On Fri­day, June 13^th, 2008, I had the extra­or­di­nary priv­i­lege of talk­ing to George Car­lin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth inter­view he gave before he passed away yes­ter­day at age 71. Orig­i­nally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psy­chol­ogy Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so gen­er­ous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Car­lin came across as a grouch, often vul­gar and some­times mis­an­thropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minu­tiae of his cre­ative process and eager to share sto­ries about his child­hood, his evo­lu­tion as a comic, and his influ­ence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the won­der­ful feel­ing he got in his gut while writ­ing. I was also moved by the grat­i­tude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bul­ly­ing, alco­holic hus­band when George was just two months old, get­ting a job dur­ing the worst years of the Depres­sion, and rais­ing two boys on her own.

He spoke about the pride he took in his work. As a ninth-grade dropout, he said, it was grat­i­fy­ing to see his words quoted in text­books, class­rooms, and court­rooms. And he was proud to have inspired other com­edy greats, who rou­tinely called him to say, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” As he looked back on his aston­ish­ingly pro­lific 50-year career—which includes 130 Tonight Show appear­ances, 23 albums, 14 HBO spe­cials, three books, and one Supreme Court case—the inter­view became a sort of ret­ro­spec­tive of his life.

Finally, after two hours, he gen­tly men­tioned that his arm was get­ting tired from hold­ing the phone. “I really appre­ci­ate all the thought you’ve put into all these ques­tions. Really, it’s the most com­plete inter­view I’ve ever done,” he said. “Is it tomor­row yet? I think it is.”

“It feels like it is,” I said, strug­gling to keep up with his wit.

“All this is for a quote unquote back page?” he said.

“This is for the back page, but, I don’t know, I just love you and your work so much!” I gushed. “I just had so much I wanted to ask.”

At the time, I was embar­rassed by what I’d said. But when I heard the sad news this morn­ing, my feel­ings changed instantly. I’m hon­ored that I got to speak to him, and I’m grate­ful that I got to tell him how much I admired him before he died.

It would be impos­si­ble to over­state George Carlin’s con­tri­bu­tion to standup com­edy. Along with Richard Pryor and a few oth­ers, he essen­tially cre­ated the genre as we know it today. But he was more than just a com­edy pio­neer. He was a free­thinker who never backed down, and he truly changed the course of Amer­i­can cul­ture. He will be missed. —Jay Dixit

The Inter­view

What fol­lows are edited high­lights. They rep­re­sent a lit­tle over half of the interview.

How do you think about com­edy and self-expression? Express­ing what’s within vs. look­ing at the out­side world and mak­ing obser­va­tions?

Self-expression is a hall­mark of an artist, of art, to get some­thing off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that ele­ment is present in all art. And com­edy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vul­gar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spo­ken word, the writ­ing that goes into it is an art form—it’s cer­tainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even stand­ing up and say­ing, “Hey, lis­ten to me.” Self-expression can be based on look­ing at the world and mak­ing obser­va­tions about it or not. Com­edy can also be based on describ­ing one’s inner self—doing anec­dotes, talk­ing about your own fears. Woody Allen taps into a lot of self-analysis in his com­edy. But I don’t think these things are mutu­ally exclu­sive. I think self-expression is present at all times, and whether or not you’re talk­ing about the out­side world or your responses to it depends on the moment and the subject.

Do you go around observ­ing and try­ing to col­lect funny things? Or do you just live your life and then say how you feel about what you hap­pen to have seen?

I’m 71, and I’ve been doing this for a lit­tle over 50 years, doing it at a fairly vis­i­ble level for 40. By this time it’s all sec­ond nature. It’s all a machine that works a cer­tain way: the obser­va­tions, the imme­di­ate eval­u­a­tion of the obser­va­tion, and then the men­tal fil­ing of it, or writ­ing it down on a piece of paper. I’ve often described the way a 20-year-old ver­sus, say, a 60– or a 70-year-old, the way it works. A 20-year-old has a lim­ited amount of data they’ve expe­ri­enced, either see­ing or lis­ten­ing to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer stor­age area, the matrix inside is more tex­tured, and has more con­tours to it. So, obser­va­tions made by a 20-year-old are com­pared against a data set that is incom­plete. Obser­va­tions made by a 60-year-old are com­pared against a much richer data set. And the obser­va­tions have more res­o­nance, they’re richer.

So if I write some­thing down, some observation—I see some­thing on tele­vi­sion that reminds me of some­thing I wanted to say already—the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impres­sion. The first time I write it down, it makes a sec­ond impres­sion, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a lit­tle richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a net­work of knowl­edge and data and obser­va­tions and feel­ings and val­ues and eval­u­a­tions I have in me that do things auto­mat­i­cally. And then when I sit down to con­sciously write, that’s when I bring the crafts­man­ship. That’s when I pull every­thing together and say, how I can best express that? And then as you write, you find more, ’cause the mind is look­ing for fur­ther con­nec­tions. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writ­ing is the really won­der­ful part. A lot of this is dis­cov­ery. A lot of things are lying around wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.

Do you think that the rich­ness you described comes from just being able to access more expe­ri­ences, hav­ing infor­ma­tion on file? Or is it judgment?

