Last Words

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by Carlin George


  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.

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  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 17.1 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

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  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 Pitts-

  burgh 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 . . .

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  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 o f f

  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 hun-

  dreds 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 I
S

  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 week-

  end 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! . . .

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  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 com-

  bine, 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 suddenly 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. . .

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  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.

  The Aspen Comedy Arts Festival in '97, where I was honored for

  forty years in comedy, had a little of that. Not totally: I was proud of

  the HBO compilation of my work to date— 40 Years of Comedy, my

  '97 HBO special—and it was my first taste of )on Stewart. He was

  just a kid at the time and he did a great interview. Maybe a little too

  respectful, but he soon got over that. Boy, did he go on to do brilliant

  things.

  There were a bunch of us: Dennis Miller, me, Laraine Newman

  and Janeane Garofalo thrown in for gender equality, and an SNL

  contingent: Chevy, Lome, Martin Short, Steve Martin. I have a lot

  of respect for Steve Martin. I think he's got a great mind. He's made

  some good choices. And I like Martin Short's talent. But it's a club.

  I had something in my head for each of them: you fantasize these

  encounters beforehand and prepare. A little personal thing I wanted

  to say to each one, Chevy, Lome, Martin and Steve. Just to make

  human contact, because I'm out of this club. Steve Martin came by.

  I hadn't seen him since 1967 on the Smothers Brothers show, where

  he gave me an eight-by-ten signed: "Not just another pretty face." I

  pulled him aside and said, "Steve, you know I haven't seen you in a

  long time. And I want you to know how happy I am for your career

  and the things that you've done."

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  He was touched, I could see, a little taken aback, but kind of

  touched. I'd made human contact. I told him about the photo—that

  I still had it and occasionally have it out to show people.

  Now I see Lome, for whom I have no respect, because he's a fucking hands-and-knees cocksucker, but I wanted to make contact so I

  put on a nice face and I said, "Lome, all these years I've wanted to

  apologize to you for making that first week so difficult because of

  the cocaine." He nods and thanks me. Like he's accepting my apology and that's that. No clear human contact like I got from Steve.

  By now we're in a big briefing room that looks like the Council

  on Economic Affairs; everybody has a pad and a glass of water and a

  pencil. The room is largely empty and is where they're supposed to

  brief us before we go to the dais for the press conference.

  So it's Lome, Martin, Chevy, Steve and me. That's it. And HBO's

  camera. I do a little thing with Lome that's funny, we laugh, there's

  a couple of good cocaine jokes. But then it becomes Lome telling

  the others Famous Cocaine Stories From SNL: "Gary Busey in the

  countdown to air . . . he s n o r t s . . . 5, 4 . . . he s n o r t s . . . 3, 2 . . . he

  snorts . . ." Okay, fine. But I never got another glance, never another

  word.

  Martin Short came over. When I'd done SNL the second time,

  Martin had been nice and I'd never told him I was grateful. So I

  said, "I always wanted to tell you—I saw you in Toscana a few weeks

  ago and I didn't get a chance—how nice that was of you on SNL and

  how touched I was by your words." And he said, "Oh, I didn't know

  that." Some empty words. Just—WHOOSSSSSHHH: no contact.

  And Martin is a person who, when I see his work, I feel has something really human in him. I forget what I said to Chevy.

  Then it's just movie talk, yuppie talk. Nothing stuff and still not

  a glance or a word. And I'm realizing that this group of people, who

  were once considered radical and revolutionary, has become just

  another fucking Hollywood celebrity club. The Lome Club. That

  their chitchat is a modern version of the fraudulent showbiz crap I

  was expected to do forty years ago in Mike Douglas's gazebo.

  We move on to the press conference and first of all there are a
r />   lot of Saturday Night Live questions. Chris Albrecht from HBO,

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  who's moderating, tries to direct a question or two toward me so I'm

  included, but I dismiss them with short answers. The press is not

  interested in me at all. Now people start asking these pretentious

  questions about the effect of television on CHILDREN. Dennis

  Miller's next to me, who I think is an arrogant person but I kinda like

  his mind. Dennis occasionally says something and I occasionally

  say something. But they're all talking about CHILDREN.

  Steve and Chevy were very funny. They're very funny people,

  though Chevy might not want to be doing so many pratfalls now

  that he's a little larger than back when he was doing Ford. But

  they're quick and bing! they land on each other and the banter was

  wonderful.

  I'm letting it go whenever it's CHILDREN this and CHILDREN

  that. Now it's the Internet and THE CHILDREN and we can't protect THE CHILDREN and porn and THE CHILDREN. This goes

  on and on and even Chevy, when he's not doing structural damage

  to the building, is being self-important and pretentious about THE

  CHILDREN.

  They finally call on me and I say: "There's TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO CHILDREN in this country! Leave them ALONE!

  They're gonna BE ALL RIGHT! They're SMARTER THAN YOU

  ARE!"

  There was a big laugh on it. HBO used it as the punch line in

  their on-air version of the event. Fuck the Lome Club.

  On April 5, 1997, Brenda was diagnosed with cancer of the liver.

  They said the cancer had metastasized from her breast cancer and

  attacked her liver, always vulnerable because of the hepatitis C. A

  liver transplant was not an option because of her previous cancer.

  Some part of me probably knew it was the end. The part of me

  that always looks for the brighter side got the better of it. The doctors

  fed that a little, sugarcoated it, I think—that she might have three

  to four months. I wanted to believe them. Maybe even that she was

  going to live. They'd given her only a few weeks to live when she got

  sober in '75, and ten years later worried that she'd have a recurrence

  of her breast cancer. Yet here she was: she'd survived so often. With

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