George Carlin

P: Should anything be off limits in comedy? Is there such a thing as going too far?

GC: I don’t think so. One of the tasks of a certain kind of comedian—I count myself among them—is to see where the lines are drawn and then cross them deliberately, and try to bring the audience with you across the line and make them happy you did. The other part is just getting them to laugh, and to see some things that they’ve seen in a different light up until that time. And part of it is to find out what bothers them, where their soft spots are, their hot buttons, and press them. I love doing that. That’s part of the rebellious ‘f— you people’ thing that’s somewhere in me: ‘You think that’s sacred? F— you. Your kids? This parenting shit? I love getting in there with a big gouger and just gouging out their insides and having them sit there, and having half the people enjoy it and the other half rethinking for a moment.

P: Since the late ’60s, there hasn’t been too much separation between the man you seem to be and the man we see on stage. Do you think that’s accurate, or is there a lot of separation for you between stage and personal life?

GC: There are a great deal of genuine similarities, but many people read the theatricalized impatience I have with a topic as anger. It’s an easy word to use, it’s a convenient catch-all, and they say, “What are you so angry about?” and I say, “I’m really not an angry person, I don’t live an angry life, I’ve never had a physical fight in my life.” Most things aren’t worth, to me, getting angry at, so what you see up there is a disillusionment and a sense of betrayal on the part of my fellow humans and my fellow Americans—that they had such gifts they were given and squandered them in the interest of superstition, meaning religion, and material gain. When I get onto those subjects it brings out that dissatisfaction, that disappointment, and because I’m on a stage and I have to accent it and theatricalize it, it comes out in a heightened form and sounds like anger. So that’s what they don’t know about me, that I’m rarely angry. No one who’s been around me for five minutes—or five years—would ever say they’ve seen me very angry very often. Life is too precious to be using your energy on stupid things.

P: Do you feel that part of the reason you’re not angry or depressed that often is because your work is therapy, a way of exorcizing the demons?

GC: Yeah. I think there’s no question about that. It’s an outlet. And there is the satisfaction of building on—it’s like a Christmas tree, adding a few more ornaments every week or so.

P: What do you consider the greatest moment of your career in show business?

GC: The thing I’m proudest of is lasting for a long time at a really high level, and being highly productive and getting better. There’s an interesting distinction between being an entertainer and an artist. On the face of it, I’m an entertainer, a standup comedian. I’m proud of that term. It’s one of the low arts, a vulgar art, an art of the people. But there’s also an artist at work in there. The artist is the writer—that’s the creative artist, and the performer is the interpretive artist. So there are two levels of art going on, and an artist is never satisfied and never content with the present. They’re in motion, heading somewhere, and usually they can’t tell you where, and they don’t know, so they’re just on this path of growth and evolution, looking further into themselves, and more deeply around them. It gets a little high-falutin’ here, some of these ideas, but they’re true. There’s an important moment for me, but it has nothing to do with the external world of show business. For years, I described myself as a standup comic, a comedian who writes his own material. I was proud of that because a lot of comedians don’t. And then, in the early ’90s, I realized what I really was—[the reverse], a writer who performs his own material.

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For more riffs from George Carlin on HBO, disc-jockeying, the IRS, atheism, and his iPod, click here.