Well, that’s true, too. The machine that does all this learns what it is you want—it learns what it is that serves your pur­pose and it begins to tai­lor the syn­the­sis. It syn­the­sizes these obser­va­tions and these com­par­isons. Comedy’s all about com­par­isons and con­trasts and con­gruities and incon­gruities and height­en­ings and under­state­ment and exag­ger­a­tion. The mind has all of that stuff built in, and it learns which ones pay off the best for you. It’s prob­a­bly related to the plea­sure cen­ter. You get so much plea­sure find­ing good obser­va­tions and find­ing which things are the rich­est things you can say, that prob­a­bly the brain remem­bers how that hap­pened and learns to pro­vide the best stuff. Maybe you have a lit­tle silent edi­tor in there.

You talked about how comedy’s all about incon­gruities, con­trasts, exag­ger­a­tion. Do you think about those tech­niques or those prin­ci­ples of humor consciously?

It hap­pens auto­mat­i­cally. Some­times there’s a con­scious height­en­ing, you’ll rec­og­nize you’ve just cho­sen an image to make a point. Then your mind will just sud­denly throw some­thing at you that’s stronger—a height­en­ing, to raise the stakes, a stronger word, a more vis­ceral image, some­thing that lights up the imag­i­na­tion, much bet­ter than the orig­i­nal thought. So you’re aware that you’re height­en­ing and exag­ger­at­ing fur­ther but you don’t use the word exag­ger­a­tion or any­thing like that. All that stuff is just hap­pen­ing. And some­times, after­ward, I’ll look at some­thing and say, “If I were giv­ing a com­edy lec­ture, that would be a good exam­ple.” I often think in those terms.

Do you think there are any down­sides to hav­ing got­ten to the point where you are, where all of this is hap­pen­ing auto­mat­i­cally? Or are there some advan­tages a 20-year-old would have?

Well, I would imag­ine there are some that I can’t put my fin­ger on because I don’t remem­ber what it was like. I was a dif­fer­ent man. I don’t know—the advan­tage that a 20 year old would have would be more longevity to look for­ward to.

You talked about how won­der­ful it is, this feel­ing of writ­ing. So what is your process like?

I take a lot of single-page notes, lit­tle memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a lit­tle memo pad, I have a dig­i­tal recorder. Most of the note-taking hap­pens while I’m watch­ing television.

Because the world is undif­fer­en­ti­ated on the tele­vi­sion set. You may be watch­ing the news chan­nel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of Amer­i­can life and the human expe­ri­ence. It’s gonna go from sui­cide bomb­ings to friv­o­lous con­sumer goods. It’s a broad win­dow on the world, and a lot of things are already estab­lished in my mind as things I say, things that I’m inter­ested in, things that are fod­der for my machine. And when I see some­thing that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it’s a fur­ther exag­ger­a­tion and a fur­ther addi­tion, or an exception—if it plays into fur­ther­ing my pur­pose, I jot it down.

When I har­vest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic pack­age was a great method­i­cal left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to clas­sify and index things and label them and store them accord­ing to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a sys­tem for fil­ing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me.

And what’s your fil­ing system?

There’s a large seg­ment of it devoted to lan­guage, which is a love of mine. And a rich area for my work talk­ing about how we talk. One of the files is called “The Way We Talk.” And it’s about cer­tain vogu­ish words that come into style and remain there. But then there are sub­files. Every­thing has sub­files. There’s one that says “Crime.” There’s “Crime” and there’s “Law,” there’s “Sex” and there’s “Race.” And there’s “Humans”—that’s obvi­ously a big folder with a lot of smaller fold­ers in it, it’s about the human race and the human species and expe­ri­ences and obser­va­tions I have about that, or data that I’ve found about it. You know, 6 mil­lion peo­ple stepped on land mines this year. Those things inter­est me.

And there’s “Amer­ica,” and Amer­ica is a major cat­e­gory, of course. It breaks down into the cul­ture, and the cul­ture breaks down into fur­ther things. It’s like nested boxes, like the Russ­ian dolls—it’s just fold­ers within fold­ers within fold­ers. But I know how to nav­i­gate it very well, and I’m a Mac­in­tosh a guy and so Spot­light helps me a lot. I just get on Spot­light and say, let’s see, if I say “ass­hole” and “min­is­ter,” I then can find what I want find.

What’s the process of going from some­thing that’s true about the world—observing it—to actu­ally mak­ing peo­ple laugh?

I begin with the knowl­edge that my audi­ence knows me thor­oughly. I know the things they will trust com­ing from me, and I know they’ll allow me to do expo­si­tion that’s nec­es­sary to set the stage for the piece of mate­r­ial. The funny—that’s part of the genetic pack­age. The genetic marker for lan­guage came through my fam­ily. My grand­fa­ther, whom I didn’t know, was a New York City police­man. I did not know him. Dur­ing his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies long­hand just for the joy it gave him. And he asked ques­tions about lan­guage at his din­ner table, my mother told me. My mother had a great love of lan­guage, and a great gift for lan­guage. The Irish have a genetic tra­di­tion, it seems, an affin­ity for lan­guage and expres­sion. And so I got that. The Irish say: “You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid.” It comes in the blood. So, I have that and I don’t have to do any­thing about it.

