Original subtitles

Thank you.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to 40 Years of

tribute to George Carlin.

I want to make it clear.

I want to make it clear this is not a summation of his career. This is not a

Thalberg Award.

We're not retiring his mic. We're merely checking in on a body of work that

continues to grow at an astonishing pace.

There are two things that comedians of all stripes have in common, basically.

One, the belief that someone who's not as funny as they are is doing better

they are.

And two, we're a cynical bunch.

And two, a sincere love and respect for George Carlin and his work.

He is a member of our Holy Trinity. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George

The rest of us are just time to go.

Personally, I first began listening to George Carlin in seventh grade.

We had gotten a hold of Class Clown.

And man, it was funny and dirty and

great. And we just knew instinctively that parents weren't going to like this

kind of thing.

We just knew. George Carlin was a rite of passage in the 70s. As much as

cigarettes. and looking at Playboys, and in my case, dressing like Ace Frehley.

And while the thrill has dissipated from those other activities, my pleasure in

listening to George grows every time I hear him, as does my respect and

admiration for him as a performer and as a person.

So please sit back and enjoy a rather condensed version of George Carlin, 40

Years in Comedy.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening. My name is

Carlin, and I am a professional comedian, as opposed to the kind you run

work all day long.

There are thousands of comedians in this country, but basically only two types

of humor. There's the old school and the new school.

I think we recognize them both. The old school is largely made up of the fast

-paced stand -up comedians, the one -liner comics who came from vaudeville

burlesque, and they comprise the insult school of humor. Jackie Leonard is a

good example of this.

Well, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I'd just like to say it's

wonderful to be back here in New York once again.

It's a wonderful town. Thank you very much. You've got some lovely girls here

compared to the last place I worked.

Somebody brought there was so ugly that if you wanted to pay him a compliment,

you had to say, how do you do? I see your face cleared up.

Now, by contrast, in the new school, we have many different styles, but the

foremost among them, I feel, is Mort Saul, the first man to do much with

political comedy since Will Rogers.

Mort Saul.

Right. Good. Right. Good. Right. That's right. Good. Right.

Right. Basically, it's a dichotomy of guilt in society we're concerned

with. Right. Right. Good. Right.

That covers the comedians that we pay to see. There is, however, a third field

generally unrecognized among humorists, and that's White House humor.

JFK, the present resident president.

Thank you very much.

On behalf of the Attorney General, to Joint Chiefs of Staff, to members of the

Supreme Court, and the rest of my family.

the country and Canada has been asking for us to bring back George Carlin. So,

ladies and gentlemen, here is comedian, comedy star George Carlin.

Hey, baby, what's happening?

Hey.

Que pasa?

How sleety, you hippy -dippy weatherman.

Brought to you by Parsons Pest Control.

Do you have termites, water bugs, and roaches?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Parson's pest control will get rid of the termites and water bugs and let

you keep the roaches.

Tonight's forecast, dark.

Continued dark tonight.

Turning to partly light in the morning.

And the big fight is coming up.

Ali and Frazier, Muhammad Ali. I call him Muhammad Ali because that's what he

wants.

Oh, yeah, he's a big dude and he hits hard, you know.

I'll call him what he wants. But it's good that he's being allowed to work

again. As you know, he couldn't work for three years.

Of course, he had a strange job beating people up.

But that was his, you know, his right. He could have that job.

Government wanted him to change jobs.

Government wanted him to kill people.

He thought it over, and he said, no, that's where I draw the line.

I'll beat him up, but I don't want to kill him.

And the government told him, well, if you won't kill him, we won't let you

him up.

And it was all because he didn't want to go to Vietnam, and now we're getting

out of Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia.

That's got to be the long way.

We've got to go through China and Russia to get out that way. What are we going

to tell them? We'll only be here a short time.

Just looking for a trail.

Well, maybe they'll go for it. I don't know.

Of course, we're only there in Southeast Asia for one reason, to free the people

so they can have industry.

Isn't that what we do everywhere, I think? We kind of free people and then

little industry on them so they can have all the benefits of industry that we

have.

Oh, beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain.

For strip -mined mountains, majesty above the asphalt plain.

America, America, man sheds his waste on thee.

And hides the pines with billboard signs from sea to oily sea.

I used to be this guy.

Or maybe this guy used to be me. I don't know. We were each other at one time.

It wasn't long ago.

I liked him, you know. He was really good. He was funny, and I had a lot of

with him. He did some nice things for me, but it was like there was nothing

behind him, you know.

He was kind of...

Just superficial.

Just the surface. It was all characters. I wasn't in there. I found out I wasn't

in my own act after a while. And here I'd been doing it for five years. It was

all characters.

It was all other people that I remembered from my life. And composites

people. People like this lady here, Congolia Breckenridge. A marvelous

contestant on a quiz show. Picador.

