George Carlin

George Carlin
George Carlin in concert in the 1970s
Birth name	George Denis Patrick Carlin
Born	(1937-05-12) May 12, 1937 Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Medium	stand-up, television, film, books, radio
Nationality	American
Years active	1956 – Present
Genres	Observational comedy, Wit/Word play, Satire/Political satire, Black comedy
Subject(s)	American culture, English language, everyday life, childhood, recreational drug use, human behavior, American politics, religion
Spouse	Brenda Hosbrook (August 5, 1936 - May 11, 1997) 1 child
Notable works and roles	Class Clown "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" HBO television specials Rufus in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Website	www.georgecarlin.com

George Denis Patrick Carlin (born May 12, 1937) is a Grammy-winning American stand-up comedian, actor, and author.

Carlin is especially noted for his political and black humor and his observations on language, psychology, and religion along with many taboo subjects. Carlin and his "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a narrow 5-4 decision by the justices affirmed the government's right to regulate Carlin's act on the public airwaves.

George Carlin's most recent stand up routines are primarily focused on attacking the flaws in modern-day America. He often takes on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirizes the excesses of American culture.

He is considered by many to be a successor to the late Lenny Bruce and was described by Comedy Central as the second greatest stand-up comedian of all time behind Richard Pryor.. He was also the first person to host Saturday Night Live.

Early life and career

Carlin was born in New York City, New York, the son of Mary (née Bearey), a secretary, and Patrick Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun.

Carlin grew up on West 121st Street, in a neighborhood of Manhattan which he later said he and his friends called "White Harlem", because that sounded a lot tougher than its real name of "Morningside Heights". "General Grant was one of my neighbors," he would say later. He was raised by his mother, who left his father when Carlin was two years old. At age 14 Carlin dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School and later joined the United States Air Force, training as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, Louisiana.

During this time he began working as a disc jockey on KJOE, a radio station based in the nearby city of Shreveport. He did not complete his Air Force enlistment. Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors, Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957. In 1959, Carlin and Jack Burns began as a comedy team when both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. After successful performances at Fort Worth's beat coffeehouse, The Cellar, Burns and Carlin headed for California in February 1960 and stayed together for two years as a team before moving on to individual pursuits.

1960s

In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing on television variety shows, notably The Ed Sullivan Show. His most famous routines were:

• The Indian Sergeant ("You wit' the beads... get outta line")
• Stupid disc jockeys ("Wonderful WINO...") — "The Beatles' latest record, when played backwards at slow speed, says 'Dummy! You're playing it backwards at slow speed!'"
• Al Sleet, the "hippie-dippie weatherman" — "Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning."
• Jon Carson — the "world never known, and never to be known"

Variations on the first three of these routines can be found on Carlin's 1967 debut album, Take Offs and Put Ons, recorded live in 1966 at The Roostertail in Detroit, Michigan.

During this period, Carlin became more popular as a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the Johnny Carson era, becoming one of Carson's most frequent substitutes during the host's three-decade reign. Carlin was also cast on Away We Go, a 1967 comedy show.

Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce's arrest for obscenity. According to legend the police began attempting to detain members of the audience for questioning, and asked Carlin for his identification. Telling the police he did not believe in government issued IDs, he was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle.

1970s

File:Georgecarlinmugshot.jpg

George Carlin's 1972 arrest photograph
(arrest report: Page 1 Page 2)

In the 1970s, Carlin became known for unpredictable performances. He would walk off if no one laughed, verbally insult the audience, or simply not appear.

Eventually, Carlin changed both his routines and his appearance. He lost some TV bookings by dressing strangely for a comedian of the time, wearing faded jeans and sporting a beard and earrings at a time when clean-cut, well-dressed comedians were in vogue. Using his own persona as a springboard for his new comedy, he was presented by Ed Sullivan in a performance of "The Hair Piece," and quickly regained his popularity as the public caught on to his sense of style.

In this period he also perfected what is perhaps his best-known routine, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television", recorded on Class Clown, a routine which offended some. Carlin was arrested in 1972 at Milwaukee's Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws after performing this routine. In 1973, a man complained to the FCC that his son had heard a later, similar routine, "Filthy Words", from Occupation: Foole, broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica Foundation FM radio station in New York City. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC, which sought to fine Pacifica for allegedly violating FCC regulations which prohibited broadcasting "obscene" material. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC action, by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling that the routine was "indecent but not obscene", and the FCC had authority to prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be among the audience. F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). Ironically, the court documents contain a complete transcript of the routine, perhaps validating what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said: "You cannot define obscenity without being obscene".