As Noël Cow­ard said, “All I ever had was a tal­ent to amuse.” I have a tal­ent to amuse and I have a way of find­ing the joke, a way of express­ing things through exag­ger­a­tion, inter­est­ing images, what­ever goes in, what­ever the parts are that go into mak­ing these things work.

I try to come in through the side door. One of the vogu­ish terms, which is so repel­lant to me, “think­ing out­side the box.” To set­tle for that kind of lan­guage is embar­rass­ing. But that’s a very use­ful pic­ture. I try to come in through the side door, the side win­dow, to come in from a direc­tion they’re not expect­ing, to see some­thing in a dif­fer­ent way. That’s the job that I give myself. So, how can I talk about some­thing emi­nently famil­iar to them, on my terms, in a new way, that engages their imagination?

The jokes come. You don’t look for them. It’s all auto­matic, and, I think, genetic. My father was an after din­ner speaker, was a great racon­teur. He was an ad sales­man for space in news­pa­pers dur­ing the 1930s, when that was the pri­mary medium of adver­tis­ing, and my mother was in adver­tis­ing her whole life. They both were very funny, and they both were very gifted ver­bally. So, those things come to you auto­mat­i­cally. It’s like being a child prodigy with the vio­lin or the piano. It’s not some­thing you try for or you have to do too much about except work at it. And that’s what I try to do.

How is it that you find things that are unexpected?

I don’t know. But I want to add an ele­ment I over­looked. Psy­chol­ogy. We’re talk­ing about a mag­a­zine called Psy­chol­ogy Today.

As a child, my father was gone. I had no grand­par­ents; they were all dead. Had no real cousins to play with, and I didn’t give a shit, frankly. I expe­ri­enced my life in a very happy way, but, what I want to say to you is, I was alone as a child. My father was dead. My mother left him when I was 2 months old and he died when I was 8 years old. He drank too much and he was a bully and she had the courage to take two boys, one of them two months old and one of them 5 years old and to leave him in 1937 and get back into the busi­ness world and get a job and raise us through the end of the Depres­sion and through the Sec­ond World War. She did a great job, but she was at work until 7 or 7:30 at night many nights.

So I spent a lot of time on my own. In the house or out around the neigh­bor­hood or sneak­ing in the sub­way, going down to 42^nd street, trav­el­ing around Man­hat­tan Island, learn­ing it as a young­ster. And I expe­ri­enced that—because psy­chol­o­gists ask you not if something’s good or bad, but how do you expe­ri­ence it—I expe­ri­enced that as free­dom, inde­pen­dence, auton­omy. And I was brought up on that feel­ing. That’s what made me, I think, able to quit school, and go out and try to start my life and career early, because I had that strength.

And my mother had that strength. I wit­nessed it. I mean, what she did was she took us away from him and saved us. So, those qual­i­ties of being alone like that fos­tered in me a need for adult approval and atten­tion. Now they say that it’s kind of a com­mon cliché that come­di­ans just want atten­tion. But it’s an ele­ment that’s very impor­tant. The job is called “look at me.” That’s the name of this job. “Look at me. Ain’t I smart? Ain’t I cute? Ain’t I clever?”

I needed to be—not the cen­ter of attention—but I needed to be able to attract atten­tion when I wanted it, through my stunts and my fool­ing around phys­i­cally with faces or pos­tures or voices I would do. Then it became funny the things I would say, and I became more of a wit than sim­ply a mimic and a clown. And so, those things were all impor­tant in this. The fact that I didn’t fin­ish school left me with a life­long need to prove that I’m smart, prove it to myself, maybe to the world. “Ain’t I smart, ain’t I cute, ain’t I clever.” “Lis­ten to me, lis­ten to what I got to say.” So, those things are impor­tant ele­ments in the drive behind all of this.

You made an anal­ogy to play­ing the vio­lin. I wanted to ask you about mas­tery. You’ve been doing this for, as you said, over 50 years, and it seems like you’ve only got­ten bet­ter with time. So I’m won­der­ing what you think has enabled you to do that. Is it like play­ing the vio­lin? Is it just prac­tice? Is it get­ting good feed­back? Is it—you know, what is it that allows you to hone your craft?

The feed­back that I’ve got­ten has been through the suc­cess of the career. That’s a rein­forc­ing fac­tor. I say: Oh, that works, oh that’s what I do, I see. I think with any­thing you do over a long period of time, you should be get­ting bet­ter at it. I’m talk­ing about craft, art, or drive that comes from inside.

What is your phi­los­o­phy about phys­i­cal per­for­mance? You walk around a lot, you make a lot of gestures.

It’s just sec­ond nature, you don’t think about it at all. And I don’t pace as much on stage as I used to, maybe it’s my age, I don’t know. I don’t feel lim­ited phys­i­cally, in that respect, but it’s just some­thing I’ve grown into.

Were you always mak­ing peo­ple laugh, sort of auto­mat­i­cally, just because of your per­son­al­ity?

Yeah. As I was describ­ing, this is a job for a showoff. In those 8 years of gram­mar school that I had—the 9^th year was kind of a it was a Irish catholic Chris­t­ian broth­ers, and it was a much more bru­tal set­ting than these lovely nuns we had. So I think of those 8 years as my edu­ca­tion. I got the work very eas­ily, I didn’t have any trou­ble grasp­ing the work, and so I had time to clown, time to sig­nal to my buddy, make a face, make a fart under the arm, I was a bit of a class clown, I was a neigh­bor­hood cut-up.

