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To Carlin, American mediocrity was a real disappointment. We’ve sold our souls, he said, for cheap thrills and false beliefs. In his later years he cranked up the volume on his rants, writing darkly comic pieces about the fate of humanity. “I prefer seeing things the way they are,” he said, “not the way some people wish they were.” He became a kind of oracle of disaster, finding black humor in school shootings a few years before Columbine and in horrific calamities just before the planes hit the World Trade Center, and even presupposing the government bailouts of 2009 (“The Fund for the Rich and Powerful”).

Like a doctor searching for a swollen gland, he pressed on any subject that made people sensitive. At various times in his career it was the Catholic Church, bodily functions, the sanctity of children, the emptiness of our sense of entitlement. Many casual observers thought he grew angry in his later years. To Carlin, it was just an extended comic exercise: How far could he go? Comedy was a constant intellectual challenge, an endless reevaluation of received wisdom and group thinking. He genuinely liked individual people; it was their collective beliefs he couldn’t stand. “No matter how you care to define it,” he once said, “I do not identify with the local group.”

“How he stood above and apart from the world . . . observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulences of man!” another wicked American humorist once wrote of Mark Twain. “What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue!” When Carlin learned that he was to be honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor—five days before his death, as it turned out—much was made of the comparison between the comic and the writer for whom the award was named. But Carlin had at least as much in common with H. L. Mencken, originator of the above quote, the iconoclastic journalist who saw the rampant misuse of the English language as an all-too-perfect symbol for the dismayingly low standards of his culture. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” Mencken famously put it.

Few things, Twain felt, are as rare in American life as the act of a man speaking freely. Our constitutional commitment to free speech is a wonderful idea, in theory. In practice, however, we can speak freely only so long as we are willing to keep our most uncompromised thoughts to ourselves. Unequivocal free speech, Twain argued, is “the privilege of the dead.” The living are much too paralyzed by the potential social costs to dare utter “unpopular convictions.”

In a society inescapably inundated with evasions, false promises, phony manners, fine print, and outright lies, George Carlin never failed to say what he meant. “Just when I discovered the meaning of life,” he joked, “they changed it.” If the meaning of life is laughter, he changed it himself.

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HEAVY MYSTERIES

The kid had a mouth on him, and he knew it. Young Georgie Carlin, a scrawny, buzz-cut New York City boy in striped shirts and rolled-up jeans, had predicted his professional life almost to the letter. Required to write a self-portrait in Sister Nina’s fifth-grade class, he had confidently explained that he would become a radio announcer, an impersonator, a stand-up comedian and, finally, an actor.

Now, barely into his twenties, he was in Boston, working as a board announcer at an easy-listening radio station. He read promos and sponsorships, patched through the various programs of the NBC radio network, and hosted an after-hours show featuring the “beautiful music” of Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. It was here that Carlin met Jack Burns, a fellow radio newcomer with whom, within a year, he would appear on The Tonight Show, doing comedy.

Boston was Carlin’s second city in radio. He’d broken in three years earlier while serving as a radar technician at Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, Louisiana. Hired in 1956 by an upstart rock ’n’ roll station with the call letters KJOE, he spun