Last Words

by George Carlin

  Boulevard before he did. Of course, he starred in When Harry Met

  Sally . . . a couple of years later and took off. Still, for that one moment, fuck him.

  I had a ball making Outrageous Fortune; it was the kind of belonging I'd always longed for. Part of a group I wanted to be part of.

  It's a cliche that's been used to death, but there is a family feeling

  when you work with people on an artistic project for four, six, eight

  weeks; my work wasn't even that long and I still felt it. Like being at

  camp with good friends and there's this little ashtray you're all making together..,

  I played—of course—a burned-out hippie who's an alcoholic and

  lives on an Indian reservation and hustles tourists. The part's not

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  huge but the impact is great because in a way he's the hero—he

  saves the whole situation they get into. I played a fairly broad character and I had just a terrific experience, doing my homework, coming in prepared, working with the other actors, going for those little

  shadings. It was everything I ' d hoped it would be, and it led to Bill

  & Ted's Excellent Adventure a couple of years later, and then a good

  role in The Prince of Tides and more recently Dogma and Jersey

  Girl with Kevin Smith. I've always had that same feeling of belonging, working with friends, and enjoying the counterpunching with

  them. A dream that in a nice little way actually came true. Even if I

  never did become Jack Lemmon the Second.

  My new direction was slowly making itself known to me—by the

  reading I was choosing and the things I was tearing out and circling

  in periodicals. I was beginning to keep what amounted to a journal

  in another form: a record of my reactions to issues.

  Every day I take a lot of notes. And the notes go into files in various categories. They can be a sentence, a word, an idea, two things

  that connect or contrast, an afterthought, a neat phrase. Something

  I can add to something in a given file; maybe these go together,

  maybe it could start like this . . . or something that starts an entirely

  new file. It's an incessant process.

  What often happens with these notes is that there's a period of

  months when they tend in a certain direction or they're about certain topics. I don't review them that often but I add to them all the

  time, so when I finally take time to look them over, I get a kind of

  objective view of what my mind really wants to produce.

  In the mideighties the notes began to be almost exclusively about

  issues: capital punishment, rich and poor, abortion, government

  corruption, official euphemisms, the crimes of those business suits I

  sat next to on planes. The number of notes about department stores

  or dogs and cats or driving habits or airlines began to diminish.

  (Those files were fairly fat anyway.) My mind and heart said, "This

  is what we're doing now." And it would be new, a new direction, a

  new sound.

  There was a familiarity to these feelings of anticipation. It was

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  I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!

  how I'd felt in the formative stages of Class Clown and Occupation:

  Foole. I knew—just as I had then—that this new material would flow

  easily and naturally. It had been stored up and was already halfway

  formed or ready to start forming. It had a life of its own. My process

  always works like that. I review a file and say, "There's a lot of good

  stuff in here, but I don't feel this bursting out of my chest yet." I look

  at another and I get excited: "This shit's going to be GOOD! Can't

  wait till they hear THIS!"

  But something else was happening that had never happened before. Previously my notes and ideas came together the way galaxies

  do: they just naturally clumped. They clumped simply because they

  were related—an extended family of ideas around a general topic.

  Now they were parts that fit and functioned together, which I then

  gradually formed into a whole. My writing was getting more disciplined, more consciously crafting language and structure. I had that

  constant laboratory of performance to test things, to strip away what

  wasn't needed or didn't work. I was taking the first tentative steps

  toward comedy as art.

  The 1986 HBO show, Playin with Your Head, has a piece called

  "Hello-Goodbye," which is about the ways we say hello and goodbye

  to one another. The mature voice hadn't evolved fully, but it had

  pace and urgency and verbal fireworks.

  The end of it is "Love and Regards," which in a way is an outgrowth of S t u f f , narrowly focusing on one word or phrase—treating

  the trivial as a matter of great significance. The piece is about the

  implications of trivial phrases like "Give my love to so-and-so," all in

  the form of almost legalistic questions:

  Think of the awesome responsibility of carrying one persons love

  to another person. If you don't encounter that person, can you

  unburden yourself of the love by giving it to someone else? Even

  to someone who doesn't know the original person? Does the law

  allow them to accept it? Does the law allow you to transport the

  love? Especially across state lines? What form should the actual

  delivery of the love take, whether or not the person is the intended

  recipient? Can you tongue-kiss them? What if they're gay?

