Satiristas

  PAUL PROVENZA: How do you share that with an audience so they receive it the right way?

  RICK OVERTON: I’m not trying to preach it. I just try to sneak it in with my act. I try to have a joke ratio that’s more about the joke than anything else. I love jokes. And I love jokes that have nothing to do with anything. I need that, too. But we’re in a crisis time, and I think it’s negligent not to put stuff like that in.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Have we ever not been in a crisis time?

  RICK OVERTON: This is worse. I think it’s not accurate to say it’s like the other times. How are you gonna feel if you didn’t say anything? Whatever punishment you’re taking now for being called Chicken Little, well, the sky is actually falling this time.

  PAUL PROVENZA: One of the things that frustrates me is that a lot of mainstream comedy is very much status quo. The person who gets targeted is the one who’s different. It makes me crazy when people get picked on in an audience by a comic for having a weird hair color or dressing differently.

  RICK OVERTON: I don’t do that. I honor those people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Yeah, me too! I celebrate them.

  RICK OVERTON: You know what? The normal guy mowing that lawn is always the one with the stinky basement that the dog whines about.

  PAUL PROVENZA: With the bodies in it?

  RICK OVERTON: A collection of hands in a jar. Human teeth in the fridge. That’s always the guy, and that’s why you’ve got to put on your “look how normal I am” uniform all day. There’s nothing in my apartment I’m ashamed of except the porn collection and, you know, it depends on who you are for me to be ashamed. Otherwise, I don’t have any reason to hide it, so I get to be me all the time.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Why do you think some comedians just pander to the status quo but others choose to be more of who they are and remain unique?

  RICK OVERTON: I hate to tell you, they’re all being who they are. And I pander, too, sometimes, when I have to. I mix it. But it’s fly fishing. Cast far, reel near. And they’re doing what they’re meant to do. Not everyone’s supposed to do the same thing. I’m not judging that part. Good for them. Get your laugh any way you can.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If you had to give yourself a theme or something, what’s the takeaway that you love an audience to pick up and go home with?

  RICK OVERTON: Misfit’s rights.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Misfit’s rights.

  RICK OVERTON: That’s right. You have the right to be here, and not everyone that judged you was authentically good at their job of judging you. And almost everyone, to a soul, if you boiled them down or gave them sodium pentothal, they feel like a misfit. Almost everyone does. But mostly it’s “difference is better than sameness.” And not just arbitrary, but conscientious difference.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Owning it.

  RICK OVERTON: Conscientiously. That is, you know, some guys go, “Hey I’m a man, I feed my family.”

  Hey, a squirrel can feed its fucking family. I see them do it up the trees all day. They’re bringing nuts up to their family, that’s nothing. That’s not what made you a man. Being a man is how you can protect people you’ve never met. Sometimes they need a spank to hear it, because they don’t like hearing it—because they spent most of their life not doing it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: A spank is the language they know.

  RICK OVERTON: Yeah, and they respect big tough guys. I don’t do it a lot. I try to be playful, but I let them know I’m playing.

  The thing I strive for is “keep your kid alive.” But there’s two kids—childlike and childish. One makes, the other destroys. I’d rather you walked out with a childlike kid inside you more than the childish one.

  The only way we ever get out of problems is by being inventive. Being repetitive does not solve problems. Every culture is defined by its innovators, its artists.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think people have kind of been shamed out of passion in life, too.

  RICK OVERTON: Absolutely, shamed out of passion. Because passion makes you do what’s next, rather than what was, and it makes you disobedient.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It makes you follow something other than just rules.

  RICK OVERTON: And fear cancels passion. And I’m not saying I’m not afraid. I try to remember that I’m afraid, and have passion override it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So how do we as artists or performers, and as human beings, spread non-fear?

  RICK OVERTON: Try to be brave, so there’s an example somewhere. So someone can imitate you, and get it even better than you. And don’t be freaked when they beat you at it. As a teacher, teachers hate it when a student beats them, but fuck that. That’s one of your fears.

  People are scared of change, because they’re afraid that if they’re not evolving at the right rate, they’ll disappear. “Oh shit, you’re replacing me. Everything was great until the next thing showed up. I’ll be replaced. Food supply cut off. Mammal scared.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: This is an odd little paradox: That the two things that remain from all rich cultures are warfare and art.

  RICK OVERTON: That’s it. And art’s more important than warfare, because everyone copies the weapons until they spread. So everyone’s got the exact same weapon but they don’t get the exact same art.

  The only actual “authority” can come from an author; everything else is fake. There’s a lot of frauds, a lot of book bullies, a lot of pseudo-intellectuals. They quiz you on everyone else’s book. It’s despicable. “Oh, really? You didn’t read that book? I thought you would’ve.”

  Hey, don’t start getting tough until it’s your book. “Stop being so brave with everybody else’s hard fucking work, you coward. I want your opinion. You only remotely become interesting at that point. And by the way, I don’t hate you. You just had it coming. You needed a good spank. We’re both 98 cents worth of minerals and salt water with a meat battery on top. You get to do that, and I get to do this back. We’re exactly equal. You had it fucking coming. And I’d rather see you as my friend next week because you came around, which is not the result you were looking for with me.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Or you at least respect that I gave you what you had coming.

