Editor’s Choice
Published: November 15, 2009, 12:30 am
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Last Words by George Carlin with Tony Hendra; Free Press, 294 pages ($26.99). You had to see one of those late-life George Carlin specials on HBO to fully understand why his fellow stand-up comedians worshipped him. Carlin was putting the pedal to the metal onstage just about to the end of his life, heart condition be damned. He died at 71 in June 2008, but he was still as brilliant—and sometimes as astonishing—as any comic out there, including those 40 and 50 years younger.
It turns out that even as his stand-up appearances slowed down, he was working on two other major long-term projects—a “sortabiography” with comedy writer Tony Hendra (embattled author of “Father Joe”) and a possible one-man show on Broadway to be made of it. Obviously, Hendra’s 2004 deflection of a grown daughter’s charges of childhood sexual abuse helped stall this book.
This “sortabiography” was to be different from his best-selling humor books—Carlin’s own story, full of riotous jokes, gloriously indiscreet asides (wait until you read Carlin on “The Mike Douglas Show,” which was produced, at the time, by no less than Fox News’ Roger Ailes) and a great many brutal facts about Being George Carlin that most of us spent years not thinking about. He was, after all, different from those who had emerged just before him— Shelley Berman, Nichols and May, Mort Sahl, etc. He and his first partner Jack Burns, he writes, “weren’t what was becoming a standard type. We weren’t clean and campus-bred. We were tough, rough-edge Irish kids. In nice suits, with what seemed like a decent vocabulary and a bit of a social conscience, but cut from a coarser cloth.”
It’s the same cloth this “sortabiography” is cut from and it’s sort of a great memoir from one of the handful of comedians almost anyone would want to write one. It’s entertaining, brutally candid and full of Carlin’s black wisdom and pitiless frankness.— Jeff Simon
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