George Carlin.

• Author: Cooper, Marc
• Position: Stand-up comic - Interview

George Carlin as political and social philosopher? Why not? One would be hard-pressed to find anyone who so consistently, for more than three decades now, has stood before the public, in venues both small and global, to tell so many dirty and ugly and hilarious truths about the way we Americans live. Or pretend to live.

Carlin's arc has been impressive. From frat-boy radio shtick in the early '60s, to a clean-cut stand-up comic, to a doper-friendly hippie in the '70s, Carlin's persona has morphed again today into a curmudgeonly bad conscience for a society that he sees as ill with consumerism and self-satisfaction.

Most famous for his routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," Carlin has eighteen comedy albums to his name, four of them gold. He has performed eleven solo HBO comedy specials. His 1997 book, Brain Droppings (Hyperion), spent forty weeks on The New York Times bestsellers' list, and his new book, Napalm & Silly Putty (Hyperion), is number one on that list today.

Now at age sixty-four, Carlin is not so much a comedian as a performance artist who toils endlessly at his task. Performing several nights a week on the road, he spends months at a time carefully honing his new material that he will eventually use on HBO.

I caught up with Carlin a couple of times over the last several months, and here are some excerpts.

Q: What is the relationship between napalm and Silly Putty?.

George Carlin: Well, there are two reasons it's the title of the book. One, it's always sort of amused me that mankind has been able to come up with a lot of things, two of them being napalm which is a jellied substance that burns the skin and kills--and Silly Putty, which is something that you can press onto a comic and see a backwards picture of Popeye. And somewhere between these two extremes lies our truth. And I don't know how good we are at pursuing it. That's just sort of an oddball title, but it also describes kind of the two extremes of my own performing and writing personality. I have things that are strident and confrontational, and I have a lot of things that are childlike and innocent and sort of sweet. So, somewhere in between lies the middle of me.

Q: What can you do in a book that you can't do on stage?

Carlin: Things occur to me that are not all useful for stand-up, just nice observations that by themselves would have no place in the stand-up show. And there are some things in the book that are altered somewhat for the page--the ear and the eye kind of enjoy things differently. It's just a matter of my finding out in the last ten years that I actually was a writer who had the ability to perform his own work as opposed to a comedian who wrote his own material. So that really made me happy and changed my whole perspective.

Q: One of the fascinations that you have, whether it's on the page or on the stage, is with the English language, its use, perversion. This must be a very rich time when you've got a President who so mangles the English language.

Carlin: I think he's an imbecile, and it's just wonderful because the American public kind of gets what it deserves, and I think they deserve this one.

Q: You argue in your new book that language is more often than not a tool for keeping knowledge from people.

Carlin: By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. If we could read each other's minds, this would be a horror show. This stuff we call society would really be interesting. So we kind of shape our truths as we speak them. We fashion things to suit the occasion or the person or our own needs in the moment.

Q: How cynical or pessimistic are you about politics in general?

Carlin: I'm certainly a skeptic. I always quibble with people. I like to split hairs. And I quibble with people who say, "Well, you're cynical." And I know there's a second and third definition of cynical where my stuff fits. But to me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups. And the belief that there's a man in the sky watching us, watching everything we do, is so ingrained: First thing they do is tell you there's an invisible man in the sky who's going to march you down to a burning place if he doesn't like you. If they can get you to believe that, it's all over. Before you're six years old, they've got you thinking that, they've got you forever on anything else they want. There's no real education. It's an indoctrination training little producers of goods who will also be consumers of goods. Some will be on the producer side, and more will be on the consumer side. But you're all being trained to be a part of this big circle of goods being pumped out and everyone buying them and everyone going to work to help make more of them for other people to buy.

I've given up on the whole human species. I think a big, good-sized...