Oh, and I see Monty.

Monty.

Oh, how many, what are the doors? One, two, and three. Oh, wow. What was that

again? One, two, and three.

Okay, three. No, wait, one. No, hold on. I didn't go yet.

My trouble was I wanted a list.

I didn't think it was asking much.

Here are these words I'm not supposed to say.

Let's have a look at them.

I figured, looking for a list, I started running into all the categories of

dirty words.

Started to realize there are more ways to describe filthy words than there are

filthy words.

Seemed curious to me. Someone was awfully interested in them.

They found an awful lot of ways to refer to them. And I did too. Called them bad

language.

Dirty.

Filthy.

Foul.

Vile.

Vulgar.

Coarse.

Unseemly, in poor taste, street language, locker room talk, gutter talk,

barracks language, naughty, saucy, bawdy, raunchy, rude,

lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off -color,

risque, suggestive.

Cursing, cussing, swearing. All I could think of was shit, piss, fuck, cunt,

cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, man.

There are things about the words surrounding football and baseball which

all away.

Football is technological.

Baseball is pastoral.

Football is played in a stadium.

Baseball is played in a park.

In football, you wear a helmet.

In baseball, you wear a cap.

Football is played on an enclosed, rectangular grid, and every one of them

the same size.

Baseball is played on an ever -widening angle.

It reaches to infinity, and every park is different.

Football is rigidly timed.

Baseball has no time limit. We don't know when it's going to end.

We might even have extra innings.

In football, you get a penalty.

In baseball, you make an error. Whoops.

The object in football is to march downfield and penetrate enemy territory

get into the end zone.

In baseball, the object is to go home.

And in football, they have the clip, the hit, the block, the tackle, the blitz,

the bomb, the offense, and the defense.

In baseball, they have the sacrifice.

What I have been doing, I've been branching out a little bit. My career

always been very one -dimensional, just being a stand -up comic. And I've been

doing a couple other things. I worked from Summer Stock last summer. Did you

really? Yeah, it was in Death of a Salesman. I played the suitcase.

Oh, good.

I did a little different for... Rip Torn played the original suitcase on

Broadway.

And I understand he did it more as a belief, and I kind of... I did it as a

-suiter. You know, things like that. I got an opera. I've written an opera.

interesting, too. You have an opera singer tonight. I've written an opera

tuberculosis, and the only trouble is trying... Yeah, well, trouble is trying

find a thin tenor, you know?

This is serious. I'm writing a sequel to the Bible.

It's a wonderful book. It's been around a long time. I think it's time for

another. And I'm having trouble with the title. I go Bible II. I want to call it

Bible II.

Son of Bible. You get into those things.

The Bible goes west, you know.

That's all your house is. It's a place to keep your stuff while you go out and

get more stuff.

Now, sometimes, sometimes you've got to move. You've got to get a bigger house.

Why? Too much stuff.

You've got to move on. your stuff.

And maybe put some of your stuff in storage.

Imagine that. There's a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff.

Enough about your stuff. Let's talk about other people's stuff.

Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never quite

100 % at home? You know why? No room for your stuff.

Somebody else's stuff is all over the place.

And what awful stuff it is.

did they get this stuff?

And if you have to stay overnight at someone's house, you know, unexpectedly

they give you a little room to sleep in that they don't use that often.

Someone died in it 11 years ago and they haven't moved any of his stuff.

Or wherever they give you to sleep, usually right near the bed there's a

and there's never any room on the dresser for your stuff.

Someone else's shit is on the dresser.

Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?

The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, decided all by itself that

and television were the only two parts of American life not protected by the

free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

I'd like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.

You see, an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the president,

decided on its own that radio and television were the only two parts of

life not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

And why did they decide that? Because they got a letter from a minister in

Mississippi.

A Reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he

didn't like.

Well, Reverend, did anyone ever tell you there are two knobs on the radio?

Of course, I'm sure the Reverend isn't that comfortable with anything that has

two knobs on it.

But hey, Reverend, there are two knobs on the radio. One of them turns the

off, and the other one changes the station.

Imagine that, Reverend. You can actually change the station.

It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was

founded upon. Look it up in the library, Reverend, if you have any of them left

when you finish burning all the books.

a while since I've been here and a couple of things that happened in that

I'd like to talk a little bit about the war in the Persian Gulf.

Big dunes in the Persian Gulf. You know my favorite part of that war? It's the

first war we ever had that was on every channel plus cable.

And the war got good ratings too, didn't it? Got good ratings. Well, we like

war.

We like war. We're a war -like people.

We like war because we're good at it. And you know why we're good at it?

we get a lot of practice.

This country's only 200 years old and already we've had 10 major wars.

We average a major war every 20 years in this country. So we're good at it.

