Review: ‘George Carlin’s American Dream’ Shows Comedian Misunderstood His Influence

We 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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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We 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.