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Still, Carlin saw that the culture was changing, and he was changing accordingly. “I realized I had to raise my voice literally and in a figurative sense,” he recalled, “to raise the stakes a little bit onstage in order to compete with a very noisy culture. There’s a lot of din in the culture, and to get attention, you have to raise your voice.” Voluble, hotheaded comedians such as Kinison and Bill Hicks felt compelled to address the things that infuriated them. Though other great comedians’ moments were yet to come—Jerry Seinfeld and his jeweler’s eye for trivialities, Chris Rock’s intrepid social surgery, Jon Stewart’s instantaneous deflation of the hot-air newsmakers of the day, all of them owing a distinct, and routinely acknowledged, debt to Carlin—the late 1980s were the last time the comic, who was entering his autumnal season as the “Grand Old Man of the Counterculture” (as the New York Times called him), looked to the current crop to gauge his own place in the field.

10

SQUEAMISH

I’ll be watching you, ya prick, so you better be good.” That was how Carlin introduced himself to his new opening act, Dennis Blair, at a 1988 gig in Omaha. Blair, a Rodney Dangerfield protégé who earned a writing credit and a bit of screen time in Dangerfield’s 1983 comedy with Joe Pesci, Easy Money, is a daffy musical comedian in the Steve Martin mold. He first saw Carlin perform in the early eighties in Atlantic City, where Carlin was opening for Suzanne Somers. He went with Dangerfield, who admired Carlin’s very different style. The feeling was mutual.

“I know George loved Rodney’s humor, and Rodney thought George was hysterical,” Blair recalls. “Rodney really liked guys who made people uncomfortable.” For a few years, after Chandler Travis and Steve Shook had set aside their own musical comedy act to start a good-time bar band called the Incredible Casuals, Carlin toured with an opening act named Glenn Super, a genially cranky club guy in jeans and suspenders who called himself Mr. Microphone, after his favorite prop. By 1988 Carlin was ready for a new warm-up act, and he and Jerry Hamza gave Blair a three-month trial. Blair ended up sharing the bill with the older comic for nearly two decades.

Over the years Blair came to think of his employer as comedy’s version of the Beatles’ John Lennon: “He started with goofy three-minute pop songs, and he ended with ‘Cold Turkey,’” he says. “He grew, just like a great musical artist.”

Carlin took the place of another Beatle, Ringo Starr, in one of the more unusual roles of his life. When Ringo stepped aside as the voice of the storytelling sprite “Mr. Conductor” on the popular PBS kids’ show Shining Time Station, featuring Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow toy trains, Carlin took over the role. (He was, he joked, the “anti-Pete Best,” the drummer who lost his place in the Beatles to Ringo.) Searching frantically for a replacement, cocreator Rick Siggelkow played a recording for his partner, Britt Allcroft, without identifying the voice. “The first word I heard, ‘stuff,’ won me over,” Allcroft recalled. New to America—she was born in South Africa and had created the original Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends for Children’s ITV in the United Kingdom—she was unfamiliar with Carlin’s warm grumble. She didn’t hear the voice that had nearly blown a gasket on his last cable show: “I get pissed, goddamn it!” “I heard a sound that, for children, could be intimate, lyrical, sometimes spooky, soothing and, most important, kind,” she recalled.

Even when he was swearing, Carlin’s performing voice “always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child,” Jerry Seinfeld once suggested. “It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.” For the next few years—by his count, forty-five episodes—Carlin provided the narration for the adventures of Thomas and friends, and he appeared onscreen whenever the miniature Mr. Conductor materialized from inside the station house wall in a burst of pixie dust.