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  It was more an exercise in form than a piece with a particular point,

  but my mind was beginning to work differently. With my first transformation it was exciting just to speak to my audience one-on-one

  instead of performing impersonally in front of them—to confide in

  them who the internal me really was, share insights with them, be

  their friend.

  Now I was driven by a different need: to convey things about the

  external world—or my version of it. Lead them logically or apparently logically to conclude that my version was correct. Take them

  step-by-step to the place I wanted them to be.

  There was a long piece called "Sports." Once again it had no

  social or political aim—that would come—but it had a new tone and

  approach: definitive, forceful and also reflecting a related theme

  that was showing up more and more in my notes: violence.

  It began with suggestions on how to improve major sports by

  guaranteeing serious injury: in football, you'd have the entire fortyfive-man squad play all the time and leave the injured on the field.

  In baseball, if the pitcher hit the batter with the ball he'd be out, and

  the outfield would contain randomly placed landmines. In basketball, there'd be a two-second shot clock and you'd score twenty-five

  points for any shot that went in the basket off another guy's head.

  I set out to prove that most other sports weren't sports—another

  exercise in logically proving the opposite of conventional wisdom.

  For instance: Swimming is simply a way to keep from drowning,

  so it can't be considered a sport. Having to rent the shoes prevents

  bowling from being one. As for tennis, what is it really but Ping-Pong

  played while standing on the table? And then there was g o l f . Here the

  point was less that golf wasn't a sport than how inane it is to hit a ball

  with a stick, then walk after it, then hit it again. Wa
tching flies fuck is

  a lot more stimulating.

  The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be

  to be heard above the din. This was a conscious thought—that I'd

  better raise the level of my voice and therefore the intensity of my

  metaphors and images and words and topics to get and keep people's

  attention.

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  I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!

  There was another reason to turn up the volume. There was a

  comedy boom in full swing during the eighties. I was always being

  told about the hot new guy or the hot new woman. I'd sometimes

  tense up internally, because you never know. It's like gunfighting, the Old West. New guy in town. Might be faster than you.

  I'm the big guy on the block, or at least one of them. So they're

  coming after me. I've always been very competitive about that. But

  they also come and go. So I was always slow to rush out and catch

  them; I didn't obsess about the competition as some guys do. But

  when a stand-up starts breaking from the pack, you have to check

  them out.

  Then one of three things happens. Either: NO THREAT! NO

  FUCKING THREAT AT ALL! Or: this guy is really good. But he's

  not on my block. So NO THREAT either.

  Or: WHOOOA!

  Sam Kinison was a Whoooa!

  When he started catching fire in the second half of the eighties I

  remember saying to myself: I'm going to have to raise my voice. This

  motherfucker's GOOD! He's got ideas. He's loud. And he's on my

  block. Definitely on my block.

  I loved Sam's mind and the way he went after people and ideas:

  his piece about world hunger and the Ethiopians—"GO LIVE

  WHERE THE FOOD IS!"-that was something I'd like to have

  written. Without wanting to wipe him out, I had to raise my level to

  where I wasn't lost in his dust.

  Be smarter. Be louder. Be on my fucking toes. And though the

  general proliferation of comedians presented no threat either, the

  sheer numbers that were happening, the sheer fact that there was a

  comedy boom, was a spur. You have to run a little faster, show 'em

  why you're out in front. It's not the accumulated credits, George, not

  the years you've put in. It's what did you do last week.

  My overall reaction to the Reagan years was one of storing up

  ammunition. Arming myself and storing the armaments away for

  use later on. I knew this was happening, because I could see the

  files taking shape, acquiring real structure, meaning and weight.

  And they were getting fatter and fatter. Before long I was going

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  to be able to back up the things I really wanted to say, the positions I wanted to take. I knew now what I was for and against and I

  knew why.

  The 1988 HBO show, What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, was the

  first use of the stored armaments, the first time that this newfound

  attention to structure met up with a heightened political sense:

  I haven't seen this many people gathered in one place since they

  took the group photo of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the

  Reagan administration. 225 of them so far. 225 different people

  in Ronald Reagan's administration have either been fired, ar-

  rested, indicted or convicted... of either breaking the law or

  violating the ethics code. Edwin Meese alone has been investi-

  gated by three separate special prosecutors and there's a fourth

  one waiting for him in Washington right now. Three separate

  special prosecutors have had to look into the activities of the at-

  torney general! And the attorney general is the nations leading

  LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICER! This is what you gotta re-

  member. This is the Ronald Reagan administration—these are

  the LAW AND ORDER people. These are the people who are

  against street crime. They want to put street criminals in jail

  to make l i f e safer for business criminals. They're against street

  crime so long as it isn't WALL Street.