And it's a good thing we are. We're not very good at anything else anymore.

Can't build a decent car.

Can't make a TV set or a VCR worth of fuck.

Got no steel industry left, can't educate our young people, can't get

care to our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country, all right?

We can bomb the shit out of your country, all right?

Especially if your country is full of brown people.

Oh, we like that, don't we? That's our hobby.

That's our new job in the world, bombing brown people.

Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. You got some brown people in your country. Tell

them to watch the fuck out or we'll goddamn bomb them.

Well, when's the last white people you can remember that we bombed? Can you

remember the last white? Can you remember any white people we've ever

The Germans. Those are the only ones. And that's only because they were trying

to cut in on our action.

They wanted to dominate the world.

Bullshit. That's our fight.

Call this piece advertising.

Quality, values, style, service, selection, convenience, economy,

performance, experience, hospitality, low rates, friendly service, name

easy terms, affordable prices, money -back guarantee, free installation.

Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free

free home trial, and free parking.

No cash?

No problem.

No kidding.

No fuss, no must, no risk, no obligation, no red tape, no hidden

down payment, no entry fee, no purchase necessary, no one will call on you, no

payments or interest till December, and no parking.

Limited time only, though, so act now, order today, send no money, offer good

while supplies last, two to a customer, each item sold separately, batteries not

included, mileage may vary.

All sales are final. Allow six weeks for delivery.

Some items not available. Some assembly required.

Some restrictions may apply.

Shop by mail. Order by phone.

Try it in your home. Get one for your car.

All entries become our property.

Employees not eligible. Entry fees not refundable. Local restrictions apply.

Void where prohibited, except in Indiana.

So come on in. Come on in for a free demonstration and a free consultation

our friendly professional staff.

Our courteous and knowledgeable sales representatives will help you make a

selection that's just right for you and just right for your budget. And say,

don't forget to pick up your free gift.

A classic deluxe custom designer luxury prestige high quality premium select

gourmet pocket flashlight.

And if you act now, we'll include an extra added free complimentary bonus

a classic deluxe custom designer luxury prestige high quality premium select

gourmet leather style wallet with detachable key chain and a pencil

our way of saying thank you. And if you're not completely satisfied, you pay

nothing. Simply return the unused portion for a full refund. No questions

It's our way of saying thank you. Keep your free gift.

Actually, it's our way of saying bend over just a little further and let us

stick this big dick into your ass a little bit deeper.

You know, whenever you're exposed to advertising in this country, you realize

all over again that America's leading industry is still.

The manufacture, distribution, packaging and marketing of bullshit.

High quality bullshit.

World class designer bullshit, to be sure.

Hospital tested, clinically proven bullshit.

But bullshit nonetheless.

And it always amuses me that so many people seem to think that bullshit only

comes from certain sources.

You know, advertising, politicians, salesmen. Not true.

Bullshit is everywhere.

Bullshit is rampant.

Parents are full of shit.

Teachers are full of shit.

Clergymen are full of shit. Law enforcement people are full of shit.

The entire country is completely full of shit.

In fact, this country was founded by a group of slave owners who told us that

all men are created equal.

That is what's known as being stunningly, stunningly full of shit.

And, you know, I think people

show their ignorance when they say they want politicians to be honest.

What are these people talking about?

If honesty was suddenly introduced into politics, it would throw everything off.

The whole system would collapse.

And I think deep down the American people know that. The American people

their bullshit out front.

where they can get a good, strong whiff of it.

That's why they re -elected Clinton.

Listen.

Clinton might be full of shit, but he lets you know it.

Dole tried to hide it. I'm an honest man.

Bullshit.

Bullshit. People don't believe that shit. Clinton said, hi, I'm full of

and how do you like that?

And the people said, at least he's honest.

At least he's honest about being full of shit.

It's like the business world.

All businessmen are completely full of shit.

Just the worst kind of people you could ever want to run into.

Businessmen. And the proof of it is, they don't even trust each other.

They don't trust each other. When a businessman is negotiating a deal, the

thing he does is to automatically assume.

that the other guy is a complete lying prick who's trying to fuck him on the

deal. So he has to do everything he can to fuck the other guy a little bit

harder and a little bit faster.

And then, when it comes to dealing with customers, that's when you get the big

smile.

That's when you get the big smile.

Businessman always has that big smile on his face as he carefully positions

himself directly behind the customer.

unzips his pants, and services the account.

We specialize in customer service.

You heard that? Now you know what it means.

Whoever coined the phrase, let the buyer beware, was probably bleeding from the

asshole.

advertising. Advertising is the businessman's cheaply dressed $2

Advertising sells you things you don't need and can't afford that are

and don't work.

And they do it by exploiting your fears and insecurities.

