Last Words
What Am I Doing in New Jersey? in '88 was taped in the Park
Theater in Union City, Doin It Again in '90 in the State Theatre
in New Brunswick. The difference in response over the West Coast
was explosive. Plus, '90 solidified the new voice with strong, disturbing pieces. One of them was "Rape Can Be Funny," which was
less about rape than about being told what you could and couldn't
say. The early nineties were the heyday of identity politics, and—
especially on campus—language codes were cropping up everywhere, trying to define and prohibit offensive speech. I opened the
show by saying I wasn't sure what I could say anymore. Comedians
especially were always being told there were off-limit subjects. Subjects that weren't funny. I disagreed.
Take rape. Is rape funny? Yes. Consider Porky Pig raping Elmer
Fudd. And Porky's raping Elmer because Elmer had been coming
on to him. He was asking for it.
Core point: Men justify rape by claiming that if a woman's provocatively dressed, she's asking for it.
Example: Those news stories where a burglar robs a house, then
rapes an eighty-one-year-old granny! Why? Her bathrobe was too
tight. She was asking for it!
Keeping the focus on what pricks men are proved my point: that
you can joke about anything—even rape. And let me tie the piece
up neatly:
Now I've got the feminists pissed o f f at me, because I'm joking
about rape. Feminists wanna control your language. And they're
not alone. They got a lotta company in this country. I'm not pick-
ing on the feminists. In fact I got nothing against the feminists.
I happen to agree with most of the feminist philosophy I have
read. I agree for instance that for the most part men are vain,
ignorant, greedy, brutal assholes who've just about ruined this
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planet. I agree with the abstract that men have pushed the tech-
nology that just about has this planet in a stranglehold.
Mother Earth-RAPED AGAIN! Guess who?
" 'EY, SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT!"
1990 was a sign, looking back from the perspective of years, that
Jammin' was on its way. And when it came—on April 25, 1992, in
what used to be called the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden,
in front of 6,500 people—it leaped past all the others. The train had
arrived.
Jammin' in New York has always been my favorite HBO show, but
it was more than just a favorite. It lifted me up to a new plateau, a
good plateau. It became my personal best, the one I had to beat, the
template for future HBOs in terms of craft, artistry and risk taking.
We dedicated it to Sam Kinison, who'd been killed by a drunk
driver just two weeks earlier.
April 1992 was just over a year after the end of the Gulf War and
patriotism was still riding high. A lot of people had seen it and still
did as a good war, even though the Pentagon lies in the run-up to
it were beginning to come out. Supposed Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait
City fabricated by some woman from the Kuwaiti royal family.
DOD satellite photos of Iraqi troops "massing at the Saudi border,"
which actually showed empty desert. There was some risk in doing
"Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf" on national television,
but it was calculated.
I went right into it—at the height of their commitment to me—
and it had such pace, such fire, that they couldn't ignore the ideas in
it. There was less an unpatriotic ring to it than a loud dissenting one.
America loved war, I said. In our history we've had a major war
every ten years. We suck at everything else but we could bomb the
shit out of any country full of brown people. Only brown people.
The last white people we bombed were the Germans. Because they
were trying to dominate the world, and that's our job!
I shifted to my theory that war is just men waving their pricks
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at one another. We bomb anyone we think has a bigger dick than
us. That's why rockets, planes, shells and bullets are all shaped like
dicks. America has an overpowering need to thrust the national dick
deep into other nations . . .
The ideas came from all directions, piling on joke after joke and
idea after idea, the next idea validating the previous one. There was
always more shit coming. Including the familiar point that our language always betrays us.
America's manhood problem was typified by the teenage sexual
slang we use about war. In Vietnam we didn't "go all the way." We
"pulled out." Very unmanly. When you fuck an entire people you
have to keep fucking and fucking them—women and children
too—till they're all dead.
By the end they were cheering every line. At the beginning I
think they were surprised by the sheer performance of it—it wasn't
quite like anything I'd ever done. But the combination of laughs
and ideas and imaginative flurries of language overwhelmed any
resistance they might've had along the lines of "Wait just a goddam
minute, I know someone with a boy over there."
I was beginning to realize something: I had a powerful new tool
for my tool kit, though I've only made sparing use of it since. Getting
laughs all the time wasn't my only responsibility. My responsibility
was to engage the audience's mind for ninety minutes. Get laughs,
of course, dazzle them from time to time with form, craft, verbal
fireworks, but above all engage their minds. "The Planet Is Fine,"
which ended jammiri, was the perfect example. Essentially it's an
essay on what I see as the futility and narrow-mindedness of environmentalism, symbolized by attempts to save endangered species.
It's probably the most "macro" piece I've ever done. It goes much
further than the issues people think of as macro, like saving endangered species or reversing global warming, to the heart of the
matter: the arrogance of our species.
The problem was caused long ago by us arrogantly trying to control nature, believing we were superior to our environment. Just
as arrogant to think we're needed to save it—especially when we
haven't even learned how to take care of one another. Earth doesn't
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need us to save it. It's survived four and a half billion years through
far worse disasters than a species a mere hundred thousand years old
that has only been really fucking the place up since the Industrial
Revolution.