I even­tu­ally started doing rou­tines when I was about 14, 15 16. I would do rou­tines on the street cor­ner for my bud­dies on the stoop. My mother wanted me to fin­ish high school, go to col­lege, be an adver­tis­ing man, be a busi­ness­man like the men at her office whom she admired. But she couldn’t stop this other machine that was revving up.

I had an 8^th grade grad­u­a­tion from the gram­mar school—it was the only grad­u­a­tion I ever had. And in 9^th grade, while I was at that school, I had a Brother, one of the broth­ers who taught, his name was Brother Con­rad. My mother had said to me, now George, I didn’t get you a grad­u­a­tion present, and this was June 1951, this was now the fall of 1951, when I’m in first year of high school. She said, “I didn’t get you a grad­u­a­tion present, so you be think­ing about what you might want.”

Brother Con­rad was telling the class one day that because he had a clergyman’s dis­count rate, he could get cam­eras for peo­ple. Then he men­tioned tape recorders and man, the bell went off in my head! Tape recorders at that time were vir­tu­ally unknown to the aver­age per­son. They may have heard about them here or there. They were not con­sumer items.

She bought me a tape recorder, a Web­cor. And that became a tool for me to put some of these ver­bal impulses to work. I began to pro­duce lit­tle radio shows on it at home by using the phono­graph. Play­ing a record on the phono­graph, like play­ing the Drag­net theme. Dun da dun dun. Dun da dun dun duuun.

Then I would fade the phono­graph down and I would come in and I would do my make-believe announcer. I did news­casts, I did sports. A lot of the things that I ven­tured into pro­fes­sion­ally in my first stage of com­edy I was doing on that tape recorder. I recorded a whole half hour of story—it was like a vignette, like a series of vignettes, a drama, about my neigh­bor­hood. And guess what: I made fun of author­ity figures.

So my mother—in spite what she wanted me to do for her, to be a great reflec­tion on her, go to col­lege and be a businessman—she knew this was some­thing I needed. And she got that for me, and it helped accel­er­ate the begin­nings of my putting this dream together that I had. I was 14 when I got that tape recorder. They were the size of a Buick. They were not lit­tle handy things. And she was smart enough to get me one. That’s an impor­tant part of my development.

Can you remem­ber the first joke you ever told?

No. But I do remem­ber the first time I ever made my mother laugh. And unfor­tu­nately, it’s lost on me what it was I said. But I noticed the moment, I knew some­thing had hap­pened, this was when I was very young. My mother laughed fairly fre­quently. But I knew the dif­fer­ence between her social laugh and her really spon­ta­neous laugh when she was caught off guard—which is the key to laugher, being off guard. And I said some­thing to her, and I saw that in her and it reg­is­tered with me. And it made the point. I wouldn’t have remem­bered it as well as I do if it hadn’t meant a lot to me. It was a kind of a lit­tle mark along the way, a lit­tle badge of honor. It meant I had said some­thing witty. I didn’t clown, I wasn’t mak­ing a face or stand­ing in a funny angle. I had said some­thing witty. I had prob­a­bly turned some sit­u­a­tion around, exag­ger­ated one ele­ment, and made a joke.

I want to talk about the trans­for­ma­tion that you did in the 60s when you went from what you once termed the “middle-American comic” to this dif­fer­ent persona—it was much more sub­ver­sive. How did that hap­pen and why did that happen?

I was always swim­ming against the tide. I was always out of step. Not only did I quit school, but I got kicked out of three schools along the way. I even­tu­ally got asked to leave the air force a year early—it wasn’t dis­hon­or­able, but it was a gen­eral dis­charge, which is a step down—because I did not shape up, I didn’t like author­ity, I had three court-martials. I was kicked off the alter boys, I was kicked off the choir­boys, I was kicked out of the boy scouts, I was kicked out of sum­mer camp. I never fit and I didn’t like con­form­ing. And some­times it just broke through the mem­brane, and I was out.

By the end of the 60s, all of my friends, the musi­cian friends of mine, had gone through a tran­si­tion in their dress, and espe­cially in their music, and what I noticed was that all of these great artists—Bob Dylan, Buf­falo Spring­field, Joan Baez—all of these peo­ple were using their art to express them­selves polit­i­cally and socially. And I was not. I was still doing people-pleasing.

I was 30, and I res­onated much more truly with the 20-year-olds. I was more in line with them than I was with these peo­ple I was enter­tain­ing in night­clubs. I began to notice that. I began to be affected by it, and along the way, the judi­cious use of some mesca­line and some LSD man­aged to accel­er­ate the process. It gave me more of an insight into how false the world was I was set­tling for, and to see that there was some­thing much richer and bet­ter and more authen­tic. And those changes hap­pened, they just—they hap­pened nat­u­rally and organ­i­cally. It took about 2 years for the total changeover to occur.

My beard got a lit­tle longer, the hair got a lit­tle longer, the cloth­ing changed, and then I sud­denly found myself being as—the best com­bi­na­tion of both, this per­son I really was who was kind of out of step, anti­au­thor­i­tar­ian, who also had these skills and tal­ents that he was hon­ing to express him­self. And so I started express­ing those feelings.

