LAST WORDS
George Carlin with Tony Hendra
Free Press
Memoir
ISBN: 9781439172957
Over the last 15 years of his life, George Carlin enlisted friend and fellow comic Tony Hendra to help him assemble what they jokingly referred to as a “sortabiography,” drawing on Carlin’s life story and the rich lode of material he had accumulated in almost half a century in show business. Sadly, the project was interrupted by Carlin’s death in June 2008, but Hendra has brought it to fruition in LAST WORDS, an engaging memoir and a serious examination of the comic art.
The montage of photographs that appears on the title pages of the book serves as a revealing summary of Carlin’s singular journey. Born to middle-class Irish Catholic parents in 1937, his life quickly turned downwardly mobile after their divorce. He spent most of his rough and tumble childhood in a heavily Irish area called “White Harlem” on New York City’s Upper West Side, just north of Columbia University. A ninth-grade dropout, he enlisted in the Air Force and counted himself fortunate to evade a dishonorable discharge.
After a couple of stints as a disc jockey and a pairing with fellow Irish comedian Jack Burns, Carlin’s career blossomed in the 1960s. He was a frequent guest on popular daytime variety shows hosted by Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, and Sunday night’s institution, “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which he described as a “torture chamber of comedians.” It was during this period that he introduced indelible Carlin characters like Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, and sensed himself on the road to realizing his dream of becoming the next Danny Kaye or Jack Lemmon.
But like a butterfly --- albeit an irritable, sharp-tongued, profane one --- Carlin struggled to emerge from a chrysalis of comedic bondage. As the Vietnam War raged on in the early 1970s, he underwent what he called “the long epiphany,” the transformation that saw him shed his conventional, buttoned-down persona for the bearded, long-haired iconoclast who became a pioneer of what came to be known as observational humor. He was fired from a lucrative Las Vegas gig for using the word “ass,” but he was willing to endure that and other career setbacks as he felt himself “stumbling across the difference between being an entertainer and being an artist.” By the end of the decade, he had made his first appearance at Carnegie Hall, hosted the premiere episode of “Saturday Night Live,” performed his first HBO special (he would do 13 over the next three decades) and suffered his first heart attack.
Carlin credits his fury at the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 for sparking the further evolution that would define his comedic style for the balance of his career. Ever the autodidact, he immersed himself in the study of politics and philosophy, and his comedy moved from what he calls his “micro-world material” to biting politically-fueled humor that he blames, along with an abortive movie project, for a costly, long-running battle with the IRS. Though he never became a movie star, there was an assortment of quirky film character roles, a short-lived television series, bestselling albums, and even a stint as Mr. Conductor on “Shining Time Station.”
Carlin spares little detail in describing an almost lifelong history of drug abuse that didn’t come to an end until he entered a detox facility in early 2005, determined to kick his addiction to wine and Vicodin. He survived four heart attacks and numerous heart-related procedures that make his survival to age 71 seem almost miraculous. Alongside his own cocaine-fueled career, his wife, Brenda, who died in 1997, fought her own battle with alcoholism.
What distinguishes LAST WORDS from the conventional celebrity memoir is the way Carlin uses it as a vehicle to explore the nature of the art of comedy, reminiscent of Steve Martin’s BORN STANDING UP. It’s like looking over the shoulder of a skilled watchmaker as he disassembles a delicate timepiece. There are ample excerpts from some of Carlin’s most famous routines, including “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” (which landed him a place in legal history in 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled the routine “indecent”) and thoughtful discourses on his meticulous writing process and his passion for the nuances of language. In the end, it’s nearly impossible to separate Carlin the man from Carlin the self-described “consummate showoff.” As he says himself, “I am very single-minded and preoccupied about my career, my art, my craft, my writing, my entertainment. I’m accustomed to going out in the world and talking to thousands of people and being applauded for it, then coming home and debarking emotionally.”
When George Carlin died, Jerry Seinfeld, a member of the generation of comics inspired by Carlin’s genius, paid tribute to him in The New York Times, writing that “George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways.” No doubt, someday historians of American comedy will share that generous assessment.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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