Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [118]
His harshest show was a gleeful phantasmagoria. Like dreams, jokes originate in the unconscious, said Sigmund Freud. Both “try to outwit the inner censor.” If Carlin were a painter, this would have been his deliberately ugly period. “There are a lot of comics working forty years who might have added ten jokes to their act over that time,” comedian Richard Lewis told the New York Times. “Carlin treats every HBO special like a gallery opening.”
Having taken Lenny Bruce’s radical moral reassessments to an extreme in Life Is Worth Losing, the next special, It’s Bad for Ya, was Carlin’s nod to the other comic revolutionary of the 1950s, Mort Sahl. Aired live from the arts center in Santa Rosa, California, a stiffer, puffier Carlin, now seventy, padded carefully around a cluttered set designed to look like a cozy den and office, with a thick dictionary on a stand given a place of prominence at center stage. A memorable bit on removing the names of deceased friends from your address book segued into thoughts on the excessive culture of child worship, the misplaced use of the word “pride” (“Being Irish isn’t a skill. You wouldn’t say you’re proud to be five-eleven”), and the “delusional thinking” behind religious and patriotic customs, such as swearing on the Bible and removing your hat for the singing of “God Bless America.” In what would prove to be the last recorded hunk George Carlin ever performed, in what has to be the single most impressive body of solo material ever assembled by an American comedian, he went out, fittingly, with an analysis of the existence of individual rights. There are none, he claimed, breaking the bad news to fans who had come to see him as a beacon of American freedom: “We made ’em up.” And if they can be taken away, they’re not rights: “They’re privileges.”
Between the last two specials, Carlin took part in a tribute to Sahl at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. After the show he made out a big check to his predecessor, who, eighty years old and still performing, was having some financial trouble. Sahl had watched Carlin’s career closely, and the cantankerous elder comic admits he didn’t agree with all of it. “Stuff about white guys playing golf is like throwing fish to a seal,” he says, and he never liked the swearing: “The only time I’ve ever cursed onstage is when I read from the Watergate transcripts.” Still, Carlin was one of the only comedians who followed Lenny and Mort who took the job of social critic seriously. “America has been dying for several years,” says Sahl. “Would you know it from the comedians?” Watching Carlin’s final few HBO shows, you’d have no doubt.
Five years after receiving the Free Speech in Comedy Award at the 2002 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, Carlin returned to Aspen for his last appearance there. Backstage, he casually told John Moffitt he was suffering from heart failure, that he’d recently been in and out of the hospital. “He was so much shorter and frailer. I was really worried about him,” says Moffitt, who pleaded with his old friend to use the oxygen tank the festival had on hand for performers suffering adverse reactions to the altitude. Carlin waved him off, saying he’d resort to it if he needed it. He went onstage with his notes for the upcoming HBO show—working title, The Parade of Useless Bullshit—and he did nearly an hour and a half without a break. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
“He was a tough little guy,” says Moffitt. “The good news is that he was working until the very end.”
In June 2008 the Kennedy