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index cards, later on a word processor, and then on laptop computers. Lenny Bruce sometimes scribbled down a few notes in his hotel room, but more often than not he treated his gigs as though he were jumping off a ledge into his own brain soup. “Just before he went on, he’d say, ‘Not now, baby, I’m thinking,’” recalls Paul Krassner. Very much unlike his role model, Carlin wrote, rewrote, and self-edited, perpetually calibrating his act to dial up a maximum level of impact.

Chris Rush liked to tease Carlin that he wasn’t actually Irish—that they’d “found him in a diaper with a swastika on the side. He had the work habits of a commandant, a middle-echelon guy from the Nazi party who was under direct observation.” Rush, as impulsive a comic as Carlin was studious, once watched his friend in his hotel room, walking on a treadmill while working on his laptop. When he needled the older comic about it, Carlin shot back, “Fuck you. You rap out two years of an average comedian’s material in one hour backstage. I write the shit out. I’m not an ad-libber.”

With the burden of the Fox sitcom lifted, Carlin suddenly landed on a project he’d been preparing for for years. Books by comedians were becoming trendy in the publishing world. Seinfeld’s Seinlanguage was a number 1 New York Times best seller; Cosby and Mad About You star Paul Reiser were also succeeding on the shelves, both with popular titles about marriage and parenting. And Ray Romano, the star of Everybody Loves Raymond, was about to land a seven-figure book deal for his own debut humor collection.

Carlin’s first crack at publishing, 1983’s Brain Damage, had been a novelty, equal parts Mad magazine and concert program. The new book, Brain Droppings, published in May 1997, was a legitimate transferal of Carlin’s stage act to the page. Opening with expressions of gratitude to his brother Patrick (“who was kind enough to teach me attitude”), his manager and best friend Hamza (whose “inner maniac is even weirder than mine”), and Joe Monroe, he found a corker of an epigraph, credited to Kahlil Gibran: “We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.”

Brain Droppings was a crash course in the singular worldview of the grown kid from White Harlem. Besides written versions of signature hunks such as “Stuff” and a revision of “The Indian Sergeant” set in primitive times, there were copious random musings, characteristically heavy on the punning and gripes about poorly considered clichés (“If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen one”). The book sold briskly through strong word of mouth, staying on the Times best-seller list for eighteen weeks. Three years after publication, the audiobook version earned Carlin his third Grammy award. The new wing of his comedy empire eventually grew to include two more best-selling books, 2001’s Napalm & Silly Putty (another Grammy winner in audiobook form) and 2004’s When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, the cover of which—a parody of “The Last Supper,” resulted in the title being banned at Wal-Mart, much to Carlin’s amusement.

But excitement over his first real book publication was sadly fleeting. On Mother’s Day, one day before Carlin’s sixtieth birthday, Brenda died of complications from liver cancer. She was fifty-seven; they’d been married thirty-six years.

The length of Brenda’s illness had prepared Carlin for life without her. “I’m very much a realist and a practical person,” he said.

But it was not pleasant by any means. She had been stabilized with chemotherapy, but then things took a rapid turn. They kept her alive an extra twelve or eighteen hours, apparently just for me to get back in from the road. And by the time I got there it was gruesome. So it was no picnic, but my tears were fairly contained. . . . I had kind of rehearsed it in my mind.

Fellow comedians sometimes speculate that Carlin grew darker, more pessimistic, after Brenda’s death. The truth, however, is that he had already been exploring the limits of dark humor for several years. A month later he was on The Late Show with David Letterman,