George Carlin

Love him or hate him, George Carlin has a knack for getting under people’s skin. Since the ’60s, when he decided to forsake the comedic mainstream, he’s never looked back, and never shied from speaking his mind or using his chosen form of expression, standup comedy, as a means to shake his audience into self-examination, whether through fiercely irreverent provocation or by inducing gut-splitting laughter.

The 70-year-old icon is a professed lover of words, linguistically bobbing and weaving—as graceful and fluttering as Ali in the ring or Elvin Jones behind the trap kit—through his record 13 HBO specials (look for the 14th in 2008) and his 50 years in show business. Now, highlights from his epic body of work have been compiled for the 14-disc set, George Carlin: All My Stuff. Carlin recently spoke with Paste from his home in Venice, Calif., to discuss the ins and outs of comedy, and his long, satisfying journey in life—a journey the ambitious entertainer/artist had already mapped out by age 11.

PASTE: Looking back, how do you feel about the work you’ve done in your career?

GEORGE CARLIN: The nice thing is it really shows a growth curve. The HBO [period] starts at a later time, when the hair’s already out of my head and down to my shoulders, so it picks me up at a certain time. But I’m very happy with it; most of it stands up very well; there’s only a little that isn’t timely. There are some things that have an anachronistic sound, but not many. I am who I am, and was who I was—past tense of Popeye—and I’m happy with it and proud of it. I only wish I were two people, so I could’ve done twice as much.

P: Watching your standup over the years, the rhythm and the wordplay, it sometimes feels like I’m watching a poet. Do you think good comedy is poetry?

GC: The thing about what I do, and this is true of some other spoken-word artists—this is more than just standup comedy. There’s an element of rhetoric, of oratory in it. It’s an essay, a spoken essay and it’s supposed to have some persuasive power, like a lawyer’s closing statement. So it’s not only a statement of what I believe, but it’s an attempt to make the beliefs I have seem more reasonable and acceptable. Now, as they say, I’m preaching to the choir anyway because I get people who are pre-sold on my way of looking at things. But it’s nice to find ways that are still novel to describe things we all know. That’s what’s fun about it, it’s speechmaking in a way, but with the saving grace of a lot of comedy: a lot of good lines, I really pride myself on good strong jokes, powerful words, not necessarily cursing—they’re necessary ’cause they’re great intensifiers—but words that carry picture power. Strong adjectives, multiple verbs.

P: You’ve said that you came to realize at a certain point that you “didn’t give a f— what people thought anymore.” When was this, and how did you reconcile that with your desire to be the center of attention?

GC: I needed attention as a kid because I had an isolated life, which I enjoyed at the time. I liked the autonomy, the independence of being alone in the house. My mother had to work all day because my father was out of the picture. And I developed my left brain—mental activities, to be a little melodramatic, saved me. Loneliness could drive you crazy. So I used my brain to work my way out of that. I noticed I had the ability to get the attention of adults and amuse them, and I thought that was nice because it’s like, ‘isn’t he cute, isn’t he clever’—it’s an acknowledgement of yourself, and praise and back-patting, and it’s a good way for someone like me to first notice these skills that he had. And the guys in my neighborhood felt the same way the adults did earlier when I was a little kid—it was approval. It was applause, approbation, adulation—all the A’s I wasn’t getting in school, I was getting on the street corner. In school I was a clown, too, and I got their attention and never failed to deliver because when I did say something disruptive it was usually pretty funny. So I knew I had that ability, and how good it made me feel, so it was a natural homing process to go toward that. The plans I made were decidedly mainstream—to be like Danny Kaye was the oversimplification I gave it. But underneath that, what I became was a rebellious kid who swam against the tide and didn’t like authority and rejected it, got kicked out of preschool, kicked out of the altar boys, the choir, the Boy Scouts, summer camp—kicked out of the Air Force ultimately when I was 20. So the pattern was that I was a lawbreaker/outlaw type, and yet my dream was to be a people-pleaser like the people in the movies. [The two] didn’t go together, and I never noticed. I experienced it as dissatisfaction as I became more successful as a mainstream comedian, getting a lot of television work and getting on to variety shows. I only felt comfortable doing my bits on stage, but even they were very superficial because that was the era I lived in, comedians did that kind of stuff. They were good, I liked them, and they had a little edge of irreverence in them, but they were still people-pleasers. Then all of that changed in the ’60s, along with everything else in this country—this place underwent great changes, and it had to do with the very qualities I was denying: the anti-authority, out-of-step, “we don’t buy it” attitude. So I was able to surrender to that once I saw I had something to offer there, that I had other thoughts that could be in my comedy that weren’t just nice, happy, “how are you” things.

P: How important is honesty in comedy, and do you think it’s your responsibility as a comic to tell the truth as you see it?

GC: Definitely yes to the second question. But with the first it depends. Think of how different comedians are from each other. If you think of the differences between Lenny Bruce, “Moms” Mabley, Carol Burnett, even Lilly Tomlin, Flip Wilson—every [comedian] who rises to a good height and lasts has something unique about their approach, their content, their outlook, what they want to do for you as an audience. That wasn’t true before the ’50s, and I was lucky to be in on the tailwind and to get propelled so that, when the time came to act as an individual, I was able to make that turn in the late ’60s. But I don’t think honesty plays into every comedian’s toolkit.