Last Words

by George Carlin;Tony Hendra

  But when the Shining Time lady, Britt Allcroft, a wonderful, creative, concerned woman, came to me about her project, I thought: “Hey, here’s a chance to show something quite different: a side that’s gentle, childlike.” Britt was careful about what her team did, and this was PBS. Jerry and I had always tried to associate ourselves with strong brands: HBO, Atlantic, Warner Bros. Records—PBS was one of them. Plus I took the place of Ringo Starr (who did the first season). So that made me the anti-Pete Best.

  The nicest thing about it was I didn’t have to deal with actors—adults or children—because it was all green-screen. I was the only actor there, which made the acting a little harder, but it was more pleasant not having to deal with everybody’s little story-of-the-day.

  It won me a whole new generation of admirers who knew nothing about George Carlin except that he was a little man in a little blue suit. When I ran into one of these kids at the airport and the parents would say, “That’s him, that’s him! Go over and say hello,” the child was always completely fucking traumatized. I was out of uniform and way too big. I had to say gently, “I’m not on the Island of Sodor, I’m not working today. But I am Mr. Conductor.” Then that wonderful look would come on the child’s face: “What the FUCK is going on?”

  I must say, like most adults, I find kids fascinating one-on-one. Just watching them drool or look at you funny. Or even saying something bright. But as a class—far too much attention.

  Now, ten to twelve years later, some of Mr. Conductor’s little fans are beginning to show up at my concerts and HBO shows. To complete their education.

  After Fox died, we did some one-hour specials for PBS with guest stars like Jack Klugman, and a series of half-hours, a few of them where Mr. Conductor was the central person and told several Thomas the Tank Engine stories. There was talk about a feature film, which never came to anything, but I do remember a fascinating series of discussions out at the studio—casual but with a purpose—talking with Britt about what the movie ought to be and how to keep the core of Shining Time Station intact.

  She pointed out how the stage in Shining Time Station began over on the right with a lot of mischief: Schemer and his arcade, the moneymaking schemes, always creating hassles and anarchy and chaos. Then, as you moved leftward on the set—she didn’t plan that you move leftward but some right-wing asshole could see a subliminal message there, I guess—you came to the center, the information booth, with Stacy Jones, the female stationmaster. She was the embodiment of order and reassurance: “It’s all right, it’s okay, this is going to work. The train comes in at eight and it leaves at nine.” Then, moving farther left, you got to Billy Twofeathers, the engineer, an American Indian, who represented a spiritual and nurturing side.

  There was a combination in Shining Time Station of nurturing, freedom, lesson learning, chaos. I pointed out that Mr. Conductor didn’t quite fit into any of those roles but could be part of any of them—even chaos, in his evil twin. None of them explained why he was so fascinating to children. And Britt asked, “Why is he the most fascinating?”

  The director had been Jesuit-trained as a kid and I’d been attacking them and religion in children’s lives and we’d been enjoying that. There seemed to me a connection. I’m aware this is a well-known theme, but bear with me.

  And PAY ATTENTION!

  When we’re in the womb, we’re in the oceanic state, we are completely part of nature. We are attached to nature, literally, physically. Everything comes through tubes, you don’t have to do a goddam thing, everything’s cool. You are at one. You are in union with nature.

  Then you get torn out of this fucking place and there’s pain and screaming and the violence starts. The slapping on the ass, the acid wash, the circumcision. You are out of there, not attached, not cool, not at one with anything. And INDIVIDUATION starts! You are JOHNNY PHILLIPS and you are going to be a LAWYER. And you’re going to be just like your FATHER and you’ve got RED HAIR and you’re gonna have a TEMPER and a whole bunch of other shit will be true of you. You better SHAPE UP and have a goal and work for it and achieve things. UNION is OVER.

  The rest of your life is spent yearning for reunion. To join the One again. That’s where religion perverts a very natural longing in people. More primitive people have found a way of having for themselves a communion with nature, balance and harmony with it.

