Last Words
about Captain Cook—Hawaii having been one of Captain Cook's
landing places—in a superbly accurate reproduction of the Captain's captain clothes. I didn't play Captain Cook though—I played
Captain Cook's First Mate. Yes, the Indian Sergeant is back in my
life. A definite sign that I no longer know who the fuck I am. Or
even which decade it is: the late seventies? Or the late sixties?
By the next summer I was appearing as a regular on Tony Orlando
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and Dawn. Not surprisingly, my sixth Little David album, On the
Road, was directionless and unstructured: featuring the interminable "Death and Dying" routine, the longest piece I ever did. (On the
album it only ran thirteen minutes but onstage it ran twenty-seven
minutes.) Talking about dying for twenty-seven minutes should've
given a seasoned comedian pause, but that hoary old metaphor for
failure never occurred to me.
Another signal I missed was in '78, when I had a mild heart attack. It was in the septal branch artery. One morning when I was
driving Kelly to school, my jaw felt tight. I knew that a tight jaw
or pain in the jaw can be a symptom of a heart attack as well as
the traditional pain in the chest. (The left arm, upper back and the
jaw can all be locations where you feel angina.) Apparently each
person's angina is slightly different. I had to spend two days in the
hospital before they were able to find the enzyme in my blood that is
the marker of an MI, or myocardial infarction. When muscle tissue
dies an enzyme is released. If they find that enzyme, you had a heart
attack. If they don't find it, you've had chest pain. So, they found it,
and I'd had an MI. But it was so minor it didn't force me to change
anything or reexamine anything. For a while I did eat margarine
instead of butter.
One thing happened in that period which would be a major positive force in my life, although I didn't realize it until later. HBO
came into the picture. I did two HBO one-hour specials in '77 and
'78. These regular specials would soon take the place of my album
career—eventually becoming one and the same thing. They didn't
yet have as many subscribers as they would in the eighties, when
they exploded, but it did give me access to a mass audience. At the
time it just seemed like more TV. Not that different from Perry
Como or Tony Orlando except I got to say "fuck."
The material I was doing tells the real story. After an explosion of
self-revelation and self-discovery, and the revelation to others of my
autobiographical self and past—together with a good strong dose of
value judgments about the world around me—I'd become a person
fascinated with his own navel. "Hey—look at my lint! You got lint?
He's got lint! She's got lint! Everybody got lint!" I was turning to my
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bodily functions and extremities for inspiration, plundering the last
few scraps of self-examination from them. It started on Toledo Win-
dow Box . . .
Snot is universal. There are some things that work in comedy be-
cause they're universal, but we don't talk about them. First of all,
snot is the original rubber cement. Thumb and forefinger. . .
ever t r y to toss one away? Won't go . . . You ever pick your nose
and have a guy walk around the corner, "Hi, Bill! How are you?"
and go to shake your hand? "Sorry, my right arm is paralyzed."
"Oh, okay. Why don't you put that thing back in your nose and
come in my office?"
You CAN put it back in your nose. Lot of people stuck for a
place to put one don't think of that. You CAN PUT IT BACK!
They're viable for four hours after picking. Put it back in but
don't jog it loose. Gotta sit still the first hour . . .
Imagine if snot was FLUORESCENT! DAY-GLO MUCUS!
There d be no place to hide it. Where you gonna put a fluo-
rescent snot? Gotta go down the head shop and wipe it on a
poster.
Urinals, pissing and farts were dealt with at some length on To-
ledo Window Box. On Wally Londo I really went to town. First snot
made a comeback:
Have you ever been making out with someone and one of you has
a snot that's whistling? Oo Oo Oo Oo Oo O0O0O0O0O0O0H
"I think we blew it out of tune on the climax, honey!"
I moved on to the involuntary shake that happens when you
piss—which I called the piss-shiver—and from there I transitioned
to this important question:
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Isn't it funny how we say take a shit and take a piss? You don't
take 'em, YOU LEAVE 'EM! "I l e f t a shit, Bill." "Jeez, where'd
ya leave it this time? Last year the kids didn't find it till Easter!"
Then it was stomach noises, lots of those, and so to:
Did you ever belch and taste a hotdog you had two days ago?
"'Ey, that was almost PUKE! A toss-up between puke and hot-
dog there!"
Which brought me to the big finish—vomiting in the New York
subway:
You ever notice that your whole sense of values changes when
you're throwing up? I DON'T CARE ABOUT MY SHOES . . .
BLEEEEUUUURRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
When I'd finished scavenging my extremities, I turned to pets—
the nearest thing to an extremity. Let me tell you about this little
extension of me . . . my dog . . .
Example: A dog appears on TV, and you t r y to get your dog to look
at it. And he won't! He has no clue what that image is. His reflexes are
triggered by your voice, which is screaming at him, and your hand,
which is twisting his head o f f . He just thinks you're mad at him and is
filled with doggie guilt.
And when I'd done with that, my dog's extremities . . .
Example: The neighbors are over for c o f f e e , you're chatting away
and there's Tippy on the floor, bent double like a fur donut, licking his
own balls! Staggering! If you could do that you'd stay home perma-
nently! But no one says a word . . .
It was graced with the term "observational humor." I think I was
even sometimes credited with inventing it. Later it would reemerge
as what I call my micro-world material—but by then always balanced with macro-world material. Back in the seventies, it seemed a
rich vein I could mine for a while.
The very fact that I didn't see what was happening—and I never
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have quite been able to untangle why I was behaving like this—is
itself a sign of profound confusion. Yet I can't believe it was simply
involuntary, that I was just passively letting it happen to me. I think I
was also saying to myself, "Okay. I showed them I could be a success
on my own terms. Now let's see what I can do from the place I've
ended up."
In other words, given an opportunity to curve back to the middle, to become straight again, I took it. I got waylaid by that. Instead of taking a new leap into the dark—"I've got another place to
go, another idea to show you!"—I said, "No, this is okay. Let's be
safe."
I've always called these years of my life the Seco
nd Visitation of
the Straights.
One other path I did consider, although it eventually led nowhere
either. On Toledo Window Box there was a piece called "Water Sez."
A stream of consciousness cut personifying water:
I'm gonna get some water. This is your H-two-O, my friend. I
don't mind telling you. From the scientific community . . .
Lookit that, huh? fust drops and drips. Water sez, "I don't care."
Water sez, "Drink me, I don't give a shit." Water sez, "Put me on
your ass, I don't care."
Water sez, "Leave me alone, I'm in the lake. Get the hell away
from my water place!" Ice is water, some water is ice. Some water
hasn't been water for a long time. It's ICE! At the North Pole.
Long time no water! "Ice. What are you—I'm ice. I WAS wa-
ter. I'm hopin' to be water again—after the Ice Age, hahahaha-
haha!"
You could be two kinds of ice. You could be ice made in the ma-
chine at the Holiday Inn. OOO-ER! Or you could be a hunk
of ice that comes across a Mail Pouch sign in Minnesota on
fanuaryll . . .
Sometimes I just say shit I've never heard before, man.
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There were a number of other little blips like this, bubbles of conceptual possibility that didn't get on the album. If I had been free
of my middle-class entanglements, my family, my house, my debt
structure, my obligations, this might have been the point where I
veered off into conceptual art. Streams of consciousness harnessed
into form, let loose again and harnessed back until finally you'd
have something with form and structure that sprang purely from
your improvisational side.
A fantasy, a what-if, a path not taken.
One thing I can be certain of: the old movie dream wasn't dead. It
was just deferred. When my comedy exploded, I saw that by putting
the movies aside, I'd make room for the comedy to become what it
did. At the same time, the movie thing still had its appeal. Acting
had a different set of rewards. For one thing, an outsider longing
to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an
ensemble. I equate them because I get great satisfaction in being a
part of the proper—for me—community. I'm uncomfortable with
various social groupings and clusterings. But when I'm in the right
group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as
anyone who does it all the time. Maybe more.
I had misgivings. There was no way a long-haired, bearded person
with a hippie immediate past could just suddenly play a salesman or
a clerk, let alone a leading man. I would be typecast immediately,
and that's exactly what happened. Those were the kind of offers
I got.
I did play a cabdriver in Car Wash. It was one day's work and they
let me write the scene myself: I played a modified, lightened version of my old Upper West Side character. But I had no illusionssurprising, given how confused I was—that this would lead to a
flood of offers from the studios, begging me to be in their movies.
Much better to pour my creative juices into producing, financing, writing and starring in my own movie. And along with the
juices, all my savings. Yeah. That'll show the fucking mainstream
and the studio system!
Among the quasi-gurus—charismatic people around the AA on
the West Side that Brenda attended—was Artie Warner. Artie got
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into Brenda's circle and found out she was Mrs. George Carlin and
Artie saw an opportunity.
