The book’s weakness made me consider something that had never occurred to me, although I have been a fan of his work since the age of 10: Although Carlin spent roughly five decades performing with nothing but his brain, his mouth and a microphone, he was never much of a storyteller. So, as a chronicler of the working of his own mind, Carlin is terrific as a writer who can turn his encounters with other people into an engaging narrative, he leaves something to be desired. This is the stuff of a great comedy seminar. The book is very strong when it goes into his analyses of how he learned to speak his mind onstage and also of how he took timid backward steps following many of his eureka moments. When he finally went to rehab in 2004, just four years before his death at 71, it was for his addiction to “an opiate called wine-and-Vicodin.” But the Carlin of “Last Words” displays perfect recall of each step in his artistic development. As he says here, he smoked pot from boyhood on took acid to help him make his main breakthrough, from clean-cut comic to wild monologuist was an early adopter of Ritalin, which he used from his “straight years” onward and had a cocaine problem. Maybe Carlin’s huge intake of drugs had something to do with his apparently fuzzy memory. Tom Smothers, left, and Dick Smothers on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy House,” circa 1967-69. Carlin moved up from coffeehouses and nightclubs to bigger stages at the same time as Pryor, and the book mentions him here and there, but we come away with little idea of Carlin’s opinion of Pryor’s act or how he got it to work. Later on, he says the comedian Mort Sahl was one of the friends he used to hang around with in his Upper Manhattan neighborhood (known as “White Harlem”), but he says this only in passing, without bothering to bring Sahl to life on the page. Unfortunately, he neglects to tell us just what the joke was. Early on, for instance, Carlin describes a momentous occasion when, as a little boy, he made a witty joke that got a genuine laugh from his hard-to-please mother. It is a treasure for anyone who has ever felt in tune with this cheerfully misanthropic comedian.
“Last Words” has been assembled by its co-author, Tony Hendra, from his many hours of interviews with the book’s hero-narrator, as well as from autobiographical material left behind by Carlin. Furthermore, his late-period work, which included the gleeful “I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die,” was just as angry and relevant as anything he had come up with when he made his classic albums in the early ’70s. In the third act of his career, starting in the late ’70s, he put together 14 HBO specials featuring ambitious, painstakingly worded long-form routines.
As “Last Words” confirms, he had the verbal dexterity to convey his skewed thinking in rants that entertained his fans and took aim at nearly everyone else. He was blessed or else just overloaded with opinions on subjects ranging from the ridiculous (bellybutton lint) to the sublime (the existence of God). But it lacked the obsessive hacking away at unpleasant topics that would characterize the best Carlin material.
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In fact, it was not far from the smoothly professional routines that Jerry Seinfeld and other observational comics would later deliver.
There he stood, on the CBS stage, dressed in a crisp blue suit, hair neatly parted, as he launched into his much practiced “Indian Sergeant” bit. At the time, he was locked inside the good-boy phase of his career. As he notes in “Last Words,” the program was “the only comedy show that was actually taking a stand against the war,” but he ignored the chance it gave him to do something daring. When Carlin appeared on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” during its 1968-69 season, he was in a rut and he knew it. “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,’ ” by the veteran television critic David Bianculli, is a straightforward chronicle that charts the rise and fall of a charming double act cut down in its prime by annoyed CBS executives. Its strength lies in its documentation of how this great comedian made the trip from a happy-to-be-here entertainer of the 1960s to the salt-in-the-wound philosopher-comic of the 1970s and beyond. “Last Words,” a posthumous autobiography from George Carlin, is a jazzy, inward-looking piece of work. Two new books center on the collision between comedy and the old establishment.
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