The controversy only increased Carlin's fame (or notoriety). Carlin eventually expanded the dirty-words theme with a seemingly interminable end to a performance (ending with his voice fading out in one HBO version, and accompanying the credits in the Carlin at Carnegie special for the 1982-83 season), and a set of 49 web pages organized by subject and embracing his "Incomplete List Of Impolite Words".

Carlin was the first-ever host of NBC's Saturday Night Live, debuting on October 11, 1975. (He also hosted SNL on November 10, 1984, where he actually appeared in sketches. The first time he hosted, he only appeared to perform stand-up and introduce the guest acts.) The following season, 1976-77, Carlin also appeared regularly on CBS Television's Tony Orlando & Dawn variety series.

Carlin unexpectedly stopped performing regularly in 1976, when his career appeared to be at its height. For the next five years, he rarely appeared to perform stand-up, although it was at this time he began doing specials for HBO as part of its On Location series. His first two HBO specials aired in 1977 and 1978. It was later revealed that Carlin had suffered the first of his three heart attacks during this layoff period.

1980s and 1990s

In 1981, Carlin returned to the stage, releasing A Place For My Stuff, considered by many to be his best album since Class Clown, and making a triumphant return to HBO (and to his hometown) with the Carlin at Carnegie special videotaped at Carnegie Hall and airing during the 1982-83 season. Carlin continued doing HBO specials every year or every other year over the following decade and a half. All of Carlin's albums from this time forward are the HBO specials.

By 1989, Carlin had become popular with a new generation of teens when he was cast as Rufus, the mentor of the titular characters in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and reprised his role in the film sequel Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey as well as the first season of the cartoon series. In 1991, he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the children's show Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, a role he continued until 1998. He played "Mr. Conductor" on the PBS children's show Shining Time Station which featured Thomas from 1991 to 1993 as well as Shining Time Station TV specials in 1995 and Mr. Conductor's Thomas Tales in 1996. Also in 1991, Carlin had a major supporting role in the movie Prince of Tides along with Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand.

Carlin began a weekly sitcom, The George Carlin Show, cast as "George O'Grady", a New York City cab driver, for the Fox Broadcasting Company in 1993. He quickly included a variation of the "Seven Words" in the plot. The show lasted 27 episodes before being cancelled in December 1995.

In 1997, his first book, entitled Brain Droppings, was released, which had sold over 750,000 copies as of 2001. Carlin was honored at the 1997 Aspen Comedy Festival with a retrospective George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy hosted by Jon Stewart.

In 1999, Carlin returned with an appearance in Kevin Smith's film Dogma as a greedy Roman Catholic cardinal. He worked with Smith again with a cameo appearance in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and in an unusual change, Carlin portrayed a prominent, serious role in Jersey Girl as the blue collar dad of Ben Affleck's character.

2000s

In 2001, Carlin was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 15th Annual American Comedy Awards.

In December 2003, California U.S. Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill (H.R. 3687) to outlaw the broadcast of Carlin's seven "dirty words", including "compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms)". (The bill omits "tits", but includes "ass" and "asshole", which were not part of Carlin's original routine.)

In 2004, George Carlin was ranked #2 on Comedy Central's 100 greatest standups of all time list, just behind Richard Pryor.

For years, Carlin has performed regularly as a headliner in Las Vegas. He began a tour through the first-half of 2006, and had a new HBO Special on November 5, 2005 entitled Life is Worth Losing, which was shown live from the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Topics covered included suicide, natural disasters (and the impulse to see them escalate in severity), cannibalism, genocide, human sacrifice, threats to civil liberties in America, and how an argument can be made that humans are inferior to animals.

On February 1, 2006, Carlin mentioned to the crowd, during his Life is Worth Losing set at the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California, that he had been discharged from the hospital only six weeks previously for "heart failure" and "pneumonia", citing the appearance as his "first show back".

Carlin provided the voice of Fillmore, a character in the Disney/Pixar animated feature Cars, which opened in theatres on June 9, 2006. The character Fillmore is a VW Microbus, whose front license plate reads "51237" — Carlin's birthday.

