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benefits and ready-made marketplace for a headlining comedian, he soon bought a condo in Vegas, so he could drive himself in to work and come home to his dogs. He was about as low-maintenance a performer as they come, says Joel Fischman, who was vice president of entertainment at Bally’s until leaving for Mandalay Bay in 1998. “He’d have his table set up in his room with his tuna fish, his celery stalks and his carrots, his juices and water. You’d go see him before the show, talk a little baseball, maybe.” Carlin stayed without incident until the casino closed its celebrity showroom in the late 1990s. “He was very happy with the audiences,” says Fischman. “I think they changed a little as Vegas changed, but he was so consistent. If you didn’t know what you were getting when you went to see George Carlin, what were you going to the show for?”

The impact of the HBO specials on his career was apparent. In the waning years of the CableACE awards (1979-1997), cable television’s equivalent of the Emmys, Carlin became a regular recipient, winning honors for Doin’ It Again, Jammin’ in New York, and, in 1997, two more for the retrospective George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy (which also earned two Emmy nods). He also won his first Grammy in more than twenty years for the Jammin’ in New York soundtrack album, beating out a weird field expanded to accommodate audiobooks, including recordings by the humor writers Garrison Keillor and Erma Bombeck and another by the SNL alum (and future Minnesota senator) Al Franken.

40 Years of Comedy followed closely on the heels of Carlin’s ninth HBO event, Back in Town. Taped in March 1996, a few months after he was relieved of his sitcom duties, the show took place at the 2,800-seat Beacon Theatre in New York, a historic former movie palace on Upper Broadway. Before settling on the location, Carlin had called Steven Wright, who had headlined there, to ask about the room. He kicked off the performance by running in off the street through a side door directly onto the stage, tossing aside his jacket. Prowling his turf, shoulders hunched, he wondered why the pro-life movement was homophobic: “Who has less abortions than homosexuals?” If he sounded on the last special as if he’d been taking elocution lessons, this time there was an obvious vocal residue from his George O’Grady character; he used his salty-cabbie voice throughout the hour.

The 40 Years retrospective aired from the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. The show featured an onstage interview with Carlin, looking uncharacteristically formal with newly shorn hair and a black cashmere jacket, conducted by a young admirer in a leather jacket named Jon Stewart. The hour also featured a package of clips dating back to Carlin’s earliest days on television, as well as an abbreviated stand-up performance by the honoree, anchored by a new piece called “American Bullshit.” Befitting the nostalgic format of the tribute, Carlin explained what his success in comedy meant to him by equating it with the education he had left behind. Because the nuns gave no grades at Corpus Christi, he told Stewart, resorting to one of his old lines, “the only A’s I got, and this is a little corny—I got their attention, I got their approval, their admiration, their approbation, and their applause. And those are the only A’s I wanted, and I got ’em,” he said. Stewart, looking awestruck, called him sir.

“I’m gonna keep doing this as long as I can,” Carlin told old friend John Moffitt, who, along with his fellow executive producers of the festival, Stu Smiley and Pat Tourk Lee, served as executive producers of the show with Brenda and Hamza. “I’m gonna look pretty funny, but I’m still gonna be out there.”

Constantly looming HBO deadlines had forced the comedian to write new material with the rigor of an athlete in training. “He really was a workaholic,” says Moffitt. “I think it kept his mind sharp as he got older.” Just as Joe Monroe had advised him back in Shreveport, he’d been collecting and categorizing his ideas from the start, at first in folders and on