Read: 2025-12-06
Recommend: 6/10
George Carlin is another creative person who struggled with drugs and eventually received help from Alcoholics Anonymous.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
My first ever public appearance! A real charge! Having thirty people (okay, six-year-olds, but they had pulses) sit without fidgeting and watch something you were doing—which they couldn’t do—was intensely satisfying. Having them applaud at the end, even though many had difficulty bringing their hands together with any accuracy, produced an odd sense of power. It was an intoxicant. As would be the case with many intoxicants, I immediately wanted more.
But the exciting thing was the discovery that I could create funny dialogue for these characters and voices. Plenty of people can do imitations, lots of kids can mimic grown-ups. The real power is in making up stuff for your impressions to say. And the most exciting thing of all was to try this stuff on my mother and have it work. I knew her laugh and I knew when it was sincere. It felt great to be able to say, in answer to her question “Where did you hear that?” “I made it up.”
There was additional pressure: the studio audience knew the show was live too. They knew there was a chance they might be on television, sitting in front of the picture of Joe Louis or Jimmy Cagney or some other celebrity Ed wrote about in his stupid column. Half the audience had special invitations. It was a perk. If you were a Lincoln Mercury dealer on Long Island you got ten tickets and you brought people you wanted to impress. Everybody had their best things on. The audience was on display as much as you were. When an audience is potentially on display, they’re very inhibited. They’re reluctant to let go. So laughter, which is a natural, spontaneous thing, must be avoided. They think: “I’ll wait and make sure that if I laugh, it’s something everyone’s laughing at. That I’m right in with the crowd. Because if I start roaring, ‘Hahaha- ohhhahaaahaaaa-God-oh-fuck-that’s-funny,’ and no one else does, I’ll embarrass the shit out of myself.” Not good for comedy.
Perhaps even then, in the wisdom of her four years on earth, she sensed that I was on a treadmill to nowhere. Without a clue how to get off.
I once said, I always had long hair—only I used to keep it inside my head.
They condemn you for idolizing Lenny Bruce—how little they really know what you see in his courage, sincerity and daring. Please George insist on being yourself. Don’t let anyone change you or silence you.
I had money. I felt terrific. So why not get more cocaine? To do Class Clown, which I recorded on May 27, 1972, I had to say to myself, “I want to be sharp and clean and clear tonight. No cocaine.” My diction on it is remarkably lucid. In other words, I was already using enough cocaine that I had to think consciously about not using it to record an album. But it was a great time. I felt so free. So flush. It was such a catharsis, such a coming to terms, such a reward. It was proof that I was right—fuck you people, look at this! Not only are they going for it—it’s GOOD too! I needn’t have been worried about success. Lily Tomlin once said, “I worry about being a success in a mediocre world,” and I’d always been fearful that if I had mass appeal I wouldn’t have substance. So I was happy that I had substance and yet was getting all this attention, approval, applause, approbation, affirmation—all those A’s I never got in school.
Kids are always the giveaway. “Young sons.” “Youths in wheelchairs.” The main reason to outlaw indecency, wrote Justice Stevens in his majority opinion, is that “broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children, even those too young to read.” Which in turn means that the only thing you can safely broadcast anytime, anywhere, in any medium, is material that’s suitable for kids. Could this be why our society shows so many signs of arrested development?
Even without visions, there was the deadly treadmill of staying awake and taking more drugs to try to put off the time when you would finally have to go to sleep and running out and going through the rigamarole of getting more and taking it and putting off sleeptime and then realizing that you couldn’t go any further. It would all just come crashing down and you’d go into this deep, deep sleep.
“Why is it that the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”
t’s the old American double standard. And of course we’re founded on the double standard. That’s our history. This country was founded by slave owners WHO WANTED TO BE FREE! So they killed a lot of English white people in order to continue owning their black African people so they could kill the red Indian people and move west to steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place for their planes to take off and drop nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country oughtta be? You give us a color—WE’LL WIPE IT OUT!
Some of these people think that by buying a safe car it excuses them from the responsibility of actually having to learn to DRIVE THE FUCKING THING! First you learn to DRIVE! THEN you buy your safe car!
But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever more herself or himself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, I own them. That’s one of the things—maybe the most important—I seek by following this path: to have that power.