And if you don't have any, they'll be glad to give you a few by showing you a

nice picture of a woman with big tits.

That's the essence of advertising.

Big tits.

Threateningly. Big tits.

And speaking of big tits, what about show business?

Show business, completely dishonest, corrupt, and full of shit, but in a nice

way.

Plenty of expensive drugs and perverted sex.

If you're going to be full of shit, might as well enjoy your work.

Then you have the media.

Not just the news media, let's include them all.

The media are almost literally exposed.

Exploding with bullshit.

Because they're located right at the crossroads of all the other bullshit.

The media are made up of equal parts advertising, politics, business,

public relations, and show business.

These people are sitting right at bullshit junction.

There's enough bullshit in the media for Texas to open a branch office.

And you still have enough left over to start two law firms and a Christian

bookstore.

Because, folks, I got to tell you, when it comes to bullshit, truly Major League

bullshit, you have to stand back in awe, in awe of the all -time heavyweight

champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion.

Organized religion.

It's no contest.

Religion easily, easily has the best bullshit story of all time.

Think about it.

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the

who watches everything you do every minute of every day.

And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to

do.

And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place.

burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever and

suffer and burn and scream until the end of time.

But he loves you.

He loves you.

He loves you and he needs money.

He always needs money.

He's all -powerful, all -present, all -knowing, and all -wise.

Just can't handle money.

Religion takes in billions and billions of dollars. They pay no taxes, and

somehow they always need money.

You talk about a good bullshit story.

If I may be permitted a small pun.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Now we're going to lighten up a little bit.

We're going to go back to advertising.

And we're going to go on a little bullshit hunt.

A little bullshit hunt.

Going to look at some advertising lingo.

Especially food advertising.

You know the people.

Fresh, natural, hearty, old -fashioned, homemade goodness in a can.

That kind of stuff.

So let's take a look. Let's take a look at some of these words.

Old -fashioned.

When you hear old -fashioned, you're supposed to think, oh, this goes back to

the old days.

Right. The old days.

Before we had sanitation laws.

Before hygiene became popular.

When botulism is still considered a sauce.

Old -fashioned is supposed to give you a warm feeling, make you think about your

grandmother. Well, I don't know about you, but when I'm picking out food, I

don't want to be picturing 90 pounds of wrinkles in a black dress with a big

hairy mole sticking out and an infected lip.

Old -fashioned.

Then you have homemade.

Homemade. You see this on the packages in the supermarkets.

Folks, believe me, it is physically impossible for a food processing plant

produce anything homemade.

I don't care if the CEO is living in the basement and cooking on a hot plate.

It's not going to happen.

Then you shouldn't be eating processed foods and packaged foods anyway. They're

no good for you.

You know how I stopped eating processed foods? I started picturing the people

who were doing the processing.

Next time you're in the bus and you see some guy with gangrene on his hands,

just picture him on the assembly line putting little pieces of chicken in a

That'll cure you.

Then go home and eat some fucking grapes.

Homemade. You see homemade in the restaurants, too.

Homemade soup.

I don't care how much the amphetamine -driven waitress with the Marlboro lines

in her face reminds you of your mother.

The soup is not homemade.

Unless someone is living in the kitchen. And if that's the case, I want to get a

good look at this motherfucker.

I want to check this guy for lesions, carbuncles, impetigo, pink eye, and

ringworm.

And head lice.

Then you have home style.

Home style. When the advertising imbeciles realize that homemade sounds

of shit, They go to home style.

Home style flavor.

Whose home are we talking about?

Jeffrey Dahmer's?

Believe me, there's nothing home style about the boiled head of a Cambodian

teenager, okay?

Even if you sprinkle parsley on the hair.

And any time they add the word style to another word, Someone is pulling your

prick.

Old -style goodness.

What does that mean?

Nothing. It means nothing.

New York -style deli.

It means it's not located in New York.

That's all it means, or they wouldn't have to say it in the first place.

It's located in Calgary, and the owner is from Hong Kong.

And the food tastes like things that the Bangladeshis throw away.

Chicago -style pizza means the night manager once changed planes at O 'Hare.

Family -style restaurant. You know what that means? It means there's an argument

going on at every table.

Two people are crying and the eldest male is punching the women.

Family -style.

Family -style.

Then you have gourmet.

Here's another word the advertising cretins have completely wiped their

with.

Gourmet.

Gourmet dining in a cup.

Gourmet cuisine in a can.

By the way, whenever you hear cuisine in place of food, be prepared to pay an

extra 80%. Gourmet rolls.

Gourmet coffee.

Gourmet pizza. These things do not exist.

You want to know what gourmet food?

Toasted snail penises.

Candied moose balls.

Deep dish yak dick.

Pour me.

Here's another full of shit food word.

Hearty.

Hearty. Soup is hearty.

