In twentieth-century America, he went looking for the sublime and found only the ridiculous. How could any thinking person see it otherwise? Born on the eve of World War II, he lived the Atomic Age up close, working on bomber jets while serving in the U.S. Air Force. He experienced the cultural upheaval of the 1960s from its epicenter, and he lived long enough to experience the absurd excess, and the inevitable, colossal hangover, of the end of the American century.

It’s called the American Dream, he said, because you have to be asleep to believe it. In his lifetime, laughter seemed like the only sane response. So George Carlin set about studying it and creating it. For fifty years he may well have produced more laughs than any other human being.

He also rubbed his share of people the wrong way. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been doing it right. Carlin knew that comedy is meant to shock. Funny doesn’t happen without a sense of surprise. And audacity—the courage to say what you mean—is critical to the art of making people laugh. Whether speaking truth to the powerful or telling fart jokes, comedians, by their very nature, deal in taboo.

Comedy bends the rules. Humor, wrote an early scholar of American popular culture, is “a lawless element.” Every comedian is “a scofflaw,” wrote another, “who could be charged with breaking and entering—with breaking society’s rules and restrictions, and with entering people’s psyches.”

George Carlin was a natural born transgressor. He saw where the line had been drawn, and he leaped. If he spotted a sacred cow—God, country, children—he went cow-tipping. Raised on Spike Jones anarchy and Beat Generation rebellion, he heard it every time he got into hot water, with the nuns and priests, the owner of the corner drugstore, his commanding officers: “What are you, a comedian?”

Yes, he was. Wholly devoted to the craft, he made every kind of comedy his own. Some comedians do self-deprecation. Some do surrealism. Some do political humor or dick jokes, impressions or observations. Carlin did it all. He questioned everything, from the existence of God and the authority of government, to the military and the police, to the accuracy of the phrase “shelled peanuts”: “If you’re clothed, you have clothes, so if you’re shelled, you should have shells.” “Every comedian does a little George,” Jerry Seinfeld wrote in the
New York Times
upon Carlin’s death. “I’ve heard it my whole career: ‘Carlin does it,’ ‘Carlin already did it,’ ‘Carlin did it eight years ago.’”

Carlin often said there were three main elements to his comedy: the “little world” of everyday experience (“kids, pets, driving, the stores, television commercials”); the big, unanswerable questions, such as race, war, government, big business, religion, and the mysteries of the universe; and the English language, with all its quirks and frustrations (“lingo and faddish trendy buzzwords and catch phrases and Americanisms”). In fact, that covers just about everything under the sun.

Just as no topic was off-limits for Carlin, no style of comedy was beyond his grasp. He was equally enamored of hokey puns (“My back hurts; I think I over-schlepped”) and sly brainteasers. (“If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”) He did street corner insults and Zen non sequiturs. He changed voices, made sound effects, whistled, sang, stuck out his tongue and blew raspberries. He was an outstanding physical comedian, too, with enough rubbery faces and herky-jerky gestures to do an entire set in mime.

Many comedians have distinctive voices, but only a few are fortunate enough to develop one that’s never been heard. George Carlin’s voice was unmistakable. In his younger years he had the mellow, quizzical tone of a perpetually amused pot smoker. Later it aged into a hard-earned rasp. Throughout his various stages, this one-of-a-kind voice—quintessential New Yorker, representative hippie, reflexive contrarian—spoke for a nation of dissatisfied idealists and for himself alone.

Timing is essential to comedy, and Carlin’s personal timing could not have been more precise. “The comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art,” wrote Henri Bergson in his famous essay on laughter. Born during the Golden Age of Radio, Carlin devoted more time to reading
Mad
magazine (established 1952) than to his Latin and algebra lessons. The stand-up comedy rebirth of the 1950s, when performers including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Gregory demolished the old order of vaudevillian shtick, gave his early career its context. And Carlin was at that crucial age of transformation—thirty-three—when he found he could no longer ignore the lure of the countercultural revolution. Comedy, as the proud autodidact knew better than anyone, is a constant voyage of discovery.

