Carlin has funny way of viewing life, even now
"I quit school after ninth grade. The bet paid off."
That might seem like a bit of an understatement, coming as it does from a comedian who has spent the better part of his 50 years in show business as America's premiere stand-up comedian. But George Carlin doesn't look at things the way most people do. If he did, he wouldn't be nearly as much fun to watch.
Carlin, who comes to the Wang Theatre tomorrow, knew early on that he wanted to turn his tendency to show off into a career. He wasn't sure exactly how, but he had an idea when he found a book called "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler, which traced the development of various creative tropes through three stages. The one that Carlin was drawn to, of course, was jester. A jester with ideas was part jester, part philosopher.
"If he does both of those things with dazzling and marvelous language, then he travels to the third panel and becomes a bit of a poet," remembers Carlin, speaking from the hills of Pennsylvania while on tour. "So without trying to sound too grand about myself, I think there's a touch of those other two things going on in this common, ordinary stand-up comic, which is what I am really."
Few who have seen Carlin perform would call him ordinary. He has been vulgar, profound, blasphemous, clever, offensive (and funny, of course), but never ordinary. Carlin performed his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad for Ya," live on March 1, racking up some of his strongest laughs in years with material about everything from boring conversations to the idea of human rights.
Contrast that with his last special, "Life Is Worth Losing," which featured a beat poem called "A Modern Man" and a performance piece about a wave of liquid hate cleansing the universe. Not exactly laugh-a-minute pieces, but provocative and sometimes even beautiful.
"Getting laughs alone is not the mission," says Carlin. "The real job is to engage people's imaginations and to capture them so that they're kind of like taking little trips with you. And sometimes those things are riddled with jokes, punch lines all over the place, and some of them are very broad. And other times it's largely exposition and it has a tour de force quality."
In about another year, Carlin will have a good handle on the hour of material that will make up his next special. He already has a couple of themes in mind, about a staging area in the afterlife and American consumerism. He'll dig through hundreds of his oft-mentioned files, tearing them apart and rebuilding them until he has something that feels right to his considerable instincts.
"These shows just kind of grow," he says. "There are things in the files that seem more ready, more pregnant, than other things do. There are things that excite me when I look at them; I get a little feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'd like to do that."
The fundamental contradiction of George Carlin is that he is at once intensely interested in but ultimately removed from the machinations of modern society. He is often mistaken for a cynic, but he'd rather think of it as looking at a bigger picture, taking into account science and history.
"This stuff happens in a moment of time, when you look at the age of the universe and given the age of the earth itself, and even the age since life has been around from the one-celled animal, this is a rather meaningless, short-lived drop in the bucket, and I just don't want to invest the importance in it that everyone does," he says. "I really don't feel like I have a stake in this [stuff]. It's so much of a show. I'm here for the performance. I want to see the show."
Around town
Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan's hour special "Something Mental" premieres on Comedy Central tonight. A DVD and CD of the special were released earlier this week. Chance Langton, whose new album is "I'm Better Than Them," plays the Ken Reid Show tonight at the Comedy Studio. Richard Lewis plays the Comedy Connection tonight and tomorrow. 