In what way did the mesca­line and LSD give you the insight and the con­fi­dence to make this trans­for­ma­tion? What role did the drugs play?

Well, It was just pas­sive, I don’t know. See, I had always been a mar­i­juana smoker, a pretty heavy user of mar­i­juana, all these years I’m talk­ing about when I was in this other world of main­stream tele­vi­sion, night­clubs. So mar­i­juana is a hal­lu­cino­gen and it is also a value-changing drug, as are acid and mesca­line. They are hal­lu­cino­gens and they are value-changing drugs. They alter, assist in shift­ing one’s per­spec­tive on the world which usu­ally is informed by your val­ues. And so I had already, my body, my mind, and myself—I already had a kind of a thick layer of this out-of-stepness.

And so I was already across that street. And I just hadn’t, you know, bought a house on that side yet. So, the LSD was a much stronger expe­ri­ence, and the mesca­line, and I don’t know what they did or how they did it, I just know that going through that gave me the con­fi­dence in these changes I was feel­ing, in this direc­tion, this meta­mor­pho­sis, I was in the mid­dle of. I gained con­fi­dence in it and I took strength from it, feel­ing that I was right that I was really on the right path, that I was being true to myself. And that was what counted to me, to be true to myself—my mother had always said that. To thine—Shakespeare—“To thine own self be true.” She loved quot­ing the clas­sics, and she quoted Emer­son or Shake­speare or who­ever it was she thought was appro­pri­ate for her les­son. And to thine own self be true. And I just—I just had to be who I felt like I was, not who I had led them to believe I was.

So after that trans­for­ma­tion, to what extent is the per­sona that you have on stage—to what extent is it your real per­son­al­ity? I know you’re mak­ing jokes and some of that involves exag­ger­a­tion, but do you feel that you’re act­ing angrier, more bit­ter, more caus­tic on stage? Or are you just being your­self as accu­rately as possible?

I’ve addressed this before when the ques­tion is asked more bluntly: Are you an angry man? What are you angry about; what are you so angry about? I don’t live an angry life, not an angry per­son. I rarely lose my tem­per, can’t remem­ber the last time, never had a phys­i­cal fight in my life, don’t carry grudges, don’t carry resent­ment either. Very very lucky in those respects. But I feel a very strong alien­ation and dis­sat­is­fac­tion from my groups.

Abra­ham Maslow said the fully real­ized man does not iden­tify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not iden­tify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a par­tic­i­pant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only iden­ti­fied this in ret­ro­spect, way after the fact, that I have been on the out­side, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt com­fort­able there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as mean­ing a lot of things: the local social clubs or fra­ter­nal orders, or lodges or asso­ci­a­tions or clubs of any kind, things where you sac­ri­fice your indi­vid­ual iden­tity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt dif­fer­ent and out­side. Now, I also extended that, once again in ret­ro­spect, as I exam­ined my feelings.

I don’t really iden­tify with Amer­ica, I don’t really feel like an Amer­i­can or part of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence, and I don’t really feel like a mem­ber of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the def­i­n­i­tions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emo­tional detach­ment from the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence and cul­ture and the human expe­ri­ence and cul­ture and human choices.

But even if I am a cynic, they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a dis­ap­pointed idealist—that’s what’s under­neath. That’s the lit­tle flicker of flame, has a lit­tle life in it, the ide­al­ist: I would love to be able to enter­tain that side of me, but it doesn’t work like that. I don’t see what’s in it yet, I mean I just like it out here.

I’m not an angry per­son, just very dis­ap­pointed and con­temp­tu­ous of my fel­low humans’ choices—and on stage those feel­ings some­times are exag­ger­ated for a the­atric stage—you’re on a stage you have an audi­ence of 2500 or 3000 peo­ple: you need to project the feel­ings, the emo­tions it’s height­ened, and peo­ple mis­take it for a per­sonal anger but it’s more dis­sat­is­fac­tion, dis­ap­point­ment and con­tempt for these things we’ve set­tled for.

So it sounds like it is your true per­son­al­ity, but it’s height­ened for the stage.

It is my true per­son­al­ity, but it’s not an angry per­son­al­ity. Anger is a handy term and boy words are tricky, as we know. What one man per­ceives as anger, another person—in my case the deliv­erer of material—is, “Don’t you see it, don’t you see how badly you’re doing?” It’s like shak­ing a child—which you’re not sup­posed to do.

So let me latch onto that feel­ing. You’re grab­bing some­body and you’re say­ing, “Don’t you see it?” But if you really don’t care about Amer­ica, then why are you doing it? Why are you on stage? Is it just because you want to express your­self? Do you hope you can influ­ence peo­ple in some way?

You’ve hit on the con­tra­dic­tion, and it’s one I don’t under­stand the res­o­lu­tion to, if there is one. Some­times peo­ple say, do I try to make audi­ences think? I say: No no no, because that really would be the kiss of death. But what I want them to know is that I’m think­ing. It’s part of that showoff and dropout syn­drome. I think I need to show them that I have brought myself to a clev­erer, smarter spot than they have. In doing so, “Can’t you see this? can’t you see?” And a lot of them do. I get amaz­ing things said to me. And they’re fre­quent enough that I know these things are mul­ti­plied by those who have never encoun­tered you. One per­son who says, “You really changed my out­look on things or the way I view X Y or Z,” for every­one who says that to you, there are a thou­sand, ten thou­sand who’ll never get to tell you that. There are peo­ple who take some­thing away form what I do, and I know that and it pleases me and I am proud of that. And it means the stu­dent is a bit of a teacher.