Breakfast is hearty. You know what I do when I hear the word hearty? I look at

the label.

300 grams of saturated fat.

Hearty, as in heart attack.

with buttery and lemony and chocolatey. Real chocolatey goodness.

Know what that means?

No fucking chocolate.

And beware when they add the word flavored to another word.

Lemon flavored drink.

No fucking lemons.

As a pet food now refers to itself as a chicken -flavored treat.

Well, a dog doesn't know what chicken is.

He might like it if you give it to him, but he's not going to say, oh, good, I

was hoping we'd have chicken again.

And by the way, chicken -flavored treat? Right.

No fucking chicken.

Zesty and tangy.

Zesty and tangy are not real words that normal human beings use in conversation.

They're advertising words.

Do you ever have someone turn to you and say, this is real zesty and tangy too.

Now, one more food word before I completely change the subject on you.

Natural.

This is directed to all you health food fiends and environmental nitwits.

And yuppie cocksuckers who are running around in your natural fibers.

Your natural fibers.

The word natural is completely meaningless.

Everything is natural.

Nature includes everything.

It's not just trees and flowers.

It's everything.

A chemical company's toxic waste is completely natural.

It's part of nature.

We're all part of nature. Everything is natural.

Dog shit is natural.

It's just not real good food.

Now, change the subject on you, but we're going to stay on the dog theme.

I want to bring you up to date on my pets at home. This is something I've

touched over the years, little by little.

Talking about my dogs and cats at home.

I'd like to tell you the latest, what's going on.

The one I talked about the earliest and most often was Tippy.

Little Tippy. Tippy was a mixed terrier.

And Tippy committed suicide about eight or nine years ago.

Yeah, oh, I've had a lot of dogs do that.

Haven't you? Oh, shit, I've had six or seven dogs just run out in front of a

truck for no apparent reason.

And you can never tell there's anything bothering them beforehand.

No sign of turmoil or trouble.

You know, they don't show up wearing a Judas Priest t -shirt with a new

companion who can't make eye contact.

I guess one day they just snap in their little heads.

They snap and out they go into traffic in front of a truck and boom.

And we looked at it and we said, well,

That's what Tippy wanted to do.

That was Tippy's little decision.

Who are we to interfere in the plans of a dog?

So we just processed our grief and moved along, as so many of us had to do in

the 80s.

Then we got Andy.

Andy was a mixed shepherd.

Everything we had was mixed something.

Even a lot of people in the family, when I think of it.

And some of the livelier ones, too.

And he was supposed to have been a German shepherd, according to my drug

friend who gave it to me.

You know, he handed me a little puppy, and he said, this is going to be a

shepherd.

And I, being full of drugs at the time myself, I said, well, fuck yeah.

You can already see the ears.

And, of course, it never happened.

I used to call her my Austrian shepherd because she never quite made it to the

German border.

But Annie isn't with us anymore either.

Annie had to go away.

That's the way we say it at home.

That's the only euphemism we allow ourselves.

Annie had to go away.

It happens, huh? Doesn't it? Yeah.

It's part of the deal.

Part of the deal.

What happens when you get a pet?

You have them for a while.

They get old.

They go away.

Just like your grandma.

Same shit, different species.

What happens to grandma?

You have her for a while. She gets old.

She goes away.

It's inevitable when you buy the pet.

You're supposed to know it in the pet shop.

It's going to end badly.

You're purchasing a small tragedy.

So look at him, isn't he cute?

My shit is gonna die!

Unless you're in your 80s and you're buying a tortoise.

Annie just got old, that's all.

Got old, hips started to go. First sign of trouble with Annie, hips.

Just like my grandma.

Isn't that odd?

Two members of the same family, different species, same symptoms.

Makes you think.

Maybe not.

Even the names were similar.

Granny and Annie.

And he got that hip dysplasia. It's kind of a spinal degenerative disease where

they can't hold up their hind legs anymore. It's gradual. They start

those legs. They start dragging them. Oh, it's a terrible thing to see. It's

horrible if you love the dog. They're scraping their legs and everything, just

dragging behind them. It's no way to live. And it pisses you off because you

wound up with half a goddamn dog.

Here's a front end that is perfectly serviceable.

Shit, she'd have been a Chevrolet. She could have been rebuilt.

You come in the driveway, she'd be sticking out behind a bush.

Say, look, she's okay. And then the rest of her would come out, oh, shit.

It gets worse and worse and worse.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

And finally it got so bad, Annie couldn't even get out where the trucks

So I had to intervene on her behalf.

I had to get some people to come to the house and essentially whack my dog.

We put a contract out on Annie.

But we whacked her when she was eating a big plate of pasta like they do in the

gangster movies.

We knew Annie would like that.

So Annie went away.

Just like my grandma.

