Review: George Carlin’s Last Words

The late great George Carlin’s final book, appropriately titled Last Words, was released today (11/10) and raises an obvious question: what words could George Carlin possibly have left unspoken? Carlin’s breathtaking razor-cut comedy gave personal license to several generations of comedians – and millions of fans – to say “Fuck it!” and let the truth fly fast and furious. He taught us, by example, that there are no thoughts too dark, no words too dirty, no sensibilities too profane to stay censored in a world gone mad. He gave us the collective courage to shout our deepest convictions. So what thoughts could George Carlin have left unsaid?

The answer is quite a few. Carlin’s previous books – Brain Droppings, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and Napalm & Silly Putty – read much like his comedy act: wry snapshots composed of literate observational humor delivered with a master wordsmith’s love of language. He was consistently hilarious, vicious, vitriolic, and even ambitious but in Last Words, for the very first time in my weed-addled memory, George Carlin is – dare I say it – poignant.

After having spent almost a half-century cracking wise on politics, morality, religion, psychology, “Wurds, Werds, Words” and “stuff,” in his final book for the first time George turns his uniquely interrogative eye on himself and offers a sustained look at his own extraordinary life. His nineteen chapters are as precisely titled as the opening lines of his best-known bits. In “Holy Mary, Mother of George” we learn of his complicated relationship with his parvenu Irish Catholic mom – the First Antagonist – who gave young George consummate grief and a feel for words in equal measure; in “The Old Man and the Sunbeam” we wince at Carlin’s fast-talking, alcoholic father, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun, who took off early, died too young, and gave his second-born son a pitchman’s bravura and an all-too-fragile heart; and then in “The Ace of Aces and the Dude of Dudes” we meet the indefatigable Patrick, Carlin’s older brother and “self-installed role model” who taught his kid brother the ropes and gave him the enduring ability to embrace antagonism to insure that “the bastards never had the satisfaction of grinding him down.” The George Carlin who became one of the world’s greatest comedians took that particular life lesson and turned it into art.

“Air Marshall Carlin Tells You To Go Fuck Yourself” shows how two court-martials can be parlayed into a job as a radio jock and “Two Guys In Their Underwear” demonstrates how a young GI radio DJ can morph into a brilliant standup comedian. After that it’s not long before we’re in a paddy wagon with George and Lenny Bruce in Chicago at the end of 1962. Bruce was famously arrested for comedic obscenity and Carlin went along for the ride for making “a smart-ass joke” to the arresting officer. “Lenny showed me how to work my arms down under my ass and feet so the handcuffs were in front of me,” Carlin recalls, “Somehow that worked... And off I went to jail with Lenny Bruce... Even though it began as a drunken joke, the whole affair had a radicalizing effect on me.”

That’s an understatement. Ten years later, it was Carlin’s turn. His classic “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say On Television” turned out to be taboo in Milwaukee as well. He was taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct but when the case came to trial, the judge laughed softly under his breath when the words were played back in court and dismissed the charges because no one was hurt. A year later, when the same bit from “Class Clown” was played on WBAI, a New York radio station, the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where Justice Brennan and his boys affirmed in a narrow 5-4 decision the government's power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves.

And then, of course, there are the drugs. Carlin’s tortured journey with cocaine, liquor and pills is recounted in excruciating detail throughout Last Words, but, curiously, his predilection for weed is only sprinkled throughout the text. Marijuana is often mentioned but never defined, possibly because Carlin died before he wrote definitively on the subject, or, more likely, because, near the end of his life, in a successful effort to rid himself of a vicious wine-and-Vicodin habit, George checked into rehab and embraced “a new appreciation of the AA techniques.”

“At the age of sixty-seven,” he writes, “I put an end to five decades of substance abuse, beginning with my first toke in the hallway of a building on 122nd Street when I was thirteen.” Carlin is incredulous, “That’s a fifty-four year high.”

Earlier on the same page he claimed to have given up marijuana in the 1980s but we know that’s not precisely true. Carlin may have given up recreational weed at that time but he always continued to keep a joint close by to enhance his professional creativity. In a November 1997 interview for HIGH TIMES, I asked George if he still smoked pot.

“Occasionally,” the comedian admitted. “I like to write without being stoned and then, every now and then – not every time, but not totally infrequently – I like to have a hit or two and then go punch up the writing.” He portentously added “I can have a little wine from time to time. I have a hit from time to time, but those are the only things I do.”

Seven years later he was up to a bottle and a half of wine and five or six Vikes a day. “May seem like small potatoes to the planeloads of coke and pot and truckloads of beer I’d ingested in the seventies,” he writes, “but it was my personal bottoming out. I couldn’t control it and I needed help.”

Poignant. Reading between those lines, it’s not hard to hear a cautionary tale: it’s not the weed that leads to taking up other drugs; it’s the other drugs that lead to giving up weed.

When George Carlin died on June 22, 2008 I e-mailed a friend a single sad line: “It’s hard to imagine a world without George Carlin.” Last Words is a wonderful book because, for as long as it lasts, the funniest man in the world is with us once more.