Last Words

by George Carlin;Tony Hendra

  America’s manhood problem was typified by the teenage sexual slang we use about war. In Vietnam we didn’t “go all the way.” We “pulled out.” Very unmanly. When you fuck an entire people you have to keep fucking and fucking them—women and children too—till they’re all dead.

  By the end they were cheering every line. At the beginning I think they were surprised by the sheer performance of it—it wasn’t quite like anything I’d ever done. But the combination of laughs and ideas and imaginative flurries of language overwhelmed any resistance they might’ve had along the lines of “Wait just a goddam minute, I know someone with a boy over there.”

  I was beginning to realize something: I had a powerful new tool for my tool kit, though I’ve only made sparing use of it since. Getting laughs all the time wasn’t my only responsibility. My responsibility was to engage the audience’s mind for ninety minutes. Get laughs, of course, dazzle them from time to time with form, craft, verbal fireworks, but above all engage their minds. “The Planet Is Fine,” which ended Jammin’, was the perfect example. Essentially it’s an essay on what I see as the futility and narrow-mindedness of environmentalism, symbolized by attempts to save endangered species.

  It’s probably the most “macro” piece I’ve ever done. It goes much further than the issues people think of as macro, like saving endangered species or reversing global warming, to the heart of the matter: the arrogance of our species.

  The problem was caused long ago by us arrogantly trying to control nature, believing we were superior to our environment. Just as arrogant to think we’re needed to save it—especially when we haven’t even learned how to take care of one another. Earth doesn’t need us to save it. It’s survived four and a half billion years through far worse disasters than a species a mere hundred thousand years old that has only been really fucking the place up since the Industrial Revolution.

  We imagine we threaten this vastly powerful self-correcting system? The planet will shuck us off like a case of the crabs. Forget about saving endangered species—WE are the endangered species.

  The planet is fine. WE are fucked. We’re going away. We’ll leave some plastic bags behind but, other than that, after the Earth has absorbed them, not a single trace …

  From the point of view of the performer—the ever-present possibility of going in the sewer—a basically serious piece like this was a lot riskier than “Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf,” and in my concerts, throughout the months before the Garden show, it would get long, quizzical silences. But it was clear from the response at the end that they were appreciating it. There were considerable stretches when I wasn’t getting laughs, but I didn’t expect them. (They were where there weren’t any jokes.) The laugh-free stretches were acceptable to me and to the audience because they were engaged, or more accurately: we were engaged.

  The success of “Planet” gave me new power: the permission to take artistic risks. As long as I kept them interested and engaged and entertained—not bringing them to laughter all the time, but sometimes to wonder: when I could see from their faces they were thinking, “Whoa—what a nice thing he did there!” So long as I did that, the contract between us was fulfilled.

  Laughter is not the only proof of success. Boy, what a liberating recognition that was! It grew and grew during those months of testing and practice on the road. And when I got to the Felt Forum, the sheer number of people ensured that even during those quiet moments, there was audible appreciation going on. Not laughs, but some ripple of agreement, a collective “Oh yeah!” Pleasure in sheer ideas! With smaller audiences I hadn’t heard reactions like that, because they were less inclined to expose themselves. But here, lost in a sea of people, they let themselves go.

  Besides now being freed to write more idea-driven and provocative material, I was learning things about my relationship with the audience too. I don’t know if they were evolving along with me or if their willingness to be engaged in this way had always been there and I’d underestimated it. It may have been there all along.

  But up till then I had never bothered to think much about my audience’s commitment to me. Not even on the basic level, that when people bought tickets to see me in concert, paying twenty, thirty, forty dollars, a week or more in advance, that was a special kind of commitment. It wasn’t casual. It’s wasn’t a brick-wall comedy club, or a Vegas casino. It said a lot about what they were willing to hear, listen to, abide, put up with.

  Characterizing audiences is always an imponderable. I do know that if I’m in Chattanooga I don’t get the average Chattanoogan. I get the weirdest, flakiest, hard-core-strangest Chattanoogan. The fringe Chattanoogan. Anywhere I go I’m going to get the freer, less risk-averse audience, the ones more willing to go out on a limb. It’s too easy to say “left-wing,” but one aspect of their collective personality is to be more appreciative of material that attacks authority, takes chances, is experimental or daring. They may not agree with everything I say but I rarely get vocal dissent from the audience.

  The “Abortion” piece in the next HBO show in 1996, Back in Town—at least during that period of testing and building—was one of the few. There were often walkouts. Never heckling. People quietly got up, turned around and walked out. Jerry would stand in the lobby just to see them. And to hear them if they did say something. We’d laugh about it afterward: “You should have seen the first guy that came out. He was fucking stricken! Almost walked straight through the glass.”

  I began with a line I’d been using since A Place for My Stuff fourteen years earlier: that it was ironic that pro-lifers were the kind of people you’d never want to fuck anyway.