But yeah, of course I care. Of course I care. My daugh­ter has pinned me on that. She says of course you care, can’t you hear it? And I say yeah yeah yeah, but they gotta prove it to me first. Show me you care peo­ple and then I’ll let some of it out; right now I just want to scold you a lit­tle bit.

So how would you say that you feel towards peo­ple? You say on the one hand you are sort of con­temp­tu­ous but on the other hand you want their approval in some way? Is that not a contradiction?

Yeah, it sounds like it has the mak­ings of a con­tra­dic­tion; I guess by def­i­n­i­tion it does. I am con­temp­tu­ous of the mass. That’s the thing I need to explain. One on one with peo­ple, I have great capac­ity and great com­pas­sion. I don’t like stand­ing around 20 min­utes talk­ing to some­body, but when I see indi­vid­u­als, I see their indi­vid­ual beauty. I’m aware of the potential—and I don’t mean this hap­pened every time I meet someone—but when I see peo­ple, I sort of see the poten­tial for the whole species. When you look in their eyes, you can see a holo­gram of the human species and you kind of know what we could have been. It’s the group behav­ior that I’m talk­ing about on stage.

Let’s switch gears a lit­tle bit and let me ask you about reli­gion. I mean you were talk­ing about it decades ago. Now, athe­ism and reli­gion bash­ing have gone main­stream: Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Sam Har­ris. You were way ahead of the curve. What’s it like hear­ing them say­ing many of the things you said in the 1970s?

I’ve read some of the books you’ve men­tioned and some of the rea­sons of exis­tence and God and what a bad name reli­gion has given God. I just kind of do this, I just keep mov­ing along. I don’t really judge it… I reserve my eval­u­a­tions and judg­ments for the parts that I do, the lines I add. I don’t think about myself in the larger world very much.

Richard Dawkins did use an excerpt of mine for a chap­ter head­ing. I noticed that. It’s nice. Not to overdo this thing, but when you’re a dropout and the cul­ture accepts you and begins to quote and they teach some of your stuff in com­mu­ni­ca­tions class and com­mu­ni­ca­tions law and I hear this all the time and pro­fes­sors ask to use things in their text­books, this is kind of my hon­orary bac­calau­re­ate. When these things hap­pen I think good, well, there’s a lit­tle thumb on my chest, feather in my cap. I notice those things, and I feel good about what I’ve cho­sen and how I do it. As Lily Tom­lin once said, and I am going to get this wrong so it’s a para­phrase, she said to be con­sid­ered a suc­cess in a mediocre cul­ture doesn’t say a lot for you.

You were cen­tral in the Supreme Court case in which jus­tices affirmed the government’s right to reg­u­late your “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Tele­vi­sion” act on the pub­lic air­waves. How do you think about the role of vul­gar­ity in your humor?

I used to point out that when I was a lit­tle boy in the 40s, I was told to look up to and admire sol­ders and sailors, police­men, fire­men, and ath­letes, were objects of child­hood hero wor­ship. We all know how they talk. So appar­ently these words do not cor­rupt morally. This was the thing I couldn’t put together.

I use the words because I’m from that ethos. I’m from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neigh­bor­hood. It was com­mon to curse, you make your point. It’s a very effec­tive lan­guage. I try not to overdo it. It’s never to shock. I know where it fits, it’s never to shock. There’s no shock value left in words. Humor is base on sur­prise, and sur­prise is a milder way of say­ing shock. It’s sur­prise that makes the joke.

What’s the fun­ni­est bit you’ve ever heard?

Some­times jokes have a won­der­ful logic to them. I’ll give you one that, even to peo­ple that don’t mind mild curs­ing, both­ers some people—especially women. Short joke. The won­der­ful thing about it is the logic of the joke, the ingenuity.

Father and son, lit­tle son are out on the back porch, pass­ing the day, father says to son, “Do you have per­haps any ques­tions for me about sex?” And he says, “Well, yeah Dad, what is that hairy area on Mommy?” And the father says, “Well, that’s her vulva.” And the boy says, “Well then what’s a cunt?” And the father says, “That’s rest of Mommy.”

And that joke strikes a nerve, hits a chord—men who’ve been divorced more than twice really like that. It makes beau­ti­ful use of that man’s thought. To arrive at that distinction—to take it from the real to the fig­u­ra­tive. From cunt as a sex­ual part to cunt as a term of deri­sion for women, just as men are called ass­holes by cer­tain women—and they deserve it. It’s funny how we use words. The fact that a mean woman is called a cunt and a mean man is called a prick. I have a long thing I’d like to write some­day about lan­guage and the way we address each other.

How has your com­edy changed over the years?

You know for a guy who didn’t do home­work, the thing that’s hap­pened is this: that 6^th grade showoff that kid who had to sing a song at meet­ings, who won the medal at camp for being fun­ni­est guy at ama­teur night 5 years in a row. He didn’t do his home­work then. I didn’t do book reports, but now what’s hap­pened is that showoff has a part­ner who does his home­work and the left/right brain are allied, united, now in a way they weren’t. I’m using my orga­ni­za­tional abil­ity, and my writ­ing abil­ity which is care­ful process, informed by art, but still a craft of putting things together, I’ve some­how become more inte­grated. I do my home­work now but I stand up and show off. So I got both, I got the best of both sixth grade worlds.