Picking up the baton from the martyred Lenny Bruce, he remade stand-up, once the trade of strip-club flunkies in cheap tuxedos, for the rock ’n’ roll crowd. He took it to theaters, turning the art of the joke into a concert event. Then he brought his provocative routines into the home, rejuvenating his career with an association with HBO that would last three decades. Some comedians can stretch a halfhour’s worth of one-liners to last a lifetime. Carlin wrote an hour of new material for each HBO show, roughly every two years. Younger comedians are awestruck by the sheer vastness of his productivity. No one else came close.

For most comics, stand-up is a means to an end. In the 1980s, ten solid minutes got more than a few their own sitcoms. In the age of television, Carlin was a rare creature—a comedian for whom stand-up comedy was the mountaintop. “I found out that it was an honest craft, and in fact, that art was involved,” he said.

Like a master craftsman, Carlin worked with words. He held them up to the light. He inspected them, rubbed them, and whittled them. He worshipped them, in a way that he felt precious few products of the human mind deserved to be worshipped.

His most famous routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” branded him as a vulgarian, a foul-mouthed comic who worked “dirty.” But the routine was much more than mere titillation. It was an airtight example of Carlin’s belief in the one thing he truly believed in—the power of reason. Why, exactly, are these few words—out of 400,000 in the English language—off-limits? Who are they hurting, and how? When Carlin reserved the right to use the whole language, he sparked a debate about censorship that brought his seven magic words—
shit
,
piss
,
fuck
,
cunt
,
cocksucker
,
motherfucker
, and
tits
—into the halls of the Supreme Court. Decades later, his questions are more relevant than ever in our media-saturated culture.

In his later years, the unruffled hippie became known for a certain irascibility. As he pointed out, laughter is our response to injustice. (“The human race has one really effective weapon,” said Mark Twain, “and that is laughter.”) The old shpritzers who played the Catskills told zingers about their mothers-in-law. He took the longer view. His targets were the massive institutions that supposedly have civilized the species.

To Carlin, American mediocrity was a real disappointment. We’ve sold our souls, he said, for cheap thrills and false beliefs. In his later years he cranked up the volume on his rants, writing darkly comic pieces about the fate of humanity. “I prefer seeing things the way they are,” he said, “not the way some people wish they were.” He became a kind of oracle of disaster, finding black humor in school shootings a few years before Columbine and in horrific calamities just before the planes hit the World Trade Center, and even presupposing the government bailouts of 2009 (“The Fund for the Rich and Powerful”).

Like a doctor searching for a swollen gland, he pressed on any subject that made people sensitive. At various times in his career it was the Catholic Church, bodily functions, the sanctity of children, the emptiness of our sense of entitlement. Many casual observers thought he grew angry in his later years. To Carlin, it was just an extended comic exercise: How far could he go? Comedy was a constant intellectual challenge, an endless reevaluation of received wisdom and group thinking. He genuinely liked individual people; it was their collective beliefs he couldn’t stand. “No matter how you care to define it,” he once said, “I do not identify with the local group.”

“How he stood above and apart from the world . . . observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulences of man!” another wicked American humorist once wrote of Mark Twain. “What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue!” When Carlin learned that he was to be honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor—five days before his death, as it turned out—much was made of the comparison between the comic and the writer for whom the award was named. But Carlin had at least as much in common with H. L. Mencken, originator of the above quote, the iconoclastic journalist who saw the rampant misuse of the English language as an all-too-perfect symbol for the dismayingly low standards of his culture. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” Mencken famously put it.

Few things, Twain felt, are as rare in American life as the act of a man speaking freely. Our constitutional commitment to free speech is a wonderful idea, in theory. In practice, however, we can speak freely only so long as we are willing to keep our most uncompromised thoughts to ourselves. Unequivocal free speech, Twain argued, is “the privilege of the dead.” The living are much too paralyzed by the potential social costs to dare utter “unpopular convictions.”