  Not: “I am DISTANT from nature and SEPARATE from nature and I will change the course of that river and I will tear up the land and make freaks out of animals and take milk out of them.” Instead, it’s: “We won’t control nature, we can’t. So let’s live at one with it.”

  But we civilized people have this loss, this loss of union, this loss of oneness. And we look for it and dream of finding it, but in all the wrong places. In religion, in sex, in success …

  Back to Mr. Conductor. I said, “He’s got two things combined. He’s small like a child. He’s childlike, like a child. But he’s fully developed like an adult. And he’s wise like an adult. These things are joined, so there’s a unity in him that is complete.” That’s one of the reasons I did him so unself-consciously—even in those silly outfits and with the propeller on my head. I didn’t feel the need to use one of my voices. He was natural to me.

  I said to Britt: “I think he’s fascinating to children because he’s got the things children need from adults, experience and information (and gold dust). At the same time, he’s totally unthreatening. He’s even smaller and more powerless than they are. He’s a baby adult.”

  I loved doing Shining Time Station. But part of it was—I also like presenting a moving target. I liked the idea of people saying, “Well, that’s nice. Now he’s on Shining Time Station educating two-year-olds. Hey, but … doesn’t he say ‘cocksucker’ and … ‘the Virgin’s bleeding from her cunt?’” Yeah. Keeping them a bit off guard.

  And being on the series gave me a great line for the ’99 HBO show You Are All Diseased. It was a reprise of riffs I’d been doing for some time about child worship in America.

  Kids were getting FAR TOO MUCH ATTENTION! And whatever people thought about kids they had to listen to an expert … This was MR. CONDUCTOR talking!

  17

  DOORS CLOSE, DOORS OPEN

  George and Kevin smith on the set of Dogma

  (Courtesy of Scott Mosier)

  One last story about material. About just how long it can take for stuff, even stuff I love, to see the light of day, or in this case HBO. And why I hate topical humor.

  Sometime in the late eighties I began to see things in my files like, “Hey, let’s just kill everybody.” That was only one brief thought, but I remember thinking, “Here’s an opportunity to create some art.” Obviously I don’t think it would be a good idea to kill everybody, but at the same time it was a good idea to let loose in the world. If I could come up with enough semi-, quasi-, pseudo-reasons and methods for getting rid of everybody in the world (except for a nice workable two hundred thousand, including me), I’ve got a great piece.

  The boilerplate definition of satire is taking on the mentality of your enemy—at this point it was still Reagan and his gang—and taking it to extremes in an ingenious way. I guess that’s what this was—instinctively anyway. Reagan’s basic worldview was that to save the American way of life everybody had to be ready to die in a nuclear holocaust. (Except of course a nice workable two hundred thousand Republicans, including him). So being 1000 percent for that kind of ultraviolence, really enthusing about it, relishing it, was fun. It appealed to the extreme in me. Some part of comedy is always about excess.

  Over time the idea grew in my files. Other similar ideas attached themselves to the core one. I began testing them out in shows on the road. One variant was that because the world is so fucked we should just kill everybody and start over. Another was essentially the introduction to “The Planet Is Fine.” Television news about disasters, the worse the better, was my favorite entertainment. I couldn’t give a shit about the budget or where the
Pope was. Give me screaming people on fire being crushed by falling masonry. Now that’s fun!

  Some offshoots became pieces in their own right. One of them—the same basic idea—is “Capital Punishment” from Back in Town. The idea was that we shouldn’t abolish capital punishment. We should expand it, kill far more people, in far more entertaining and time-tested ways like crucifixion, beheadings, boiling them in oil—in all cases the slower the better …

  As I played out the piece onstage a character began to emerge who wasn’t just an advocate of death on a massive scale but a real lover of it. Finding this out was wonderful. I used a very calm voice and manner, a really friendly, really open and honest clinical sociopath:

  I have a confession to make. If I confess my secret to you, I would hope that you would not judge me—not think of me as a bad person. Maybe many of you, if the truth were known, would have to make the same confession. Here it is: I kinda like it when a lot of people die. I really do. I can’t help it. It makes me feel really good.

