reconciliation with my mother, who wanted me to go uphill.

See, this is that audience. She took me to a couple of Broadway shows, among

them West Side Story.

And at intermission, I was 15, 14, 15, 16 at the most.

And at intermission, we'd sit and...

People would be drinking their orange drink or having a cocktail or whatever

smoking like crazy. And she would say to me, because she had refined tastes, she

was what they call lace curtain Irish as opposed to what she thought of as

shanty Irish, which was the neighborhood that I was gravitating toward, the

shanty Irish. You have breeding, she would say to me. You have refinement.

at these uh intermissions she would see someone and she would say look at that

man over there look at the way he's holding his glass look at the way he

his hand when he speaks watch how he holds that cigarette he's cultured he

refinement you have that so that um

i'm gonna get a chance to to realize that for her in a

way um because when you throw out someone's um

In that case, you know, trying to separate from a parent of the opposite

differentiation they call it, you necessarily throw out the whole package.

And I had to turn my back on good things as well as what I didn't like about

her. So I'm going to reconcile that.

I didn't intend it that way. It's just magic the way life does these things.

I had no notion, of course, how can you, that life would be this full and

rewarding, this satisfying, this many breaks, this much

luck, this, you know, it started lucky.

It started with an accidental conception, not like the type we always

about, but my mother and father had been separated for two years, and they met

on the street and decided to go to Rockaway Beach.

for the weekend and i was conceived because they met i was about to be

was in my mother's womb at whatever it is six or seven weeks or so after the

pregnancy my father's sitting next to her she's ready to have an abortion

had one earlier after my brother and she saw she thought she saw her mother in a

painting on the wall her mother had died a few months previous and uh

She took it as a sign and said, come on, I'm going to have this baby. And they

gave it one last shot together, and it didn't work.

But that was a freak.

Here's the conception as a freak, being allowed to get out of the abortionist's

office. I was 50 feet from the drainpipe. That's a freak.

These things aren't supposed to happen.

So there's been nothing but luck.

Someone said the definition of happiness or success, I forget which, is finding

what you love.

Doing what you love, being good at it, and being recognized for that. Those

three elements. And I've had that. I couldn't ask for more. I've had two

relationships with the women in my life. My marriage was long and good, although

we had a lot of things to get through together.

It was 37, 36 years.

And I met Sally Wade five years ago. And it was like a bolt of lightning.

It was just wonderful.

relationship, Sally and me. I already know that anyone who talks about or

about comedy in the last quarter of the 20th century will have to include me.

And in a nice and prominent place.

That's sufficient, you know, that's terrific.

The epitaph I'd like is, geez, he was just here a minute ago.