In a society inescapably inundated with evasions, false promises, phony manners, fine print, and outright lies, George Carlin never failed to say what he meant. “Just when I discovered the meaning of life,” he joked, “they changed it.” If the meaning of life is laughter, he changed it himself.

HEAVY MYSTERIES

T
he kid had a mouth on him, and he knew it. Young Georgie Carlin, a scrawny, buzz-cut New York City boy in striped shirts and rolled-up jeans, had predicted his professional life almost to the letter. Required to write a self-portrait in Sister Nina’s fifth-grade class, he had confidently explained that he would become a radio announcer, an impersonator, a stand-up comedian and, finally, an actor.

Now, barely into his twenties, he was in Boston, working as a board announcer at an easy-listening radio station. He read promos and sponsorships, patched through the various programs of the NBC radio network, and hosted an after-hours show featuring the “beautiful music” of Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. It was here that Carlin met Jack Burns, a fellow radio newcomer with whom, within a year, he would appear on
The Tonight Show
, doing comedy.

Boston was Carlin’s second city in radio. He’d broken in three years earlier while serving as a radar technician at Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, Louisiana. Hired in 1956 by an upstart rock ’n’ roll station with the call letters KJOE, he spun records on his own drive-time showcase,
Carlin’s Corner
. (He had his own zingy jingle: “
George, Carlin,
is on the air/The coolest record man anywhere!”) Although the Boston gig had a lower profile, it was in a bigger market. Each night at a quarter to seven the city’s archbishop, the stentorian Richard Cardinal Cushing, led the rosary for fifteen minutes, just before NBC’s
News on the Hour
.

One night Cardinal Cushing went on the air from his remote location with some spontaneous comments about the Little Sisters of the Poor. By the time he began praying the rosary, he’d fallen behind schedule. At 6:59 the cardinal was just midway through the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary. Carlin was on the edge of his seat, panicking about the news. There was only one thing to do. At seven o’clock on the nose, he pulled the cardinal’s feed and cut to the broadcast: “The NBC News, brought to you by Alka-Seltzer.”

Within minutes the phone rang in the studio. “I want to talk to the young man who took off the Holy Word of Gawd,” boomed Cardinal Cushing. Carlin, alone in the studio, nervously admitted he was that young man. Then he did something he wouldn’t do again for as long as he lived: He “hid behind the government,” as he recalled years later. He explained to the imposing clergyman that he was bound by law to follow the program log from the Federal Communications Commission. If he didn’t accommodate a network newscast and its paying advertisers, he could lose his job. It was the first, and decisively the last, time that George Carlin would take the side of the FCC. In the morning the station manager backed his junior staffer, telling the archbishop’s office he’d done the right thing.

The exoneration was short-lived. Weeks later Carlin took the station’s mobile news unit for the weekend and drove to his native New York to score some weed.

It was a fireable offense, and fired he was. So much for a career in Boston. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that he felt trapped by expectations. A decade after his apprenticeship in radio, just as he was becoming a prime-time television personality and nightclub headliner, he threw away his burgeoning success to pursue a seemingly quixotic vision of himself as a voice of the oozing counterculture. Throughout his performing life Carlin had run-ins with the tipsy crowds and heavy-handed moguls of Las Vegas, where top-shelf comedians could make big money in steady engagements as long as they played nice. When he finally landed a sitcom of his own, in the mid-1990s, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of it. Groucho Marx famously joked that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member. Carlin wasn’t joking. Catholic school, the Boy Scouts, the Air Force, the chummy world of network television—it didn’t take him long to recognize that his natural vantage point was from the outside.

HIS CAREER WAS BORN at age thirty-three, when he realized that his work was his life, that comedy could be more than just clowning: a calling. It was born during his first appearances on
The Tonight Show
,
Merv Griffin
, and
Ed Sullivan
; it was born on the stage of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, where Lenny Bruce had been arrested for saying the word
cocksucker
. Or it was born at age thirteen, when he discovered the skewed analytical benefits of smoking marijuana, or when Brother Conrad helped the budding voice artist purchase a primitive Webcor tape recorder, or even earlier than that, when his mother instilled in her second son a lifelong reverence for the dictionary.

