My chat last year with George Carlin was (almost) the most fun I ever had with a telephone.
From the Asbury Park Press, February, 16th 2007
STILL CARLIN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
At 69, George Carlin still has something to say
By Ed Kaz !
Comedy Correspondent
George Carlin never fit in.
"I got kicked out of three schools and quit
another one." reminisced the legendary comic who appears at the Strand
in Lakewood this Thursday, "And I had been kicked out of the Boy
Scouts, the choir, the altar boys and summer camp all for various
infractions."
Indeed, Carlin was a born rule breaker. With a
compelling need to remain true to his art and to himself, he busted out
of the dead end middle-class nightclub scene of the sixties and
seventies, grew his hair and dove headlong into college campuses.
It was there that Carlin emerged as a counter-culture comedy
icon. Yet somehow he managed to enjoy mainstream success at the
same time with such television stalwarts as Mike Douglas and Ed
Sullivan. It was truly a shizophrenic existence.
In 2007
the culture has caught up with Carlin. To attend his show today
is not to be shocked and outraged; it's to simply enjoy an evening of
hilariously rough-hewn observations of the stupid things we all
encounter in our lives.
But don't get too comfortable; this is George Carlin, after all...
KAZ: You were on The Ed Sullivan Show eleven times!
CARLIN: Yep.
KAZ: You were on more than Esther Willams, who was on four times.
CARLIN: [laughs] Well you can only roll out that swimming pool so many times.
KAZ: Ed must have really liked you.
CARLIN: Well I was an Irish Catholic kid from New York. He
actually said to my manager once--usually they cut the comedian’s time
between dress rehearsal and air on Sunday--usually the manager has to
go in to see Ed and he’ll say tell him to cut two minutes; the monkeys
went long, ya know. My manager swears this is true, more than one
time he went in there with Ed and Ed would say [in Sullivan voice]
“Well now, I know George is doin’ about six-and-a-half minutes
now.” It was the time for him to say he was gonna cut me. And he
said, “Now George is an Irish Catholic boy, isn’t he from New
York?” “Yeah. Corpus Christie Parish.” “Corpus
Christie? Up there near Columbia University. Yeah yeah. OK
well you just tell him to do a good show there.” And he didn’t
cut me! And it seemed to be related to my ethnicity and my
religion. You know, Bob (Carlin’s manager) said it wasn’t just
kinda happenstance. It seemed connected the first time it
happened.
KAZ: So it comes in handy to play the Irish Catholic card sometimes.
CARLIN: Ah, ya never know. Ya never know.
KAZ: You also appeared many many times on the Mike Douglas Show. Do you think Mike really got what you were doing?
CARLIN: Well, I was always on there at the beginning of my
career, 1965, 66, and 7. Mike Douglas was one of my
mainstays. And at that time there wasn’t anything to be figuring
out. I mean I was a mainstream comic and I had the “Hippy-Dippy
Weatherman” in there who was clearly a pothead. But you could
also write him off as sort of a hipster who was out of it, ya
know? So I don’t know what he thought.
Later on when
I went through my changes and his show was in another incarnation--it
might have been out in Hollywood by then--I did his show, and John
Lennon and Yoko Ono had me on. They were his co-hosts for a
week. But I don’t know that he bothered much about that kind of
stuff. He probably understood the world was changing and that
this guy had changed along with it.
KAZ: Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello?
CARLIN: Well, in childhood Abbott and Costello were the two guys
for me. But I found out later that it was kind of immature.
I didn’t realize that that was true. Like Red Skelton was another
comic who was too immature for me later on. Laurel and Hardy were
more of a classical team. I’m not really big on Laurel and Hardy,
but I understand why they’re considered so highly rated. That was
really artistic stuff they did, ya know? Abbott and Costello, I
think it was a little less classy. It was more, rowdy, sloppy.
KAZ: Recently I was watching the first season of “That Girl” on
DVD. You appeared in one episode as Marlo Thomas’s manager.
On the commentary track, someone said “George did one episode, and then
he just disappeared.” What happened there?
CARLIN: That was part of that manifestation of being in (the)
main stream and feeling I had to do acting, you know, in sitcoms.
And if I got in as a regular in a sitcom it would’ve been great.
You know, her manager. I thought as easily as (comedy) came to
me, acting would come to me. But it did not. It was very
frightening, because there were so many instructions all at once.
First of all, I had my lines memorized, but you’re terrified that
they’re not, but you keep going over them in your mind. But
that’s one thing. They’ll always say “OK. Let’s do that
again.” But after the rehearsal of the scene with blocking, then
they come to you and say stuff like, “You’re coming down the stairs,
the phone is ringing at the bottom of the stairs. You hesitate a
moment because you’re not sure if that’s your wife or your ex-wife.”
They throw s*** at ya. “And then when Marlo comes in make sure
you’re not in Marlo’s light and come a little faster with that line.”
None of that was part of what I had in mind. All I knew was to
say the words. And so I was completely fearful.
That was
when I started realizing that this is not for me. First of all,
I’m not gonna be hired, based on how bad I am. And I took acting
coaching from a couple of people, ya know, but that doesn’t mean s***.
You either become an actor, I think, or you’re not. I had no
technique. I had no training to fall back on.
KAZ: Well you did much better than Rich Little. He was in
an episode where they had a computer date. I thought you did much
better than him.
CARLIN: Good! I’m proud of that.
KAZ: Well at least ya got that goin’ for ya, right George?
CARLIN: Yeah. Absolutely. I’ll bring that up next interview.
KAZ: What is the absolute worst gig you ever had?
CARLIN: Worst gig I ever had, my partner and I, Jack Burns was my
partner for two years, and we made about five hundred a week generally
in the Playboy Clubs and four hundred a week in other types of
nightclubs. We worked six night weeks, sometimes two weeks at a
time and we got a gig in Flint, Michigan at the Palace Gardens, which
in essence was really a bar with a dance floor that had acts some of
the time, apparently. And there was jukebox up on the stage and
we did very smart sophisticated material for its time. We were in
that new wave of comics in the early sixties. I did an impression
of Mort Sahl. I did an impression of Lenny Bruce. We did a
beatnik bit. We did stuff that had a little bit of bite. A little
bit of social tinge to it. And we came into work that night and
the bar was all lined up with people in their work clothes, like cement
workers and construction guys and shit. And sitting at the tables
was, like, a softball team that had just come back from practice or a
game or something. And we had to do a f****** show with our
stuff. And during one of the nights, someone went up and turned
on the jukebox during our act.
KAZ: And what was the first gig where you thought to yourself, “Wow. This is going to work for me.”
CARLIN: No. There were plenty of nights where everything works
fine and those are the nights that you counted on when things didn’t go
well. If I did something in Greenwich Village and didn’t go over
well on a Friday night, I would just remember the last Friday
night. If Saturday sucked I would say “Last night was
great.” It’s always the audience. You have to carry that
around in your head. It’s always their fault.
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