  RICK OVERTON: You should respect when someone takes you at your own horseshit game, if you’re any kind of man or any kind of woman. And I’m not here to babysit you, though it ends up being that sometimes. And I’ve been babysat and I’ve had this handed down to me, so I know it works. I came around.

  GEORGE CARLIN

  GEORGE CARLIN WAS well on his way to mainstream stand-up success when Lenny Bruce unlocked a door hiding hitherto unknown depth and meaning in the art of stand-up. Inspired by the possibilities Lenny revealed, Carlin veered sharply off his carefully planned, Danny Kaye–wannabe course to crash through the door with a comedic force that splintered it to oblivion.

  Doing original, cleverly inventive, lighthearted comedy had launched Carlin on a people-pleasing comedian’s dream trajectory to Las Vegas hotels and prime-time television variety shows, satisfying his childhood dream of becoming an all-around showbiz personality and feeding his self-aware need for attention and recognition. But the troublemaker inside him—the thirteen-year-old pot smoker and unruly school cutup—was growing stronger and demanding attention, too. As the late sixties’ popular disillusionment with the cultural and political status quo grew more urgent, so did that rogue voice within him, becoming too disruptive to be ignored.

  His straitlaced, conventional appearance steadily began to transform: his hair grew longer and a beard materialized in sharp contrast to the customary jacket and tie, which soon gave way to a T-shirt and jeans. Material began to come more from the obstreperous anti-authoritarian in him than his crowd-pleasing urges could keep at bay, and he began pushing language and subject matter past the narrow boundary lines that mainstream Vegas and television had known him to stay eagerly comfortable within. More and more rebellious onstage, he was fired from a lucrative Vegas contract for breaking the sacrosanct rule against uttering th
e word “shit” onstage, and he found himself at the crossroads he’d consciously and unconsciously been heading for.

  Turning to the “underground” of coffeehouses and college crowds, Carlin began developing a new comic voice before a new audience steeped in political and cultural turmoil and yearning for a subversion of the status quo. With Lenny’s example fueling his new artistic journey, Carlin emerged a timely comic voice, now speaking uncensored, uncompromisingly irreverent truth to power along with his long-honed playful insights, silly characters, and childlike glee.

  With sharp, biting wit and a clear point of view, Carlin revelled in taboos. His subject matter steadily spread across the spectrum of politics, religion, sexuality, media, consumerism, corporate control, the hypocrisies of American culture, and all of life—and death—itself. But with new audiences growing and appreciative, and with the timely arrival of cable television to give his new voice widening access, the crowd-pleaser remained satisfied as the troublemaker thrived.

  Lenny’s accomplishments proved only a starting point for George Carlin. His characteristic love for language and a focus on its absurdities led to his becoming a First Amendment advocate after a 1972 arrest on, like Lenny before him, obscenity charges. A Pacifica network public radio station broadcast his now classic “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” and thrust him to the center of a landmark Supreme Court free speech case. He was quickly embodying the very ideals that drove him.

  Carlin spent the next four decades exploring comedy through his own, singular voice, inspiring generations of comedians to follow and never slowing down enough for anyone to catch up. He continued not only being creative but also relevant. At seventy-one he was still being enthusiastically discovered by fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds—not as some past-his-prime classic; they were falling in love with what he had just done. I defy you to find another seventy-year-old comedian with people in his audience who’ve been fans for twice as long as the teenagers sitting next to them have been alive, and all of them laughing just as hard.

  To talk of Carlin “in his prime” is pointless; his “prime” lasted forty years. His career had phases and passages, but distinctions such as those between the vim and vigor of his youth and the piss and vinegar of his later years are irrelevant: His targets and values never changed, his barbs never dulled, and his passion for his work never diminished. He created enough first-rate stand-up for ten outstanding careers, but never once looked back, and never rehashed or rested upon any of it. He kept raising the creative, artistic, and humanistic bar for himself, and well beyond the reach of others.

  Crafting fresh, bold, challenging, and fearless work until the day he died, he left new fans the Sisyphean task of exploring a daunting oeuvre created with a prolificness never before seen in the art of stand-up. With a stunning clarity of purpose, his brilliant talents, resolute work ethic, and unwavering honesty resulted in a body of work and a cultural impact that profoundly and permanently altered the comedy landscape.

  Right up through his last performance, to see George Carlin work was to see an artist still discovering, still growing, still digging deeper into his and our psyches, still delighted with language, and still refusing to stop bothering. His legacy will long remain a paragon of innovation, artistry, creativity, craftsmanship, irreverence, reason, truth, and above all, laughter.

  Here, from what sadly turned out to be his last videotaped interview before “he upped and fuckin’ died,” he unabashedly reveals some of the paradoxes and passions that are George Carlin.

  GEORGE CARLIN: When you’re born in the world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, it’s a front-row seat. And some of us in the front row, like me and you, Paul, bring our notebooks. We make notes about the freak show and report it to others. That’s the role I found myself in, and I really don’t care about any “issues.”