In truth, his actual birth was a mistake. George Denis Patrick Carlin was conceived during a period of separation for his parents, a slick-talking newspaper advertising salesman named Patrick Carlin and an executive secretary named Mary Bearey. Patrick Carlin, the national advertising manager for the
Sun
newspaper, the conservative broadsheet then in head-to-head competition with the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune
, had previously worked at a couple of Philadelphia papers and done a stretch at the
New York Post
as well. He was an accomplished after-dinner speaker who won a nationwide Dale Carnegie public speaking contest in 1935. Throughout his life, George Carlin kept the mahogany gavel his father had been awarded in the contest. “He had a real line of shit, boy. He could talk your donkey’s ear off,” Carlin recalled. The winning speech, given two years before the birth of Patrick Carlin’s second son, was called “The Power of Mental Demand.”

Patrick Carlin, born in 1888 in Donegal, Ireland, was seventeen years older than Mary Bearey. They were married in 1930, and their son Patrick was born one year later. Though the man of the house was making good money during the Great Depression, averaging a thousand dollars a week in commissions (for three years in a row, he was the leading newspaper ad salesman in the country), he and his young bride fought bitterly over Mary’s “lace curtain” aspirations and Patrick’s prodigious drinking. Within a few years they were separated. By chance they met again in the summer of 1936. Patrick Carlin convinced his estranged wife to accompany him for the weekend to Rock-away Beach, in Queens, where they checked into their old getaway, Curley’s Atlas Hotel and Baths, along the oceanfront. There, as George Carlin often noted, the baby was conceived.

Mary contemplated having an abortion, going so far as to schedule an appointment for a D&C with a doctor in Gramercy Park. She’d been to see that doctor before; his code name, according to Carlin, was “Dr. Sunshine.” But fate, and superstition, intervened: Gazing at a painting on the wall in the waiting room, Mary became convinced she could see a likeness of her own mother, who had died six months earlier. “Let’s get out of here, Pat,” she said. “I’m going to have this kid.”

The impending birth of George Carlin brought on a short-lived reconciliation for the couple. But Patrick’s drinking was too much for Mary to take. “The Irish call it the curse,” Carlin said. “My mother called him a street angel and a house devil.” Two months after the delivery on May 12, 1937, Patrick Carlin arrived home at the family’s Riverside Drive apartment, having made his usual stop at an Upper Broadway watering hole en route. In the course of their latest argument, Mary wondered aloud why she should bother to set out crystal and fine china at dinnertime, if her husband was just going to stumble in three sheets to the wind every night. Enraged, Patrick Carlin took a tray of his wife’s place settings and chucked them out an open window.

Mary Carlin gathered up her boys and fled down the fire escape. Making their way through the back lots out to Broadway, they piled into a Packard owned by one of Mary’s brothers and headed out of town. When they returned, mother and sons moved from apartment to apartment in the neighborhood, trying to avoid confrontation with the boys’ father. “We ran for four years,” said Carlin. “I saw the fear in her when the doorbell would ring.” With four brothers living nearby and occasional escorts from sympathetic beat cops, Mary felt safe enough from physical harm, though she could not escape her husband’s intimidation.

He bid the boys a quiet farewell on one last visit; according to Carlin, he sang an emotional version of “The Rose of Tralee,” the traditional Irish ballad about the “lovely and fair” Mary, who won her beloved not with her beauty alone, but with “the truth in her eyes ever beaming.”

The young son understood from an early age that he took great pleasure in entertaining people. As a toddler he learned a few surefire attention-getters from his mother, who worked as secretary to the president of an advertising association, demonstrating the new dance craze called the Big Apple or mimicking Mae West (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”) for her friends in the office secretarial pool. When he was old enough, Carlin began sneaking onto the subway to meet his mother after work, where his impromptu performances for her colleagues sometimes earned him a dinner at the Automat in Times Square. “I noticed that this process of doing something for people pleased them, and you gained some feeling of approval from it,” he said. Approval, attention, applause, approbation: “All these
A
s that I never got in school, I got for acting out for people.”

