The new HBO documentary George Carlin’s American Dream is a portrait of a man who misunderstood himself and his contribution to stand-up.
The new HBO documentary George Carlin’s American Dream is a portrait of a man who misunderstood himself and his contribution to stand-up.
W e tend not to know as much about the personal lives and methods of comedians as we do about those of movie stars or rock gods, so Judd Apatow is doing the public an important service as a documentarian of comedy. In two volumes of interviews with comics and his 2018 HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, Apatow has done much to illuminate the art form and its practitioners, and his new George Carlin documentary is another vital document.
George Carlin’s American Dream, a two-part HBO movie, takes its title from what the directors, Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, present as a chillingly dead-on observation at the tail end of its four-hour running time: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it,” Carlin used to say. Right? It’s funny ’cause it’s . . . hey, wait a sec.
Carlin grew up in Manhattan with a single mom who worked as a secretary. He didn’t know his abusive dad, who died when he was eight. He dropped out of school after the ninth grade, enlisted in the Air Force, and in middle age . . . bought a private plane so he could snort as much cocaine as he liked without being bothered. If starting with nothing and winding up getting paid so many millions to talk that you can afford to get blasted on the devil’s dandruff while zooming around the country on your own jet doesn’t stir you to marvel, “Is this a great country or what?” I don’t know what will.
Carlin was perhaps our most vigorous chronicler of hypocrisy, but had a difficult time detecting his own. He was the living embodiment of possibility, meritocracy — the wide-open American system. Yet in later years, he’d wail that, “The system is rigged!” Is it? It seems to me that people generally get what their talents and work ethic add up to. Carlin never really had a job besides being an entertainer; at 18, when he was in the Air Force in Louisiana, he landed a gig as a deejay, and he was still performing right up until he died in 2008.
Apatow, Bonfiglio, and the comedians (Stephen Colbert, Steven Wright, W. Kamau Bell, Paul Provenza) who provide reflections on what Carlin meant to them throughout the film strike an attitude somewhere between adoring and reverent. But it’s the candid, often bleak recollections of Carlin’s daughter and sole heir Kelly that truly reveal the man. He considered his stage self to be the full actualization of who he was as a human being, and through Kelly’s eyes we see the darkness on both sides.
Born in 1937 in Manhattan to Irish parents, Carlin had almost no contact with his father, who was so tyrannical and angry that his mom Mary once took her older son Patrick Jr. with her and hid in upstate New York. The whole family had the Irish fluency of language, and George’s dad was a prize-winning speaker. His mom was an equally gifted drama queen who mostly complained about how George disappointed her.
Carlin began to chafe at authority when he was in Catholic school, where he was the class clown and mimic, and left home as soon as he turned 17. Deejaying led to comedy, and while on tour in Ohio he met and fell in love with Brenda Hosbrook, whom he married within a few weeks. Carlin wrote her many charming letters, and we get to read some of them on screen, as the Carlins were wonderful archivists of their lives. The pair would remain together until she died of liver cancer in 1997.
But as Kelly explains, George’s negligence had a traumatizing effect on Brenda. The couple settled in Los Angeles, where she didn’t know anyone, and she grew isolated and fragile while home alone. He forbade her to get a job, then went on the road for long periods of time. She took to drink, and he let the problem get worse and worse. She’d be so wasted in the morning that Carlin had to hire a driver to take little Kelly to school.
Throughout the Sixties, Carlin’s stock rose. Columnists praised his clean-cut looks, his sharp suits and skinny ties, and his anodyne humor. By the end of the decade, he was earning $250,000 a year and appearing on sitcoms and talk shows. His star-making turn — Apatow and Bonfiglio have some jaw-dropping clips of this — came in 1966, when he and Richard Pryor appeared in baggy sweaters on a hokey TV show called the Kraft Summer Musical Hall, hosted by John Davidson. The checkerboard factory doesn’t contain as many squares as the show. For those, like me, who are too young to remember Carlin’s “straight” years, seeing his Sixties look is as unreal as catching Jerry Seinfeld done up like Jerry Garcia.