  … Every time there’s a big disaster, I always wish it were bigger. I always wish it happened in rush hour. And—forgive me for this, but … near a school? Or a hospital? Or a nursing home? I apologize if that bothers you … I know some of you will say, “Well, you’d feel different if someone close to you were killed in some big disaster.” I say: “No, I wouldn’t.”

  What was great was that now I could be the clinical sociopath, play his glee at all the carnage, enjoy it, not just suggest it. And, by getting them to go along with my glee and laugh at it, driving home that this was something deep down in our psyche. That was confirmed by hearing this certain laughter of complicity from the audience, a knowing, accepting laughter.

  Things have a way of telling me when they want to be done and this piece wasn’t bursting out of me yet. It would need a lot of writing and polishing, stage time to get all the parts working together. Plus a major memorizing job, which doesn’t get any easier when you’ll never see sixty again.

  I already had enough stuff for the HBO show in ’99, including a great closer: “There Is No God.” But there was no question that this new piece would be ready to go for the next HBO show, two years later.

  I honed it all that time and it evolved into a complex catastrophe leaving millions dead in every possible kind of disaster, unfolding across the continent, disrupting the laws of nature, full of a kind of grisly poetry, a real tour de force, along the lines of “The Planet Is Fine,” but darker and madder.

  I had big hopes for the next HBO special. It would be my twelfth and twelve is a magical kind of number. And it had the makings of an explosive show, with a big fat target in the White House: Governor Bush and his Christian fucks. I had a sledgehammer values piece: “Why We Don’t Need Ten Commandments.” And I had this major new tour de force.

  Taping was set for the Beacon Theatre on November 17. I named the entire show for the new piece. I had a hunch it was going to be the first HBO in a decade to equal, maybe even surpass, Jammin’.

  I held on to that hunch right up to 8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit. Because the show was called:

  I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die.

  Who says there was nothing funny about 9/11? There were a couple dozen eggs on my face that day. Osama bin fucking Laden hadn’t just blown up the World Trade Center. He’d blown up the best piece I’d written in ten years.

  I’m a realist. We changed the name of the show to Complaints and Grievances. (If there were such a thing as generic George Carlin, that title would be stenciled on the box.)

  Hard-core fans were probably hoping I’d do something about 9/11. I did mention it—the elephant in the living room no one was talking about—which got a kind of hopeful laugh. But I left it at that and kept the focus on strong observational stuff with the basic theme, Assholes of Our Time: “People Who Wear Visors,” “Parents of Honor Students,” “Guys Named Todd.” And “Ten Commandments” killed.

  But there was a hole in the show the size of Ground Zero.

  When I’m on the road doing promotional interviews for concerts I love it when someone from the Great Falls Gazette or the Pittsburgh Post and Nasal Drip says: “You must have a lot of stuff about Cheney and American Idol and Hillary’s pantsuits.” And I pull the rug right out from under them: “I never talk about events or people in the news.”

  I hate topical material because I hate to throw anything away. I don’t want to develop a nice little thing about Bush and Scooter Libby and it kills, then I do it for a month or so and really tighten it, add three more jokes, get the whole fucking thing down cold, but it’s not getting laughs anymore because it’s old news. I’d have to abandon it! I fucking hate that. I like to polish, polish, polish, get it perfect, put it on tape and keep it forever.

  The fate of “I Really Like It When a Lot of People Die” is a reverse example of why I hate topical humor. A piece based on stuff we see on the news was killed by stuff we saw on the news.

  At least I didn’t have to abandon it. It made it into the next HBO show in 2005, Life Is Worth Losing. That would be about seventeen years after it had first come down the birth canal. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I called it “Coast-to-Coast Emergency.” It was the finale and the best thing in the show. So—now I have it, polished, perfect and put on tape. And I’ll keep it forever.