Carlin's next HBO stand up special, It's Bad for Ya, is scheduled to air live on March 1, 2008 in Santa Rosa, CA at the Wells Fargo Center For The Arts. Many of the themes set to appear in that HBO special include "American Bullshit", "rights," "bumper stickers", "Death", "Old Age", and "Child Rearing". Carlin has been working the new material for this HBO special for the last several months in concerts all over the country.

Personal life

In 1961, Carlin married Brenda Hosbrook (born June 12, 1939, died May 11, 1997), whom he had met while touring the previous year, in her parents' living room in Dayton, Ohio. The couple had a daughter, Kelly, in 1963. In 1971, George and Brenda renewed their wedding vows in Las Vegas, Nevada. Brenda died of liver cancer a day before Carlin's sixtieth birthday, in 1997.

In December 2004, Carlin announced that he would be voluntarily entering a drug rehabilitation facility to receive treatment for his dependency on alcohol and painkillers.

Carlin does not vote and often criticizes elections as an illusion of choice. He said he last voted for George McGovern, who ran for President in 1972.

Religion

Although raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Carlin has often denounced the idea of God in interviews and performances, most notably with his "Invisible Man in the Sky" and "There Is No God" routines. In mockery he invented the parody religion Frisbeetarianism for a newspaper contest. He defined it as the belief that when a person dies "his soul gets flung onto a roof, and just stays there", and cannot be retrieved.

Carlin has joked that he worships the Sun, because he can actually see it, but prays to Joe Pesci (his good friend in real life) because "he's a good actor", and "looks like a guy who can get things done!"

Carlin also introduced the "Two Commandments", a revised "pocket-sized" list of the Ten Commandments in his HBO special Complaints and Grievances, ending with the additional commandment of "Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself."

Here for the show

Carlin openly communicates in his shows and in his interviews that his purpose for existence is entertainment, that he is "here for the show". He professes a hearty schadenfreude in watching the rich spectrum of humanity slowly self-destruct, in his estimation, of its own design; saying, "When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front-row seat." He acknowledges that this is a very selfish thing, especially since he includes large human catastrophes as entertainment.

In a late-1990s interview with radio talk show host Art Bell, he remarked about his view of human life: "I think we're already 'circling the drain' as a species, and I'd love to see the circles get a little faster and a little shorter."

In the same interview, he recounts his experience of a California earthquake in the early-1970s as: "...an amusement park ride. Really, I mean it's such a wonderful thing to realize that you have absolutely no control... and to see the dresser move across the bedroom floor unassisted... is just exciting." Later he summarizes: "I really think there's great human drama in destruction and nature unleashed and I don't get enough of it."

A routine in Carlin's 1999 HBO special You Are All Diseased focusing on airport security leads up to the statement: "Take a fucking chance! Put a little fun in your life! ... most Americans are soft and frightened and unimaginative and they don't realize there's such a thing as dangerous fun, and they certainly don't recognize a good show when they see one."

Carlin has always included politics as part of his material (along with the wordplay and sex jokes), but by the mid-1980s had become a strident and perceptive social critic, in both his HBO specials and the book compilations of his material. His HBO viewers got an especially sharp taste of this in his take on the Ronald Reagan administration during the 1988 special What Am I Doing In New Jersey? broadcast live from the Park Theatre in Union City, New Jersey.

Themes

Carlin's themes have been known for causing considerable controversy in the general media. His most usual topic is (in his words) humanity's "bullshit", which might include murder, genocide, war, rape, corruption, religion and other aspects of human civilization. His delivery frequently treats these subjects in a misanthropic and nihilistic fashion, such as in his statement during the Life is Worth Losing show: "I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks man in the head and kicks man in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse."

Language, from the obscene to the innocuous has always been a focus of Carlin's work. Euphemisms that seek to distort and lie, and generally the use of pompous, presumptuous and downright silly language are often the target of Carlin's works.

Carlin also gives special attention to prominent topics in American Culture and Western Culture, such as: obsession with fame and celebrity, consumerism, Christianity, political alienation, corporate control, hypocrisy, child raising, fast food diet, news stations, self-help publications, patriotism, sexual taboos, certain uses of technology and surveillance, and pro-life among many others.