Internally, Carlin was seething at his own tapioca-soft material. He dropped acid, spent a night smashing things, and declared he was living a lie. Carlin had seen Lenny Bruce, and even been arrested alongside him, for failing to show ID to the police who were busting the older comic for obscenity. And like many other Boomers and their older siblings, he joined the counterculture. He’d been smoking pot since he was a teen and was ardently progressive in his politics, so this amounted to simply dropping the façade, but it was a major career risk. Bette Midler — his opening act for the evening — recalls how Carlin did a bit in “Squaresville, Wis.,” defending Muhammad Ali for refusing to be drafted when the boxer was one of the most hated men in the country. The atmosphere turned so hostile that Carlin was escorted out before his scheduled second show.
In 1970, a few years after the rock stars ditched the suits and grew their hair out, so did Carlin. Bearded and long-haired, he started working in T-shirts and jean jackets. A newspaper headline from the time blared: “George Carlin has freaked, folks.” Middle-aged nightclub fans were aghast. His annual income plummeted to $12,000. He had to find a new audience to go with his new, Bruce-like material, but at the time standup was a subset of the nightclub circuit and not set up to attract the Woodstock generation. Luckily, Carlin’s pal Flip Wilson started a comedy-counterculture record label on which R-rated language was allowed, and Carlin began to accumulate gold records and rebuild his fan base.
Carlin adopted Bruce’s revolutionary style of wrapping jokes around stinging social commentary and perfected it. His contempt for religion inspired some cutting observations, and he became a cause célèbre in 1972 with a landmark bit, “Seven words you can never say on television.” That year, in Milwaukee, he was one of the last people in America to be arrested for saying such words in a public performance — charged with “disorderly conduct profanity,” he was acquitted at trial. Meanwhile, after a Connecticut listener complained about a radio broadcast of the same routine, the resulting case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 that the FCC could indeed ban certain “indecent” words from the airwaves. Apatow and Bonfiglio managed to track down and interview an assistant district attorney involved in the Wisconsin case, who recalls in the film that the judge presiding over the trial hid his face so as to conceal his laughs when he listened to the Carlin routine in court.
Back home, cocaine made for a scary environment, Kelly recalls. Both parents indulged and both became violent, she says. A tape of Carlin ranting endlessly on a bender is disturbing to hear. He’d stay up for as long as six days, without eating. A 1982 heart attack made him rethink that habit.
In the Eighties, Carlin’s act turned angry and he became a Chicken Little comic as the country grew more prosperous and free. Here, Apatow and Bonfiglio pile on the bad-news montages to position Carlin as a prophet of horror. Yes, a lot of terrible things happen over any given decade, and if you rapid-cycle through all of them you can produce any effect you like, turning, say, the Nineties into a flaming hellscape of despair instead of the calmest decade in human history. Carlin’s best days were behind him. He started to sound like one of those the-world’s-gone-to-hell guys you can find fulminating over pastrami in any deli.
To call Carlin a misanthrope would be too mild, and after his wife died in 1997 he seemed to forget that he was supposed to be funny. He called his last album, I Kind of Like It When a Lotta People Die. A typical bit: “Don’t you secretly hope that everything gets worse? When you see a big fire on TV, don’t you hope it spreads?” If you laugh with recognition at this remark, I don’t understand you, but perhaps he was just letting his progressive freak flag fly. If things keep getting better — and they generally do — progressives must feel frustration. To be left-wing is to have the mindset of perpetual emergency, so bad news becomes perversely reassuring: CNN matches your mood.
“I like natural disasters. All these natural disasters that have been going on, I fu**in’ love ’em. I can’t get enough of ’em,” Carlin said in his 2005 special. “For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature. . . . I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever, nothing.” He sounded the same notes in interviews around the same time: “I sort of gave up on the human race and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome,” he told Charlie Rose.
“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude,” wrote the British philosopher Roger Scruton in his final days. Most would agree, but Carlin went the other way, and his Mephistophelian turn startled even some prominent fans, such as Colbert. Ultimately, Carlin let rage divert his skill. He misunderstood himself, misread what his major contribution to comedy was. I’ll explain what I mean by that in my next piece.