  When I’m one-on-one with someone, I’m empathetic and sympathetic; if you need help and I can, I will. I’ll help a person, but I will not help a group of people a hundred or ten thousand miles away. Fuck them. I don’t see them, I don’t feel them, they’re not part of me.

  I’m here with you, part of you, we’re us, here together for the moment, and my empathy opens. You, I feel. I have a brother, a daughter, a wife—they’re close to me. But you start to talk about people somewhere down in Ridgefield, Something? I don’t give a fuck. I really don’t.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you not care about human suffering in Darfur?

  GEORGE CARLIN: Intellectually, I care. Intellectually, I see the problem.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But not emotionally?

  GEORGE CARLIN: Nope.

  Here’s the thing: human beings have made all the wrong choices. They turned everything over to the traders and the high priests a long, long time ago. It’s all superstition and materialism. And I understand there’s not a whole lot of other ways to run this thing, but that’s for other people to worry about. I’m just criticizing what is; I don’t have answers or a nice alternative, and I don’t pretend to. But we humans were given great gifts: binocular vision, a great big forebrain, walking erect, opposable thumbs, being able to objectify: “That’s an object, I’m a subject,” being able to make these wonderful distinctions, to think of the word “zero.” We’ve squandered the wonderful gifts we were given in the interests of a superstitious god and mammon.

  And America was given great gifts as the first real, working, self-governing democracy—of course it was an Iroquois concept that we stole from the Indians, but it works. But again, we gave ourselves over to superstitious shit: “In God We Trust” on our fucking money? We open Congress with a prayer to an invisible man?

  PAUL PROVENZA: And we pledge allegiance to a flag? If we pledge allegiance to anything, it should be the Constitution. Cut out the middleman.

  GEORGE CARLIN: Exactly! See, I can’t identify with any of these systems. If someone says, “Darfur this,” “Myanmar that,” or “tsunami this,” I say, “Yeah, interesting. The numbers keep going up.”

  That’s what I do: I root for big numbers. For nature against man. Because man is part of nature, but he doesn’t acknowledge that, he thinks of himself as separate. “I’m going on a nature walk…Nature’s out in the country, I’m a person.” They don’t realize they’re part of nature, and they deserve whatever they get. Humans deserve whatever the fuck they get, and they usually get what they deserve in the long run. I have no use for them, to tell you the truth. One on one, they’re brilliant and bright—I see people, I look in their eyes, and I can see the universe. Every human’s like a hologram of all the potential we had but will never realize because we made all the wrong choices.

  And we’re pulled along by it. That’s why I swim against the tide: I really don’t care for the way the tide goes.

  By the way, before 9/11, I’d originally planned to call my HBO special scheduled to air that October, “I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die.” Hadda change that.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you consider yourself a nihilist?

  GEORGE CARLIN: “Nihilist” is definitely an identity, and I shy away from identities.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Some might describe your worldview as cynical or dispassionate.

  GEORGE CARLIN: If an outsider wants to say that, fine, but I don’t think of myself as cynical. To me, “cynical” is when Ford refused to retool gas tanks that were exploding and killing people. It cost more to retool than it did to pay the widows, so they chose to just continue paying widows. That’s cynicism.

  I understand that a person who doesn’t believe in a lot is called a cynic—but I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. I look at things and say, “Wait a minute…I don’t fuckin’ buy that.” I have a realistic, skeptical viewpoint; if someone thinks it’s “cynical,” fine. But they say if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist, and I’d have to cop to that. It’s just who I am.

  I think it’s ’cause you don’t wanna be disappointed, so you lower your e
xpectations, that’s all. But you find when you look at the world this way there’s a great deal to enjoy about it. The spectacle of it all, the way they just march off the edge of the cliff like the rest of the lemmings…It’s a circus.

  I’m in the midst of writing something called “The Great American Cattle Drive,” about people being led to market—but not to be sold, to do the buying. They’re all branded—they’ve branded themselves with “Nike” across their chests, a Gucci hat, all that shit. At least calves struggle when you try to brand them; we brand ourselves willingly: “Ooh, a hat that says ‘Tennessee’s a great vacation place!’ I gotta have that.” It’s just pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. All the life has been squeezed out of humans by commerce.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is your worldview the result of so many years on this planet, or did it crystallize earlier?

  GEORGE CARLIN: It happened a while after I went through my period of change around 1970. From then on I was a bit different, and acknowledged more of myself as being real rather than something I needed to overlook. The realization I’m talking about now happened in the late eighties/early nineties.

  My 1992 concert, Jammin’ in New York, was the first time those values in me really showed, in a piece I called “The Planet Is Fine, the People Are Fucked.” I didn’t notice it until afterward, when I thought, “Hmmm. This is different.” In fact, several comedians, names you and I know and most people recognize, went to the trouble of telling me that that particular show was important. No one’s ever done that before or since, with any other show I’ve done.

  That show was a life-changer for me. It made me realize I was more of an artist than a performer; that I was performing my art rather than just writing stuff and putting it on stage.