Well before Richard Pryor came out with his great Live in Con-
cert in '79 I thought it would be great to make a concert movie. Take
the second HBO show, do it live in the round so it could be shot
imaginatively, record it on tape. We'd use part of the concert for
HBO, parts of it we'd transfer to film (which wasn't commonly done
at the time), and we'd have our concert movie. Of course the themes
I would be exploring were the mundane micro-world I was into at
the time: teeth, fingernails, dogs and cats, how your sneakers smell
when you get up, shit like that.
B u t . . . in the middle of talking about dogs or cats we cut to a liveaction sketch that relates to the topic we're talking about on stage.
We cut from George talking about training his dog to a vignette
about a man training a dog. Some combination of concert footage,
live-action vignettes. And, hey, why not throw in some animation?
Good idea. (We actually commissioned the animation and as an
independent piece it won awards in festivals like Tokyo.)
Artie Warner will become producer of all this, because he's a
friend of Brenda's and he calls himself a producer and I want to stay
outside of the mainstream. To make things more interesting I also
make Artie my manager but without leaving Monte Kay or even
informing him of his new shared duties. So now I'm paying two
men management fees. The movie will be called The Illustrated
George Carlin. (Because we're illustrating my monologues by showing vignettes of them.)
So this is my new departure, my novel approach, my step beyond
stand-up. Something no one had done before (probably for good
reasons). The movie dream part of me was being satisfied by these
notions. I think this was why I was able to accept whatever fall from
grace, whatever fall back into the mainstream, this whole period
represented. I could accept that, because I saw myself as having
taken an innovative step that was going to end-run the studio system
and dazzle everybody with a new idea.
The plan was to sell the distribution rights, the TV, cable and
airlines rights and so on. Whatever ancillary there was we'd raise
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enough money from to make the movie. That was the theory. The
reality was that, having assembled a full preproduction staff with
an impressive payroll, Artie took that crucial step all film producers must take on the first day of preproduction: he leased a new
Cadillac.
For a while we looked like we were coming close. We had distributors. We had an office on Robertson Boulevard. I went around
to advertising agencies that specialized in movies and interviewed
them about their campaigns. I sat with casting ladies behind
beat-up wooden tables and actors would come by to audition for the
vignettes. We rented a theater to screen Norman . . . is That You?,
the Redd Foxx movie, because it had been shot on tape and transferred to film. We discussed the 525 lines of data on the screen as opposed to the 600 lines of data in the European format. . . All on my
dime.
I had to walk away from The Illustrated George Carlin. I just ran
out of money, although—because I never opened those monthly
statements from Brown and Kraft—I had no clue just how much
money I'd run out of. Years later I looked at the material. It was
horrible! I'd been writing better ten years earlier for Buddy Greco.
Some of the vignettes might have been improved by being performed. Most of it was just mortifying and empty. He may not
exist, but God saved me from making The Il
lustrated George
Carlin.
But then a new area of concern appeared on my radar which I was
even less well equipped to deal with than how many Teamsters we'd
need for the second unit. And from a totally unexpected quarter:
Kelly.
It wasn't about drugs—the usual do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do-ordid hypocrisy Boomer parents grapple with. Kelly began smoking
pot when she was thirteen, stealing roaches from my office. I figured
it out after a while and rather than being Big Bad Dad—I did make
a living being against all forms of authority—I let it go.
Brenda was aware of Kelly's smoking too. You might think it odd
considering what we'd been through, but neither of us stopped her.
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In fact I split ounces with her when I was home. I preferred the approach: "If it's in our house and you're not driving around, at least
you're semisafe." What I didn't know was from that point on Kelly
smoked almost continuously. She went to school stoned. She functioned throughout high school stoned. She got straight A's stoned.
The bud doesn't fall far from the plant.
At fifteen she started attending Crossroads—an arts and science
high school. Full of celebrity kids but a real brain factory. If you
were smart you could really learn there. If you just wanted to take
dope and float through, I guess you could do that too.
There were different cliques, a lot of kids who learned everything
they could and stayed out of trouble. Then there were celebrity kids
who did nothing but drugs. Kelly had a foot in both camps. Great
grades, and a celebrity clique who smoked a lot of dope. Kelly's
group eventually caused problems, but at the time I was completely
star-struck. I loved it when Kelly would come home and say, "You
know who I go to school with? Mahatma Gandhi!"
These kids would hang out at our house and occasionally steal
things from me. (They told me about this later so it's not a blind
accusation.) But what could I do? Like the drug situation, I could
hardly bitch about it, having been a dedicated felon myself at
their age.
They were okay kids. Core good. Different sets of problems at