Actually, it was a little bit different. I believe we whacked my grandma in the

beauty salon.

But as soon as Andy was gone, we did what a lot of you folks would have done.

Well, we got a new dog right away. Don't you do that sometimes to fill the void?

You do. You go out and you get a new dog right away, and we got a little guy

called Moe. M -O -E, Moe.

Moe is a Maltese. First dog we ever had that was all one thing.

Ain't nothing inside of Moe except other Malteses. He's about this big, and he's

cuter than a dick. Know what I mean?

Just as cute as can be. And Moe only has one ball, but he doesn't know that.

And he doesn't act like he's got one ball because Moe humps Vern and Vern is

male cat.

Do you ever have that shit going on in your yard?

Not only is it interspecies, it's a homosexual affair as well.

The whole neighborhood is just praying there'd be no children.

Because God knows where you send them to school.

But he's out there first thing in the morning. He's humping away. You know,

got a lot of energy for a guy with one ball. You got to give him a lot of

credit. He's out there humping away.

He's trying to get a little, you know, well, he's trying to get a lot now that

think about it.

And what he's really doing is wearing a hole in the fur on the back end of that

goddamn cat.

And sometimes he's got so much energy, his feet actually leave the ground.

And he's airborne.

Cat hair with dog paws and keep it in at the same time.

And Vern could care less.

Vern will give you a look like this while he's getting fucked in the ass.

Did you ever fuck somebody who's reading a comic book?

Same shit. Tough on the ego, isn't it?

But it does happen occasionally in life.

So Moe humps Vern and it looks so cute.

I mean, it looks so cute. We took a picture of it and made a Christmas card

of it last year.

Swear on my mother's tits. Made a lovely card.

Just put one word on it. Peace.

Yeah.

Yeah. And we spelled it correctly, too. P -E -A -C -E.

There'll be no cheap jokes on our Christmas cards.

We said that our last year, and shit, we lost a lot of friends on that.

So Mo hunts Vern.

I'm getting back.

So Mo hunts Vern, and Vern's a cat, like I said, and we got two cats at home,

Vern and Murphy.

And we got them at the same time. Some years ago, they got into our lives the

same week or something, and when we first got them, we had them neutered.

You know neutered, that's a euphemism for go on and cut his nuts off.

Well, we had it done because somebody said it helped something.

God damn sure it didn't help these cats, I'll tell you that.

But we had it done, we had them fixed.

That's another word for it. Fixed shit wasn't even broke, man.

Oh, they broke now.

Altered is another word for it. Nice people say that, don't they? We had them

altered. Like a pair of pants or something.

Yeah. take a little off the cuffs and cut his nuts off.

And I'll be in on Tuesday.

Well, whatever you want to call it, we had it done.

We brought him into the vet's office and off came the nuts.

We didn't keep them or nothing like that, you know.

Although they do offer them to you, I must say that for them. Say, you want

these? Nah, nah, shit, what are you, fucking crazy?

You keep them. You find something to do with them.

Might make a nice pair of earrings for your wife out of them.

In fact, if my math is not incorrect, you might get two pairs out of that lot.

You keep the nuts, we'll take the cats. We go on home with the cats.

Brought them home and they started growing up. Got to be about six years of

And right about six, Vern, and wouldn't you know too, Vern, the interesting cat.

Vern developed a condition whereby his penis had to be removed surgically.

Not a pleasant thought.

But it happens quite a bit to these male cats. If you feed them only dry cat

food, not good. You've got to get some moist food in that diet every day or

every other day. You've got to have some balance in the diet because there is

something in dry cat food that crystallizes in the urine, blocks the

blocks that whole passageway, and pretty soon you're sitting in the vet's office

and guess what?

Off comes the dick.

Vern will not get in the car with me at all anymore.

He doesn't trust me at all because he doesn't know what's coming off next.

He's walking around counting his feet and shit like that, praying to God he's

still got something left hanging off of him.

Such is the condition of the animals at our house.

And because of it, we have a little riddle. A little riddle going around the

family. What has 12 legs, 2 dicks, and 1 ball?

And it's Murphy, Moe, and Vern.

But you got to be real close to the family to guess it on one try.

Have a good time, you folks.

Yes, sir.

Wonderful. Okay.

All right. Thank you. I'm a little out of breath. No. Please, take your time.

Drink some water. I think the image of the cat and the dog will hold us for 30

or 40 seconds here. I haven't told a little lie about my pet yet.

When you were a kid growing up, you wanted to be Danny Kaye and Bob Hope.

How do you think this thing is working out so far? Well, I knew I wanted to

stand up and be silly and have people say, isn't he cute?

Isn't he cute and clever?

