George Carlin
The comedian on living in L.A., changing his head, and not getting angry
George Carlin arrived in Los Angeles by choice in '67. He'd been here before, even worked as a comic DJ on local radio, won a bit part alongside Doris Day in With Six You Get Eggroll, and landed dozens of standup gigs on TV talk shows of the day. That was when he was a "straight" comic, a young New Yorker in search of a break, maybe smart and hip but not exactly dangerous.
That changed when he became a full-time resident amid the festering countercultural climate of L.A. - coincidentally or not - and soon his act and interests were playing with language and the concept of obscenity, challenging American attitudes about illegal drugs and our consumer society. He ended up following the barrier-breaking example of Lenny Bruce all the way to a pair of handcuffs and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mostly, the man is just funny, and is generally considered among the most influential standup comedians of the last four decades (sometimes ranked behind Richard Pryor but rarely anyone else). He became a pop-culture sensation for the first time in the early '70s, most notoriously with his "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," but his recent monologues have been just as sharp and devastating. Now 70, and living along the canals of Venice, he's about to celebrate his 50th year as an entertainer. Carlin today aims much of his comic wrath directly at his first devoted audience: the Baby Boomers, all grown up and in charge. The "excessive and exaggerated" generation of Bush and Clinton has really let him down.
-Steve Appleford
CityBeat: Did you have any kind of culture shock when you arrived here in 1967?
George Carlin: I'm pretty resilient and adaptive, so I don't know if I experienced it as culture shock. But certainly it was enjoyable to be able to go out into my driveway in January in my undershorts to pick up the newspaper. That was definitely an acceptable condition here.
Do people outside of L.A. have an accurate view of life here?
I couldn't say. There are a lot of generalizations you can make about it here. People don't have a central identity here, whereas in New York, you're from New York. Period. That's it. First of all, physically, [L.A.] is so spread out that it doesn't command an identity. Somebody a long time ago said L.A. was many suburbs in search of a city. It's a very passive place out here. In one of my books, I said, "L.A. is a woman saying 'Fuck me,' and New York is a man saying 'Fuck you.'" That really sums it up.
So you decided to stay.
I had thirty-some years in New York. I know how to make decisions every 20 seconds, because that is what New York demands of you. I have so much New York in my head, my heart, my soul. I carry that shit around with me. To be honest with you, at this point, I really think that living here on the canals is the only part of Los Angeles that I could tolerate, because it's not like being in Los Angeles. It has a sense of separateness that I really like. It's not an exclusive separateness - just a physical separateness. The traffic only goes five miles an hour, and there's something nice about being this close to water.
Did coming to L.A. have any role in the change you made to your act?
I didn't make the change to my act. I changed. I went through an evolution like a lot of people in the late '60s, early '70s. I had grown into something that didn't fit: I was working in nightclubs for people in their 40s, whom I hated, who culturally I was antagonistic toward. And at the same time, their children were burning down campuses, which I was culturally attracted to. In the summer of 1967, I was 30 - right in between 40 and 20. Right in the middle, symbolically, of these two groups who did not get along. The parents didn't want their kids growing their hair long. The kids didn't want to be told what to do - they wanted to take drugs, they wanted to have free love, they wanted to kick over authority. Well, those were all aspects of my personality that I hadn't really given a vent to. And when that movement came along, I began to realize that there was a place for that part of me.
I finally figured that out in the '70s, thanks probably to some good acid, and being around people who were allowing it to happen to them. It all happened in public, in front of people, on TV shows. The beard got longer, the hair got longer, and the ideas got more politically grounded.
One of your first albums was FM & AM, which begins with you noting how you actually got fired from a gig in Las Vegas for saying the word "shit." What's changed since then?
The whole culture changed because of those years, let's say 1965 to 1975. The free-speech movement started. Then we had the peace movement, the antiwar, anti-Vietnam movement. We had the demise of formal segregation - not de facto, but formal. We had the women's movement begin to take root. There were a lot of liberation leanings in the culture to free ourselves, and every bit of popular culture benefited from that in terms of content and language. A lot of the artificial restrictions of imposed morality were removed.
Has your lifelong interest in language led to any observations on the current White House administration?
Well, they haven't really done anything that political operatives haven't done to some level in the past. I'm sure the Clinton administration, we could go back there and find some very convenient formulations of language they used either to advance their own ideas or put the other fellow in a bad light. The debasement of American English has been going on for so long, and it has rapidly accelerated in the last 25 or 30 years. But it's so broad, it's so widespread, that the political use of these things hardly stands out to me.
The first audience that discovered you in a big way was the Baby Boomer generation. But by the time of 1999's You Are All Diseased, you sounded disappointed in them.
Absolutely. What am I going to do with them? They did the human thing, which was to try to better their lives by acquiring things. But they have gone so far afield of that. I'm in the midst now of writing a thing for this next show, and it's called "The Cult of the Child," and it's about these professional parents who micromanage and over-schedule their children and rob them of their childhoods. And that's all part of the conceit of the Baby Boomer generation. These children are lifestyle accessories. They're like little fetishes. It's one more way for Boomers to achieve. That's what the Boomers do. They glorify themselves.
Your work is sometimes described as misanthropic. But it seems that you would have to care deeply enough to notice all these things.
I don't live an angry life. I've never had a fight in my life. I've never lost my temper that I can remember. And I don't hold grudges. But what I have is a disappointment and a dissatisfaction and a disillusionment in these two cohorts of mine: the American population and the human population. It's not really cynical. It's more skeptical and realistic. I try to look at the world as it is, not as people wish it were.
I don't think humans organize themselves intelligently. We put superstition and an invisible man in the sky and the worship of material goods ahead of the real things that the human animal was capable of. We had great gifts that were never developed because of our shortsightedness. This country was given great gifts - participatory democracy - and what is it now? It's just a fire sale. There's no such thing as participating anymore. There's no street-corner democracy. We just gave all that away for gizmos and toys.
What topics are you exploring in your current show?
A lot of it is about the bullshit abroad in the land and how it's endemic and all around us and takes a lot of different forms. It's not the whole show like that, but I noticed that there are a number of parts in the show that could fall under that category. General, societal bullshit.
You've gone from shit to bullshit?
That's right. I've gone down lower in the food chain.
Published: 09/13/2007
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