You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing night­club com­edy down in the Vil­lage. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of cre­ation and it had a sec­tion on humor.

He was talk­ing about the cre­ative process. There was an illus­tra­tion on the panel that showed a trip­tych. On the left panel, there were these names of artis­tic pur­suits. There were poets, painter, com­poser. And one of them was jester. I was only inter­ested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these indi­vid­u­als on the left hand side can tran­scend the pan­els of the trip­tych by cre­ative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and think­ing, then he can pro­ceed to the sec­ond panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philoso­pher. The jester becomes the philoso­pher, and if he does these things with daz­zling lan­guage that we mar­vel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a think­ing jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impres­sion on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of revers­ing my field on peo­ple, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those sec­ond and third descrip­tions and I def­i­nitely have a gift for lan­guage that is rhyth­mic and attrac­tive to the ear, and I have inter­est­ing imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Sup­pose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exag­ger­ate that, because comedy’s all about height­en­ing and exag­ger­at­ing. And any­ways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that prob­a­bly at least influ­enced me to some level.

It sounds like you think of your­self much more as a writer than a performer—is that true? How do you think about per­form­ing?

It’s my pri­mary deliv­ery sys­tem. I used to, in my early years, when I would do an inter­view I was always proud to tell the writer that I wrote my own mate­r­ial, if they asked me or even if they didn’t. I wanted to be dis­tin­guished from the ones who didn’t do that, and I was proud of it, so I would say I am a come­dian who writes his own mate­r­ial. And then at some point, I dis­cov­ered what I really had become was a writer who per­forms his own material.

This was a really impor­tant dis­tinc­tion for me to notice—it hap­pened way after the fact. I’m a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an enter­tainer; I’m in the vul­gar arts. I travel around talk­ing and say­ing things and enter­tain­ing, but it’s in ser­vice of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two des­ti­na­tions. The writ­ing is what gives me the joy, espe­cially edit­ing myself for the page, and get­ting some­thing ready to show to the edi­tors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love rework­ing, I love edit­ing, love love love revi­sion, revi­sion, revi­sion, revision.

And com­put­ers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as eas­ily as you can move text, and say, “Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: sim­i­lar ideas, put ’em together!” But the per­son who is most a part of me is the per­former, is the standup, the guy who says, “Hey look at me, lis­ten to this!” I do that because that’s what I do, I love doing it.

And I love the feel­ing I get in my gut when I’m watch­ing on the com­puter screen that is close to being real­ized the way I would like it to be. the feel­ing I get in my gut is “Wait’ll they hear this, wait’ll I tell them this, I can’t wait to tell them!” It’s like the guy on the end of the bench: “Put me in coach, put me in!” They call to me, I can tell which ones are preg­nant, which ones need to be moved up to a higher level of readi­ness, and it’s because I can’t wait to say them, I can’t wait to share them with people.

You know, you get 2500 peo­ple, act­ing as a sin­gle organ­ism: the audi­ence is a sin­gle organ­ism and it’s you and it. And to have that feel­ing of mas­tery up there—it’s an asser­tion of power: here I am, I have the micro­phone, you came here for this express pur­pose. You’re sit­ting not in tables at night­clubs with wait­ers and glasses, you’re seated all fac­ing for­ward in order to enjoy this and here I am, and wait till you hear this! There’s noth­ing like it in my expe­ri­ence that I could aspire to. It has as much a pay­off as writ­ing, which has a big payoff.

So, sit­ting in front of a com­puter, “Wait till they hear this, this is great mate­r­ial.” What’s the dif­fer­ence between that and actu­ally stand­ing on stage hear­ing the audi­ence roar­ing with laugh­ter?

The dif­fer­ence is, at the com­puter you can stop, think back, think for­ward, look around, turn the page as it were, you can see the whole world all at once. On stage you’re only in a sin­gle moment ever—your mind can hear what you just said. This is a funny thing that hap­pens for me: when I’m up there doing some­thing I’ve mem­o­rized per­fectly, and it has pauses in it—and of course the laughs are all the pauses. As you’re going along, you’re think­ing of what you’re say­ing, you want to give it the proper vocal val­ues, so you are kind of think­ing about it, not reach­ing for the words, but kind of think­ing about them. You’re also aware of the echo of what you just said, and whether it worked or not, and what that might mean. It’s all part of the trigonom­e­try, I guess. And then there is the faint antic­i­pa­tion of what comes next.

It’s like the feel­ing of con­duct­ing an orches­tra. It’s like con­duct­ing an orches­tra, this group of peo­ple who already like you, pre­dis­posed to appre­ci­ate you, at your ser­vice, at you’re com­mand, and you’re just wav­ing the baton and bring­ing them in, lead­ing them for­ward and it’s just a nice kind of feeling.

Let me ask you about your influence—how do you feel that you have influ­enced other come­di­ans?