And that's all it was, was a reward, a psychic reward. When you're a kid and

find out that you can get the attention of adults and approval and a little bit

of respect, and you just hunger for it, you keep going back for it. And I have,

fortunately, genetic...

You know, my little toolkit, my genetic toolkit I was given included a mother

and father who were very funny people, could do accents and dialects and tell

funny stories about what happened on the bus that morning and have a punchline.

So you don't lick it off the rock, they say in Ireland. So I thank my

grandmother's milkman, actually.

You never know where these things come from.

It's interesting, you know, as I watch you now and through all the years I

listen to your albums and things, your fascination with language is so

Watching you work is almost like watching a musician.

You know, the way you weave words and use language for emphasis and all that.

Was that always a fascination for you, even as a kid?

Well, to go backwards with the question, don't forget what we do is oratory.

It's rhetoric.

It's not just comedy. It's a form of rhetoric.

And with rhetoric, you listen for rhythms. You look for ways to sing at

time you're talking and to go... And

it's just natural.

My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a policeman in New York at the turn of

the century. And he was an uneducated man, self -educated. And he, in the

of his adult life, he wrote out the...

The works of Shakespeare by hand because of the joy it gave him.

That's an obsessive young man.

Yeah. And most everything is genetic. And my mother cared a lot about

And my father was a champion public speaker of 1935. He won the mahogany

Over 800 other public speakers from the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Institute.

And he was great. I never knew him either.

Wow.

Were your parents put off by the direction that you went into when you

to go counterculture? Was it a difficult transition for them to watch? Well, he

was out of the picture. He was brilliant, and he was a top salesman in

advertising, but he couldn't metabolize ethanol efficiently.

So he was given his hat. My mother was very brave. She left him.

I was two months old, and my brother was five, five years, and she left down a

fire escape.

So he was gone. She, my mother, was very kind of controlling, wanted to control

my life, and was heartbroken when I began with the dirty language and the

stuff he says about business. She was an advertising executive secretary, loved

the business world, thought it was just the finest thing that ever happened.

And so when I went in that direction at first, very opposed.

until one day we lived on the same street that I went to school in. I went

school on the same block I lived on. Something like that.

Corpus Christi School, and the nuns were great. It wasn't a typical Catholic

school. It was an experimental progressive school that didn't have

didn't have any sort of corporal punishment. It was just a very, very

school. And the nuns, she would see the nuns in the street, and they would say,

Oh, we saw George on the Tonight Show.

And she, being a bit of an actress, she would say, Oh.

It's the awful language, sister.

The awful language.

And one of them said to her, no, no, no, you don't understand.

He's using it for other purposes. He's not just doing it for that. It's kind of

like part of what he does. Don't you understand? It's this and that and so

forth. So she said, oh, well, oh.

And from that day on, she was okay with it because the church had approved it.

So that was that. That's how that works.

People who deal in content that's on the edge, as you do, oftentimes live a

life. It's similarly on an edge.

And a lot of those people go off the rails. Yeah. And we lose them and their

talent. And you've been able to not do that and been able to pull it back in.

Another luck stroke.

You know, you've got to have luck in this world. Part of it's your genetic

makeup. That's luck.

And then what you do with it is also partly genetic because hard work is

genetic. The desire to do hard work, the willingness to work hard and be

determined and not be set, not be turned aside. That's all genetic, too.

It can be altered a little reinforced.

But some of the people who who had so much edgy promise, they died young. I

mean, Lenny Bruce, Sam Kinison, Andy Kaufman in his way. Sure.

Freddie Prinze, John Belushi, Bill Hicks. Right.

And it's just.

I don't know. Of course, Bill had a natural disorder of his own. I think so

Andy. But it's not always behavior. But sometimes it's just genetic.

But it's just that I think there's a degree of luck and intellect involved

in giving up things that hurt you. The drug and alcohol thing, it seems to me,

comes down to this.

Drugs and these things are wonderful.

They're wonderful when you try them first. They're not around for all these

millennia for no reason.

First time, mostly pleasure, very little pain.

maybe a hangover and as you increase and keep using whatever it is the pleasure

part decreases and the pain part the price you pay increases until the

is completely the other way and it's almost all pain and there's hardly any

pleasure at that point you would hope then the intellect says oh oh this

doesn't work anymore i'm going to die and i'll do something but you need

around you who can help you and you need something to live for you have to have

something to look forward to

To bring you out of it. You know, there's a lot of people who don't have a

to live for, and they're sort of stuck inside.

Was there ever any fear that by giving up the drugs, you lose a bit of the

genius by giving up the wildlife style, sanity being the enemy? Well, that has

been a canard for a long time, that most of this creativity comes from being

wacky. And I'm sure there's a lot of truth in that, as far as just being

old wacky.

Where the drugs are concerned, and alcohol, they do seem to open a window

you. They do seem to broaden the vistas. At first, the thing you have to do is

learn when, you know, it's like all these great writers who became drinkers.