Patrick Carlin died of a heart attack in 1945, when his youngest son was eight years old. It isn’t difficult to infer that his father’s absence helped shape the son’s lifelong skepticism about authority figures. “The thing is, I never really had issues with my father because I was so young,” he once said. “My brother hates his guts. I hate him by proxy, but I also love him by proxy.”

Almost six years older than George, brother Patrick was often out carousing. When Patrick came home at night, the younger Carlin sometimes lay in bed listening to his mother chastise him. Pat, Mary would say, was just like his father. Georgie was different. He had sensitivity. She vowed to “make something” of her youngest. From a young age Carlin recognized that he would have to contend with Mary Carlin’s smothering instinct. “I had to fight her off,” Carlin recalled. “And it made me stronger.”

With their mother working long hours—earning “a man’s salary,” she said—Carlin and his brother were often on their own in the apartment in which the family eventually settled, on 121st Street. Grant’s Tomb lay two blocks to the west. Morningside Heights, ensconced alongside Spanish Harlem to the east and the main economic artery of black Harlem, 125th Street, was an ethnically eclectic neighborhood, “wonderfully alive and vibrant,” as Carlin recalled. “Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Irish.” In warm weather the smells of spicy cooking and the sounds of imported music hung in the air. The area was also home to an impressive array of institutions, including Columbia University, the Manhattan School of Music, the Union Theological Seminary, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, all of which earned it the nickname “the Acropolis of New York.” Carlin and his Irish friends preferred to call the neighborhood “White Harlem,” which sounded tougher than Morningside Heights.

With Patrick out on the streets, George would fix himself a simple dinner, a hamburger or some spaghetti, and exercise his considerable imagination with the radio and his comic books and magazines. Far from being lonely, he had lifelong blissful memories of this youthful independence. Answering a question about when and where he was happiest, he once replied, “Home alone after school, before my mother got home from work.” Like thousands of kids his age at the time, he devoured the humor magazines that were becoming big business by the late 1940s.
Ballyhoo
was a groundbreaking parody magazine for kids, packed with advertising spoofs that prefigured the content of dozens of wisecracking titles to come. Another favorite,
Thousand Jokes
, was a monthly collection of single-panel gag cartoons. Carlin’s Aunt Aggie worked for William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, the newspaper company that produced
Puck
, the weekly funny pages. Each week she brought her nephew the insert that would run four weeks later. His insider status gave him great leverage on the playground, where he convinced gullible schoolmates that he could predict the storylines of their favorite comics.

He dog-eared a copy of
Esar’s Comic Dictionary
, a collection of punning definitions by the humorist Evan Esar. In the author’s world, a cynic was “a man bored with sinning”; faith was “the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate”; and freedom was “the ability to do as you please without considering anyone except the wife, boss, police, neighbors and the government.”

Then there was
Mad
, the legendary sarcastic omnibus magazine, which Carlin started reading in its original comic book format. “Humor in a Jugular Vein,” read a banner on the cover of the debut issue in August 1952. With its direct appeals to kids’ inherent skepticism,
Mad
“was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren’t alone,” wrote the
New York Times
on the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. “There were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles.” Another admirer wrote that the magazine gave the writer and countless peers

a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements. . . . It prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual human beings charged with my care ever bothered to.

The radio gave Carlin another world in which his mind could roam. He was enthralled by the adventures of
The Lone Ranger
, and he became a big fan of
Fibber McGee and Molly
. Broadcast on NBC at 9:30 on Tuesday nights, the show was a ratings champion by Carlin’s grammar-school years. Jim Jordan and his wife, Marian Driscoll, played the title characters, the scheming, yarn-spinning knucklehead McGee and his ever-patronizing companion. Another popular program,
The Aldrich Family
, prefigured the family-oriented situation comedies of television, following the mild misadventures of young Henry Aldrich and his chum, Homer Brown, who closed each show by singing a jingle from their sponsor, Jell-O. “That was my family, the people on the radio,” Carlin recalled. “No cousins, no grandparents.”

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