George+Carlin

During his nearly 50 years in show business, George Carlin has been a radio announcer, anchored a comedy duo, done a Las Vegas residency (from which he was fired), appeared in movies, guested on TV variety shows and talk shows, starred in a sitcom and a kiddie show, recorded multiple gold albums, and penned a string of linguistically playful one-liners that get quoted routinely. He's beaten addictions to cocaine, alcohol, and painkillers, was married to the same woman for 35 years until her death in 1997, and was at the center of one of the most famous obscenity cases in legal history when a Pacifica network public radio station broadcast one of his routines. The routine in question—titled a lot of different ways, but commonly referred to as "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television"—gets cited every time broadcast standards become a hot-button issue. Even with a legacy and a reputation fully secured, Carlin continues to work, writing books (his latest, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?, was released late last year) and stand-up routines (his latest HBO special, Life Is Worth Losing, premières November 5th and airs throughout the month). Carlin recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his career to date, his comedic philosophies, and how Tony Orlando & Dawn gave him one of his best recurring gigs.

The A.V. Club: This is your 13th HBO special, and your first one was back in 1977, when the channel was still pretty new. Do you remember how you first got into business with them?

George Carlin: No, but I remember that my then-manager Monte Kay, who owned Little David, the record company I was at, said to me that there was this new service and they were going to do specials by comedians, on location, and that he expected that we'd hear from them. Which I guess he did. You know, there was an awful lot of cocaine, and I honestly don't remember a lot of detail about that time.

AVC: On your website's career timeline, you describe your first Saturday Night Live appearance the same way, saying that there was a lot of cocaine and you don't remember much about it.

GC: No, I really don't. Just certain highlights. It's like a lot of things in life, even without drugs or alcohol. Some things stay in your mind for some odd reason, and the rest of the detail is sort of gone.

AVC: Did you think Saturday Night Live would endure as it has?

GC: I don't think anyone ever does. It's a "keep your fingers crossed" business, the entertainment business. Somebody once said that Hollywood is based on a lot of producers deliberately making bad movies, and every now and then somebody gets lucky. Something like that. No, I had no idea that Saturday Night Live would be successful, even after that first year. It seemed like a very promising set of descriptive terms. Sketch comedy, late at night, with a little more license to take shots at the "establishment," whatever that means at any given point in time. Back then, it meant propriety and tradition and conservatism and "the way things are."

AVC: Do you remember why you didn't appear in any sketches in that first episode, and just did stand-up?

GC: Yeah, somebody told me I was going to be in an Alexander The Great sketch, but I think I bowed out of that in rehearsal week. And I know it was because of the cocaine. One of the effects it had on my personality—my moods, my behaviors—was that it inhibited me a lot. It kind of took possibilities out of my world, and made the focus of things very narrow. So I had no confidence in being able to play sketches.

You know, there's a thing about cocaine—when I was doing it secretly, it didn't make me very sociable. I forget how others were, but it made me very inner-directed. So being in a sketch and rehearsing and the "hail fellow well met" camaraderie and all that stuff, I couldn't fake that or force that. It was painful. So I told [SNL producer] Lorne [Michaels] that I didn't think I was any good at sketches and that I didn't want to do any, but I'd do a few more short monologues to fill in that time, so there'd be more of me on the show.

AVC: That's curious, because you should've been a perfect fit on Saturday Night Live, unlike a lot of your other early TV work, where you were an odd fit. Like The Tony Orlando & Dawn Rainbow Hour, where you were a semi-regular a year after your SNL hosting gig.

GC: Oh, sure. But I'll tell you the attraction there. You can't be the fastest gun in town forever. There comes a time when you're not the golden boy, and you have to go off somewhere and figure yourself out. I did six albums [in the early '70s], and the first four were gold-selling, and the last two were not. I wanted to stay in front of the public in my monologue persona—"in one," as they called it in old-time show business—but I knew the dangers of variety shows were that they want you in the opening number and the closing number and the ensemble, and they want to see you with the other guests in a sketch or some shit. And I knew how bad I was at that, and how much I hated that, because before 1970, I was in that world and actually did that on a number of big variety shows, because I thought it was part of the price I had to pay.

But by 1976, I knew I didn't have to do that, so I told the Tony Orlando people that I just wanted to do my monologues. I didn't even have to be there on show night. I forget how it worked. I think I taped two or three monologues at a time after the main show was over, or during the break... I don't remember. But I was not in the bunny costume, and I was not in the crusades number. [Laughs.] It was just me, standing up. And that gave me two things: a prime-time presence in my chosen persona, and I didn't dilute myself with all that other variety show stuff.

AVC: Did you know there was a Tony Orlando & Dawn DVD out now, with a couple of your stand-up routines? Do you get residuals on that?

GC: I didn't know. I'm jotting that down right now. Just to make sure I get a nickel or two. I mean, everyone likes to get paid, but to tell you the truth, I really just don't want anyone getting away with anything,

AVC: Back in the '60s, when you were more straitlaced, or at least straight-looking...

GC: The Middle-American comic!

AVC: Yeah. Was there already an underground network of hipper comedians and nightclub acts forming in Hollywood and New York?

GC: Well, forget Hollywood. I lived there, but I wasn't a hang-out kind of guy. Actually, when you started asking that question, I went back to before television and I found each other, before '65 and The Merv Griffin Show. Back then, I moved around in the New York folk club and coffeehouse crowd, and though there weren't that many comedians, there was a guy named Ted Markland, and Hugh Romney, who later became Wavy Gravy, and the improvisational groups were getting some traction then, and they were all a voice for—let us call it "the underground." That's such a poor word in most instances, but it'll do. Subversive-type comedy, you know. People who are kind of, like, against things as they were. But aside from there being a few individual comedians around, it was the folksingers saying most of that stuff: "Fuck this or that." I don't know, maybe they had usurped part of the comic turf.

But comedy had already changed real big in the '50s, with people who weren't part of that big pre-'50s mold of "crabgrass, suburbs, my wife shops too much, but every now and then I get to fuck her." All those embarrassing kind of suburb jokes that the mostly Jewish Borscht Belt comics who inhabited that world were telling. In the '50s came Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Nichols & May, Bob Newhart a little later, and Dick Gregory, ditto. And then The Compass Players and Second City and all that stuff, out of which eventually came Monty Python, National Lampoon, and all the SNL and SCTV guys. All that subversive comedy came out of the '50s. So in the early '60s, when I was getting my feet on the ground, that stuff was really starting to gel.

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