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Lutz, who had recently published a book called Doublespeak: From “Revenue Enhancement” to “Terminal Living”: How Government, Business, Advertisers, and Others Use Language to Deceive You. The linguist’s work had inspired the comic to develop another strain of his humor, which would remain a part of his show until he died (or, rather, expired, “like a magazine subscription”). Like a true New Yorker, he couldn’t tolerate indirect language. That pet peeve became a part of the act. The CIA no longer kills people, he griped—they “neutralize” them. The attempt to reclassify the handicapped as “handi-capable” sent him off the deep end: “These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you’ll change the condition,” he said. Few comics ever become skilled enough in the art form to make a didactic line like that sound funny. He’d never been much of a punch-line comic, anyway. Now, as he headed toward his sixties, the humor wasn’t so much about his observations as his opinions.

“I’m doing my best work,” he told interviewer Bob Costas around this time. “I’m thinking better than I ever have.” The next HBO show, Jammin’ in New York, which aired live from the theater at Madison Square Garden (then called the New Paramount), was dedicated to Kinison, who died two weeks before its April 1992 taping. Beginning with an extended riff on the country’s militaristic self-image, with the televised spectacle of the first Gulf War still fresh, the set revolved around three long, writerly pieces, including an exhaustive examination of air-travel jargon (such as final destination: “All destinations are final—that’s what it means!”) that should have retired the subject for stand-up comedians forever, and a rant against the voguish Save the Planet movement that he called “The Planet Is Fine” (but “the people are fucked”). Machine-gunning his way through a long list of natural and man-made disasters, he proclaimed his delight in bad news—the more death and destruction, the better. “I enjoy chaos and disorder, and not just because they help me professionally,” he said in a ludicrous, hyper-articulated announcer’s voice. He’d been “an entropy fan” from the time he had learned the meaning of the word in school.

Although Carlin was still justifiably famous for pushing the limits of acceptable language and making crude jokes about human biology, his stand-up had taken a pronounced leap from blue to black. In Jammin’ in New York, he came on like an encyclopedia of dark humor, skittering from war, prison, and eating disorders to plane crashes and utter annihilation. In his previous HBO special he had even claimed to prove the point that no subject was out of bounds for comedy by doing a brief bit about rape, which involved Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd.

He was poking with ever-lengthening sticks into the field of land mines. Even fellow comics often had a difficult time with Carlin’s turn toward dark comedy. “I think you can point out hypocrisy, but you can’t be that pessimistic,” says Franklyn Ajaye, who thought of Carlin, Klein, and Pryor as his inspirational trinity. “He became a curmudgeon. And you can contrast that with Robert Klein, who felt just as disgusted as George, but he could still have fun with it.”

Others, however, saluted Carlin’s chutzpah. “If people are sensitive about something, that makes it compelling,” says Louis CK, an admirer who dedicated his stand-up special Chewed Up to Carlin. “If your job is to talk about stuff, you’d be irresponsible to stay away from things that upset people. . . . The whole point of comedy is to crash through those things.” Jammin’ in New York was the HBO special that confirmed the whole long haul for Carlin. Working live, with more than 6,000 people in the theater, “I knew I’d found my voice,” he said years later. “It felt like I really graduated that night.”

For several years he had been augmenting his touring income with an annual commitment to Bally’s Las Vegas. Having grudgingly reconciled with the city, admitting its obvious financial