  The satirical method was to focus on the meaning of the term “pro-life.” What’s pro-life about being obsessed with the unborn and then, once it’s a child, refusing it health education and welfare? What’s pro-life about sending the child off in a uniform at age eighteen to die? Or killing doctors who perform legal abortions? If all life is sacred, why is it an abortion for us but if it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?

  Consistency matters. If life begins at conception, why isn’t there a funeral for a miscarriage? If life begins at fertilization and most of a woman’s fertilized eggs are flushed out of her body once a month, doesn’t that make her a mass murderer? Could it be that “pro-life” is actually code for hating women—the source of life?

  This piece had been a while coming, like many of my long-form essay-type pieces. But there was one moment in the original version that I really liked but eventually didn’t make it to the HBO show. It says a lot about that relationship with the audience.

  My method of argument is not to fuck around responding to one side or the other of a current debate but to go all the way back to the fundamental core of an issue. So in the original version, after “Life started about a billion years ago and it’s a continuous process,” I said: “And that’s a heartbeat in there. So … it’s MURDER.

  “But … it’s justifiable homicide.”

  I loved that moment. Really risky, really disturbing. And showing why this has always been and will always be such a violent debate. You can’t have a totally closed mind or dogmatic opinion about it. And I thought they’d agree, enjoy the thought, the moment. But I was wrong. Audiences wouldn’t follow me there. It was one step too far. They didn’t enjoy the risk.

  I’m a realist. After a while, I dropped the line. And maybe they were right: maybe it was too complex an idea or the phrasing was too harsh. But it shows how the audience shapes the material. They are part of the process. I write, they edit.

  I think of thought-provoking pieces—what I call “values pieces”—as taking the audience on a journey with me through my mind. Along the way there are plenty of signposts and reminders of their own perceptions and things that they’ve assumed, heard, believed and questioned, reinforcing those things for them and reassuring them that I’m not leading them into a cul-de-sac, that the journey is to somewhere new. And if I’m engaging them in forward movement
, from a familiar place to an unfamiliar place, I have to do it with marvelous language or some other attention-getting element that transfixes them and moves them along to their destination—and then we can get back to the laughing all night.

  That gets away from the most formal definition of the word “teaching,” but in a way that’s what it is, laying it out for them in an amusing and entertaining way, taking them on an instructional tour. Because there’s something you want them to know that they didn’t know, or didn’t know they knew when they sat down in their seats.

  I’d never use the word “teaching” (rhymes with “preaching”), if for no other reason than when new ideas are conveyed via instruction (or speechifying or debate), people seem to have an instinctive defense against them.

  But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever more herself or himself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, I own them. That’s one of the things—maybe the most important—I seek by following this path: to have that power. To be able to say: stop in your tracks and consider this!

  At the same time, I’ve had to surrender myself to that moment, and it’s a communion. A genuine, momentary communion. Which they wouldn’t have experienced without me. And I wouldn’t have experienced without them.

  You have attitudes when you’re young, but you don’t have the ammunition to go with them. Especially if you’re self-educated and you’re just trying to find out what you need to know to get through. You haven’t had this overlay of other information. I was fifty-five when I did Jammin’, already well past fifty—a big turning point for a lot of guys. And I was chasing sixty when I did Back in Town. But I’ve found the perspective of time lends texture to your ideas. The longer you live, the richer your matrix gets and the observations you make have more interesting information against which to be compared. The difference between what you see and what you know is richer and more full of possibilities. It’s an accumulation of attitude and information that people respond to.

  And of course, after a certain age you get points just for not being dead.

  If you’ve been paying attention you’ll notice there was a four-year gap between Jammin’ and Back in Town. Because as always there was my two-tiered personality to be reckoned with. Just when my craft and artistry and self-discovery were maturing, I started to feel the old longing to belong, to find a group I wanted to be part of. The result was two major diversions in the midnineties, one good, one not so good.

  On my Web site it says:

  January 1994: The George Carlin Show premieres on Fox Television. Lasts 27 episodes. Lesson learned: always check mental health of creative partner beforehand. Loved the actors, loved the crew. Had a great time. Couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there. Canceled December 1995.

  For about twenty years before The George Carlin Show I’d regularly turn down some offer to have conversations about a sitcom. I was always opposed to it for the usual kind of showbiz-cultural reasons. I’m a stand-up comedian, not a sitcom guy. Movie parts are fine, but it’s a commercial wasteland, and so on.

  I’d developed a real sense of myself vis-à-vis television, of where I stood in relation to it. If I’d learned anything in the sixties from Perry Como and the Two Buddies and wearing the bunny suit in the closing number, the torture I went through, it was: situation comedy was just another form of the same thing. There was a reluctance, on many levels, to get involved in the worst aspects of commercialism.

  Fox had been coming after me for about four years and I’d been turning them down. They gradually made the offer so good I had to listen. They gave me 20 percent of the back end and an executive producer credit. Most important, they wanted to put me with Sam Simon, whose pedigree was terrific: Taxi, Cheers, The Simpsons, Tracey Ullman. A brilliant writer and shaper of comedy.