I hear that from some of them, who say, “I wouldn’t be doing this were it not for you.” I talked to a very promi­nent name in com­edy today who wanted to pay me some kind com­pli­ments about the recent HBO show, he hasn’t been able to catch up with me, I won’t men­tion him, but every­body would know his name. He said also in pass­ing, “You know, I wouldn’t be doing this with­out you.” There have been peo­ple, who, I don’t know, because I came along at a cer­tain time. Richard Pryor and I went through our changes at the same time, he became promi­nent at the same time. I had this kind of reemer­gence. I’m sure Richard Pryor would hear those things. I’m sure Woody Allen hears those things. I don’t take them as sin­gu­lar to me. But I know they’re true when I’m told, I real­ized I could be myself, could talk about this and that and not be afraid; I’m sure all artists hear sim­i­lar things, espe­cially ones who have lasted a while.

[Note: Jerry Sein­feld has since iden­ti­fied him­self as the promi­nent come­dian who spoke to George Car­lin just before I did. “I called him to com­pli­ment him on his most recent spe­cial on HBO,” writes Sein­feld in a New York Times op-ed. “Sev­enty years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas get­ting ready for his show. He was a mon­ster.” —JD]

Do you men­tor other come­di­ans?

No. I’m not col­le­gial, I don’t hang out. I’m soloist, I like my soli­tude, I don’t really hang around with comedians—this per­son I talked to today, I now have his phone num­ber. I have maybe five phone num­bers. I’m not in show busi­ness because I don’t have to go to the meet­ings, I’m just not a part of it, I don’t belong to it. When you “belong” to some­thing. You want to think about that word, “belong.” Peo­ple should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to some­thing it owns you, and I just don’t care for that. I like spin­ning out here like one of those sub­atomic par­ti­cles that they can’t quite pin down.

Has your sense of humor helped you in other areas of your life, besides your career as a pro­fes­sional come­dian? Meet­ing peo­ple? Mak­ing friends? Deal­ing with loss?

I don’t know about any of those aspects. But I know that the art of not tak­ing things seri­ously often bleeds over into the self, to not take your­self too seri­ously. You can tell from my answers that I take what I do very seri­ously, and I think about it. But I don’t really take myself that seriously.

I know that I’ve accom­plished a good deal. I was just nom­i­nated for this year’s Mark Twain prize at the Kennedy Cen­ter, so these things over the years mean, “Yeah, good job, George.” I don’t take myself very seri­ously, though, at least I don’t think so. I try to see the real­ity and not get car­ried away with the emo­tion. What’s the real­ity? What’s going on here? What’s the ground floor? What’s the real­ity? Let’s look at the sit­u­a­tion: “So he’s dead, she’s hurt, and you don’t feel good.” OK, so let’s fig­ure this out.

I like to say two things in life that mean the most: genet­ics and luck. When you look at it real­is­ti­cally, genet­ics is luck too. Because you could have been born in some really ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion and never had a chance to real­ize your­self or see who you were. And so the luck of genet­ics and then after that, cir­cum­stances, those are the two guid­ing things. Know­ing what to do about it, tak­ing advan­tage of it, that’s fine, that’s good, good for you. But still, those two ele­ments mean everything.

My arm is get­ting tired here. The crook of my arm.

I guess I’m pretty much done. We’ve been talk­ing for a long time and I really appre­ci­ate your tak­ing all this time. Was there a good ques­tion you thought peo­ple should ask that never got asked?

No, because you cov­ered some of the ones, as they came along. As I looked at the list yes­ter­day, I thought the list gave me an oppor­tu­nity for sev­eral places where I want, need to be heard—such as the anger thing, devel­op­ment, and the changes I went through in the late 60s. They were all in there so I feel good.

So the last ques­tion is: What are you work­ing on now?

I have a piece of mate­r­ial that I’m doing on stage these days. I’m in Las Vegas now. I do week­ends here, I do four nights on week­ends as part of my year of tour­ing. I go mostly to con­cert halls and the­aters, around 80 or 90 of ‘em a year. But I come down here around three or four. So I’m down here. This piece of mate­r­ial called, “There’s Too Much Fuck­ing Music,” which is my way of look­ing at… how much music there is, I guess. It’s just my way of look­ing at the world and say­ing some­thing that peo­ple don’t notice and fig­ur­ing out a new way. And it’s filled with exag­ger­a­tion and stuff. I’m doing that on stage a lit­tle bit. I’m not giv­ing myself any pressure.

The lady in my life Sally Wade and I are wait­ing for our house to be fin­ished remod­el­ing. We’re in tem­po­rary quar­ters. It’s kind of oner­ous. We’re lucky we found a place right down the street but the price we pay for being right down the street is that it’s not really suit­able in terms of space and struc­ture for our needs. So we’re really in com­bat duty. It’s been a tough time. Not so tough you can’t work it out, you know, but just enough so it’s bro­ken some of my work habits. And I’m enjoy­ing my break from them and I know where I have to go on the next book, I have a book that I’m going to start orga­niz­ing the files, reor­ga­niz­ing, renam­ing, reclas­si­fy­ing, putting things together, tak­ing things apart. And there’ll be another HBO show as these pieces on stage begin to take form.

Is there any­thing else you want to add?

No! And I really appre­ci­ate all the thought you’ve put into all these ques­tions. Really, it’s the most com­plete inter­view I’ve ever done. Is it tomor­row yet? I think it is.