You have to sort, like I find with pot, I'm not a big drug user anymore, but I

have always a joint somewhere near me.

Hidden.

Might be hidden.

Might be hidden. And what I do, and I hardly touch it maybe once a month, that

would be frequent for me.

But when I'm writing something, and I write perfectly straight, perfectly

and I write a whole lot of stuff, six, seven, eight, nine pages, and I really

pour it out, the next day, one hit is all I need now.

One hit, and it's punch -up time.

Time to get this thing going.

And you do find, with that sort of... A judicious use, I find, there's some

value in it. But most of the things we use, don't let you leave them alone.

They don't. Pot does, thank goodness for that.

Well, that's excellent.

What? Sorry. You can applaud if you wish.

That's more than fair.

You can more than applaud.

Yeah, thank you.

Why do you still care? Why do you still care enough to keep, you're at a point

in your life where you could go back, you could do your month in Vegas and

Florence Henderson could open up and you could go and hit a couple of balls and

then some pinball. Why do you still care so much?

Well, I'm not comparing myself to any of these people. Believe me.

But you wouldn't say to Picasso, when are you going to put those brushes down?

Get rid of the canvas. You've done it.

I'm an entertainer, first and foremost. But there's art involved here. And an

artist has an obligation to be en route, to be going somewhere. There's a

journey involved here. And you don't know where it is. And that's the fun.

So you're always going to be seeking and looking and going and trying to

challenge yourself. So without sitting around thinking of that a lot, it drives

you and it keeps you.

Trying to be fresh, trying to be new, trying to call on yourself, calling

yourself a little more, you know. And willing to put up with the grueling

promotional schedule and everything else. The only way. Picasso never had to

morning shows in Albuquerque. Right. And the only way I can do this is to go

where the people are. They will not come to my house.

We've offered bus rides and everything. They will not come. I have to go to

Stevens Point, Wisconsin or wherever it is.

And the audiences are great.

And they buy the tickets ahead of time. And they really wait for you to come

there. In the theaters and concert halls, it's special. Because the

they do it beforehand. And you're the whole evening.

In Las Vegas, you're an afterthought. You're an also.

Well, we could go gambling. We could go hookering. We could get drunk. We could

go to the convention.

No, let's go see this guy.

And if they like you, they do. But they're not committed fans.

So it's a different tone there. But it still works. You can still do some

there that you can feel good about.

Do you feel your place in comedy now? Do you feel the, you know, because we've

been spending a lot of time at the festival, and everybody that I would

you know, hey, I'm going to do this George Carlin tribute, and their faces

up. And to a person, really, Carlin? Can I meet him? Is he around?

Do you feel that place?

Well, that is growing on me. I think, you know, longevity is a wonderful

Sometimes you get applause just for not being dead when you say, it's true.

When you say, I'm going to be 60, they applaud that. Wonderful, not dead, 60.

But I'm getting a sense of it. You know, when you're in planes three days a

week, I go out every Friday. I come home every Monday. It's three different

cities, three different nights, airports, hotel lobbies. And people are

wonderful people. I love individuals.

I hate groups of people. I hate people who have a group of people with a common

purpose because pretty soon they have little hats and armbands.

and fight songs and a list of people they're going to visit at 3 a .m so i

dislike and despise groups of people but i love individuals every person you

look at you can see the universe in their eyes if you're really looking and

they're great and so cumulatively i have gotten the feeling that i'm in this big

family a family life i never had by the way this so to say extended family of

people who feel like you're their cousin. You know, I was like, Georgie,

saw you. Hey, remember? Yeah.

Oh, and you know what you said? And I said, did I? Oh, yeah.

So it's, you know, it's just great. And so cumulatively, you say, well, I guess

I'm in the family. I guess it's okay.

Yeah. Do you think, does it boil down?

After 10 HBO hours, after a multitude of best -selling albums, after Grammy

nominations, after Emmy nominations, after Cable 8th awards, does it all boil

down to what you had said originally, that it's about, hey, dig me?

Hey, look at me, ain't I cute?

It's just a job that's called showing off.

And if you can get them to not only stop and listen, but say, isn't he cute?

You're cute.

If you can get the approval. See, in our school, we didn't have grades, so we

didn't have A's, B's, and C's and D's.

The only A's I got, and this is a little corny, I got their attention, I got

their approval, their admiration, their approbation, and their applause.

And those were the only A's I wanted, and I got them. You certainly have mine,

sir.

I just want to say that I can't tell you enough what a pleasure this has been

for me to spend some time with you and to be a part of this show. And thank you

very much for all the wonderful... It's been great to get to know you a little,

and you...

are going to show us a lot, and I look forward to it. Thank you very much.