  The Supreme Court decided about a year ago that it's okay to

  put people in jail if we just THINK they're going to commit a

  crime. It's called preventive detention. All you gotta do is just

  THINK they're gonna commit a crime. Well, if we'd known this

  seven or eight years ago we coulda put a bunch of these Repub-

  lican motherfuckers directly into PRISON! Put 'em in the joint

  where they belong and we could've saved the cost of putting these

  country-club, pinheaded assholes ON TRIAL! Another thing

  you gotta remember is these were the people who were elected

  with the help of the Moral Majority. And the Teamsters Union.

  That's a good combination: organized religion and organized

  crime working together to build a better America!

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  I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!

  . . . I'm the first to say it's a great country, but it's a STRANGE

  CULTURE. This has got to be the only country in the world

  that could come up with a disease like BULIMIA. Where some

  people have no food at all and some people eat a nourishing

  meal and then PUKE IT UP INTENTIONALLY! Where to-

  bacco kills 400,000 people a year but they ban artificial sweet-

  eners! BECAUSE A RAT DIED! And now they're thinking of

  banning toy guns-but they're KEEPING THE FUCKING

  REAL ONES!

  It'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 In-

  dian 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 o f f and drop nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese

  people. You know what the motto of this country oughtta be?

  You give us a co/or-WE'LL WIPE IT OUT!

  You've got to be evenhanded though. Nothing like road rage for

  injecting a little populist class warfare:

  . . . And then of course, the three most puke-inducing words that

  man has yet come up with: BABY ON BOARD! I don't know

  what yuppie cocksucker thought of that! BABY ON BOARD—

  who gives A FUCK? I certainly don't! You know what these

  morons are actually saying to you, don't you? We know you're

  a shitty driver, but our baby is nearby and we expect you to

  straighten up for a little while! You know what I do? I run 'em

  into a goddam utility pole! Run 'em into a fucking tree! Bounce

  that kid around a little bit!! Let him grow up with a sense of real-

  ity, for Chrissakes!

  I'm supposed to alter my driving habits because some woman

  forgot to put her diaphragm in? Isn't that nice? Baby on Board!

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  Child in Car! Don't tell me your troubles, ladyl Why don't you put

  up an honest sign: ASSHOLE AT THE WHEEL! They don't

  sell many of those, do they? Nah—they give them away free with

  VOLVOS and AUDIS! And SAAAAABS! Some of these mo-

  rons have SAAAAAAABS! "We bought a SAAAAAAAAAB!"

  Well, what did you
buy a Swedish piece of shit like that for? "It's

  a safe car." 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!

  WELL, I GET PISSED, GOD-DAM-IT!!!!

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  WORKING RAGEAHOLIC

  The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the

  presentation of my ideas is because I see that what's happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not

  subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty,

  the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger,

  discrimination. This isn't the violence of some guy opening fire

  with an Uzi in a McDonald's and forty people are dead. The real

  violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over,

  multiplied a millionfold.

  And it is not sufficient to have a "clever riposte"! A witty song by

  the Capitol Steps, "Fa la la, oh dear, the killing, hey dilly dilly dilly!"

  doesn't do it for me.

  "FUCK YOU, COCKSUCKERS!" is my approach. To the world,

  to the leadership. When are we going to start assassinating the right

  people in this country? (Why is it, by the way, that the right-wing

  guys assassins have tried to shoot survived? Like Wallace and Reagan? Don't we have any marksmen on our side?)

  The 1990 and 1992 HBO shows were when things really gelled.

  1990 was the first time that the improvement in my new strengths in

  writing met up solidly with my heightened political sense. It wasn't a

  Jammin' in New York, but it was a good step beyond what happened

  in '88, as '88 had been beyond '86.

  One reason may have been—don't laugh—that 1990 and '88

  were both shot in New Jersey. Yeah, kiss-her-where-it-smells New

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  Jersey. We'd finally discovered not to do HBO shows on the West

  Coast. Californian audiences just sit there trying to decide whether

  they're going to go to the beach tomorrow or Magic Mountain. Not

  a lot of concentrated energy in a Los Angeles audience.