  The piece had evolved into a narrative of a nationwide cataclysm with small beginnings in L.A. A downtown water main breaks and floods an electrical substation. At the same time, a monthlong global-warming heat wave hits. Because everything in L.A. runs on electrical power, including air-conditioning and hospitals, social chaos soon spreads through the city, bringing with it cholera and smallpox and fires that firefighters can’t fight with no water, until the entire city is ablaze …

  Everybody panics and tries to leave the city at the same time and they trample one another to death in the streets by the thousands and wild dogs eat their corpses and the wild dogs chase the rest of the people down the highway and one by one the dogs pick off the old fucks and the slow people because they’re IN THE FAST LANE WHERE THEY DON’T BELONG … And big sparks from the city have lit the suburbs on fire and the suburbs burn uncontrollably and thousands of identical homes have identical fires with identical smoke, killing all the identical soccer moms and their identical kids named JASON and JENIFERRRR …

  Now the fires spread out beyond the suburbs to the farmlands …

  … and thousands of barns and farmhouses begin to explode from all the hidden METHAMPHETAMINE labs! The meth chemicals run downhill to the rivers where wild animals drink the water and get completely GEEKED on speed. Bears and wolves amped up on crank start roaming the countryside looking for people to eat—even though they’re not REALLY HUNGRY … And now the forests burn furiously and hundreds of elves and fairies and trolls come running out of the woods screaming, “Bambi is dead, Bambi is dead!!” and he is! He is! Finally that FUCKING LITTLE CUNT BAMBI IS DEAD!!

  All the regional fires come together into one huge interstate inferno which engulfs the West and Midwest and races through the South, then turns northeast and heads for Washington, D.C ….

  … where George Bush can’t decide if it’s an EMERGENCY OR NOT … And the fire moves to Philadelphia but it’s a weekend and Philadelphia’s CLOSED on weekends! So the fire moves to New York City and the people of New York tell the fire TO GO FUCK ITSELF! And while all this is going on Canada burns to the ground but NOBODY NOTICES! …

  With the entire North American continent on fire the thermal updraft causes an incendiary cyclonic macrosystem that forms a hemispheric megastorm …

  … breaking down the molecular structure of the atmosphere and actually changing the laws of nature. Fire and water combine, burning clouds of flaming rain fall upward, gamma rays and solar winds ignite the ionosphere … and bolts of lightning 20 million miles long begin shooting out of the North Pole. And the sky fills up with GREEN SHIT!

  Then sudd
enly the entire fabric of space-time SPLITS IN TWO! A huge crack in the universe opens and all the dead people from the past begin falling through: Babe Ruth, Groucho Marx, Davy Crockett, Tiny Tim, Porky Pig, Hitler, Janis Joplin, Allen Ludden, my uncle Dave, your uncle Dave, everybody’s uncle Dave, an endless stream of dead Uncle Daves …

  And all the Uncle Daves gather around a heavenly kitchen table and they light up cigarettes and they begin to talk about how they never got a break, their parents didn’t love them and their children were ungrateful and how the Jews own everything and the blacks get special treatment. And their hatred and bitterness forms a big pool of liquid hate and the pool of liquid hate begins to spin, around and around, faster and faster. The faster it spins, the bigger it gets until the whirling pool of hate is bigger than the universe and suddenly it explodes into trillions of tiny stars and every star has a trillion planets and every planet has a trillion Uncle Daves.

  And all the Uncle Daves have good jobs, perfect eyesight and shoes that fit. They have great sex lives and free health care. They understand the Internet, their kids think they’re cool … And every week without fail Uncle Dave wins the lottery. Forever and ever until the end of time every single Uncle Dave has a winning ticket and UNCLE DAVE IS FINALLY HAPPY …

  Awards and honors started coming in the nineties. Awards and honors are nice. They feed a part of me I don’t consider that important, the superficial showbiz ego. If there’s any reason I do what I do, it’s not to win awards.

  Isn’t there SOMETHING I can say that WON’T make them want to give me an award?

  Most awards are just an excuse for a television show. Showbiz congratulating you but also congratulating itself for being so relevant and important and having the good judgment to pick the best. There’s more than a whiff of that empty showbiz bullshit I used to hate in my sixties nice period, the celebrity club pretending to know and admire and care for one another in their acceptance speeches. And where there are acceptance speeches, you can be certain that pretty soon children will enter the picture.