  What really changed my mind was that the 1992 HBO show was a watershed. It brought me to a new artistic level—that good plateau—as far as the writing and performing. I could afford a pause, a victory lap. I was in my midfifties, I had a great offer, there was a great writer to work with; I thought, maybe I owed it to Brenda—and myself—to see if there was a place I could fit and do something with this form that didn’t embarrass me. I didn’t want to be in my seventies snarling, “I should have taken that Fox offer, if only I had … Christ, look at these fucking kids today!”

  I took the chance. And I had a great time. I never laughed so much, so often, so hard as I did with cast members Alex Rocco, Chris Rich, Tony Starke. There was a very strange, very good sense of humor on that stage. The feeling on the set was relaxed, democratic. And the crew was great. No Hollywood ego bullshit from anyone. I loved the acting, the process, learning the lines, shaping them.

  But I didn’t enjoy the corporate crap. You’re dealing with people who are in the business of guessing. Guessing backed up by testing. They test their guesses and if their guesses are correct, they start second-guessing. One another. The studio. The network. Everyone’s at odds.

  The biggest problem though was that Sam Simon was a fucking horrible person to be around. Very, very funny, extremely bright and brilliant, but an unhappy person who treated other people poorly.

  There’s a producer-writer in-group culture in television that isn’t friendly to outsiders—especially a star who, though he’s supposed to be the raison d’être of the project, comes from another area of show business. They keep you at arm’s length, keep you in the dark about certain areas. It made no difference that Jerry and I were executive producers—Sam was the show runner, the most important person in getting the show on.

  Once a week I’d go to long-rewrite night, after rehearsals and before shooting began. I had to be onstage all the time during the week, so I wasn’t part of everything else that happened up in the Executive Office Building. But on long-rewrite night I was. I liked it because I enjoyed having writers around and punching up and shaping stuff.

  But the length of time that goes into ordering the fucking food! Ten different menus: the Chinese, the Italian, the deli, the Mexican, they’re all over the Valley and, “Okay, who’s gonna pick the menu tonight? Joey! Let Joey! No, Joey picked it last week, I’ll pick it! Don’t order from there, they don’t deliver!” Then the food arrives and there’s the sorting out whose food is whose and the eating of the food.

  I’m old-fashioned. I like to get on with the work. I say: “Hey, Joey, on page thirty—that’s where we left off—can we put in so-and-so?” And Joey says, “Mblmblmggmlmmmm. Ya gonna finish that?”

  There was ritual, and I don’t like rituals. There were unwritten rules, and I don’t like them either. For instance, you never criticize or knock down someone’s idea, you just let it die in the air. Nobody says it sucks. They don’t say anything—just move on to the next suggestion. And even if you fight for a change and win, the rule is, you then have to lose a few. Let others win a few, even if you object to their changes. You end up only half represented.

  The producer-writer culture also had a private vocabulary: “Let’s not hang a lantern on that,” or “Drumroll, drumroll!” leaving me more in the dark than ever. Which is the whole point of private vocabularies.

  All trivial considerations perhaps, but important signs of the groupthink that prevents full expression. I hesitate to say “free expression” because it sounds too political, but full expression on a television show you can never have.

  Fox wasn’t heavily committed to The George Carlin Show. I was told the head of promotion didn’t like it. We weren’t getting much cooperation from on-air promotions and Fox’s promotional team. Mainly the network wanted us to retain a share of the audience Married … With Children left
us with.

  More unwritten rules. Married … With Children was considered a Dumb White Show and we were a Smart White show. A smart White Show couldn’t follow a Dumb White Show. Fox saw itself as a black network, and while blacks liked to watch Dumb Whites, they didn’t like watching Smart Whites. (Dumb White Network Executives at work: it turned out we had the highest share of retained audience from Married … With Children of anything Fox ever followed it with.)

  There were pluses. My hellos in the airport, my level of recognition—from black people in particular but also the general public—shot up. But Fox was not the place for me. I was incredibly happy when the show was canceled. I was frustrated that it had taken me away from my true work. I would have done my ninth HBO show in 1994 and I didn’t. I had just learned—finally—how to do my work. This wonderful second burst of creative energy was interrupted and hurt in a way. Now I cherished it all the more for that. So Fox was part of a paring down process, getting rid of extraneous dreams and ambitions, once and for all.

  Forget weekly television. I’d rather be sitting in a crappy motel in Wisconsin or Oregon going through my files, making notes on the next HBO show, rolling over during the night to write down a note: “Hm-hm-hmmm, that goes with the Kleenex bit for 2002 …”

  They could get me away from stand-up for a while perhaps, if they said: “There’s this wonderful movie role, you costar, big money, great script. You play a priest and you get to strangle six children. Not all in one burst either: in six separate scenes with six different techniques of strangulation.” I’d give up a month or two for that.

  Which brings us to Shining Time Station.

  Shining Time Station was presented to me as an acting opportunity. At that point Jerry and I were characterizing the kind of role I wanted as something where my eyes bulged out. I walked away from a lot of stuff because I was looking for somewhere to really stretch my eyeballs.