Collection of works

Discography

Date of release	Title	Record Label
1963	Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight	ERA Records
1966	Take-Offs and Put-Ons	One Way Records
January 27, 1972	FM & AM	Eardrum Records
September 29, 1972	Class Clown	Little David/Atlantic
October 1973	Occupation: Foole	Little David
November 1974	Toledo Window Box	Little David
October 1975	An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo	Little David
April 1977	On the Road	Little David/Atlantic
November 1981	A Place for My Stuff	Atlantic
1984	Carlin on Campus	Atlantic
July 30, 1986	Playin' with Your Head	Atlantic
August 15, 1988	What Am I Doing In New Jersey?	Atlantic
1990	Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics	Atlantic
November 10, 1992	Jammin' in New York	Atlantic
October 27, 1992	Classic Gold	Atlantic
April 10, 1995	Killer Carlin	Uproar Entertainment
September 17, 1996	Back in Town	Atlantic
May 14, 1999	You Are All Diseased	Eardrum
October 19, 1999	The Little David Years (1971-1977)	Atlantic
December 11, 2001	Complaints and Grievances	Eardrum/Atlantic
March 12, 2002	George Carlin on Comedy	Laugh.com
January 10, 2006	Life Is Worth Losing	Eardrum/Atlantic

Filmography

Year	Movie
1968	With Six You Get Eggroll
1976	Car Wash
1979	Americathon
1987	Outrageous Fortune
1989	Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
1991	Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
	The Prince of Tides
1999	Dogma
2001	Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
2003	Scary Movie 3
2004	Jersey Girl
2005	Tarzan II
	The Aristocrats
2006	Cars
2007	Happily N'Ever After

Home Box Office specials

Special	Year
George Carlin at USC	1977
George Carlin: Again!	1978
Carlin at Carnegie Hall	1982
Carlin on Campus	1984
Playin' with Your Head	1986
What Am I Doing in New Jersey?	1988
Doin' It Again	1990
Jammin' in New York	1992
Back in Town	1996
George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy	1997
You Are All Diseased	1999
Complaints and Grievances	2001
Life Is Worth Losing	2005
It's Bad for Ya	2008

• "All My Stuff", a boxset of all 12 of Carlin's stand up specials (not including 40 Years of Comedy) with bonus materials was released in September 2007

Bibliography

Book	Year	Notes
Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help	1984	ISBN 0-89471-271-3
Brain Droppings	1997	ISBN 0-7868-8321-9
Napalm and Silly Putty	2001	ISBN 0-7868-8758-3
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?	2004	ISBN 1-4013-0134-7
Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George	2006	ISBN 978-1-4013-0243-6

Television

• The Kraft Summer Music Hall (1966)
• That Girl (Guest appearance) (1966)
• Justin Case (as "Justin Case") (1988) TV movie directed Blake Edwards
• The George Carlin Show (as "George O'Grady") (1994) Fox
• Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (as American Narrator) (1991-1998)
• Shining Time Station (as "Mr. Conductor") (1991-1993)
• Streets of Laredo (as "Billy Williams")
• 14 specials for HBO (as of 2008)

AudioBooks

• BrainDroppings
• Napalm & Silly Putty
• More Napalm & Silly Putty
• George Carlin Reads To You
• When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?

In popular culture

• George Carlin appeared in the Simpsons episode "D'oh-in In the Wind" as a former hippie. In "Homie the Clown," Krusty the Clown is told he's being sued by Carlin for plagiarizing the Seven Words You cannot Say on TV. Krusty tries to defend himself by claiming that his seven dirty words were "entirely different" from Carlin's.

• In the second season episode of Everybody Hates Chris, titled "Everybody Hates Dirty Jokes", Chris gets suspended from school for telling jokes based on Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine.

• In an episode of That '70s Show, the disc jockey, Donna, is fired from her job and replaced by a girl who is willing to show more skin in advertisements. In order to get them back, her boyfriend, Eric, convinces Donna to trick the new girl into playing George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine on the air to get her fired. Also, Eric says that after listening to it, he can say a number which is the number of the dirty word Carlin uses. When swearing, Eric only uses numbers.

• Rick Moranis portrayed Carlin in several sketches on the late-night television comedy Second City Television (SCTV) in the early 1980s.

See also

• Seven dirty words
• Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation
• On Location (TV series)

External links

• Official Website
• at Ticketmaster
• George Carlin at IMDb
• Interview with Carlin on NPR's Fresh Air (November 1 2004)
• The Onion Interview with Carlin
• Rotten Library - George Carlin
• 1999 interview originally on CDNOW.com by Steve Holtje