We imagine we threaten this vastly powerful self-correcting system? The planet will shuck us off like a case of the crabs. Forget
about saving endangered species—WE are the endangered species.
The planet is fine. WE are fucked. We're going away. We'll leave
some plastic bags behind but, other than that, after the Earth has
absorbed them, not a single trace . . .
From the point of view of the performer—the ever-present possibility of going in the sewer—a basically serious piece like this was a lot
riskier than "Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf," and in my concerts, throughout the months before the Garden show, it would get
long, quizzical silences. But it was clear from the respo
nse at the end
thatthey were appreciating it. There were considerable stretches when
I wasn't getting laughs, but I didn't expect them. (They were where
there weren't any jokes.) The laugh-free stretches were acceptable to
me and to the audience because they were engaged, or more accurately: we were engaged.
The success of "Planet" gave me new power: the permission to
take artistic risks. As long as I kept them interested and engaged
and entertained—not bringing them to laughter all the time, but
sometimes to wonder: when I could see from their faces they were
thinking, "Whoa—what a nice thing he did there!" So long as I did
that, the contract between us was fulfilled.
Laughter is not the only proof of success. Boy, what a liberating
recognition that was! It grew and grew during those months of testing and practice on the road. And when I got to the Felt Forum,
the sheer number of people ensured that even during those quiet
moments, there was audible appreciation going on. Not laughs, but
some ripple of agreement, a collective "Oh yeah!" Pleasure in sheer
ideas! With smaller audiences I hadn't heard reactions like that, because they were less inclined to expose themselves. But here, lost in
a sea of people, they let themselves go.
Besides now being freed to write more idea-driven and provoca2 4 7
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tive material, I was learning things about my relationship with the
audience too. I don't know if they were evolving along with me or
if their willingness to be engaged in this way had always been there
and I'd underestimated it. It may have been there all along.
But up till then I had never bothered to think much about my audience's commitment to me. Not even on the basic level, that when
people bought tickets to see me in concert, paying twenty, thirty,
forty dollars, a week or more in advance, that was a special kind of
commitment. It wasn't casual. It's wasn't a brick-wall comedy club,
or a Vegas casino. It said a lot about what they were willing to hear,
listen to, abide, put up with.
Characterizing audiences is always an imponderable. I do know
that if I'm in Chattanooga I don't get the average Chattanoogan.
I get the weirdest, flakiest, hard-core-strangest Chattanoogan. The
fringe Chattanoogan. Anywhere I go I'm going to get the freer, less
risk-averse audience, the ones more willing to go out on a limb. It's
too easy to say "left-wing," but one aspect of their collective personality is to be more appreciative of material that attacks authority,
takes chances, is experimental or daring. They may not agree with
everything I say but I rarely get vocal dissent from the audience.
The "Abortion" piece in the next HBO show in 1996, Back in
Town— at least during that period of testing and building—was one
of the few. There were often walkouts. Never heckling. People quietly got up, turned around and walked out. Jerry would stand in
the lobby just to see them. And to hear them if they did say something. We'd laugh about it afterward: "You should have seen the first
guy that came out. He was fucking stricken! Almost walked straight
through the glass."
I began with a line I'd been using since A Place for My Stuff fourteen years earlier: that it was ironic that pro-lifers were the kind of
people you'd never want to fuck anyway.
The satirical method was to focus on the meaning of the term
"pro-life." What's pro-life about being obsessed with the unborn
and then, once it's a child, refusing it health education and welfare?
What's pro-life about sending the child off in a uniform at age eighteen to die? Or killing doctors who perform legal abortions? If all
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life is sacred, why is it an abortion for us but if it's a chicken it's an
omelet?
Consistency matters. If life begins at conception, why isn't there
a funeral for a miscarriage? If life begins at fertilization and most of
a woman's fertilized eggs are flushed out of her body once a month,
doesn't that make her a mass murderer? Could it be that "pro-life" is
actually code for hating women—the source of life?
This piece had been a while coming, like many of my long-form
essay-type pieces. But there was one moment in the original version
that I really liked but eventually didn't make it to the HBO show. It
says a lot about that relationship with the audience.
My method of argument is not to fuck around responding to one
side or the other of a current debate but to go all the way back to the
fundamental core of an issue. So in the original version, after "Life
started about a billion years ago and it's a continuous process," I said:
"And that's a heartbeat in there. So . . . it's MURDER.
"But. . . it's justifiable homicide."
I loved that moment. Really risky, really disturbing. And showing
why this has always been and will always be such a violent debate.
You can't have a totally closed mind or dogmatic opinion about it.
And I thought they'd agree, enjoy the thought, the moment. But I
was wrong. Audiences wouldn't follow me there. It was one step too
far. They didn't enjoy the risk.
I'm a realist. After a while, I dropped the line. And maybe they
were right: maybe it was too complex an idea or the phrasing was too
harsh. But it shows how the audience shapes the material. They are
part of the process. I write, they edit.
I think of thought-provoking pieces—what I call "values pieces"—
as taking the audience on a journey with me through my mind.
Along the way there are plenty of signposts and reminders of their
own perceptions and things that they've assumed, heard, believed
and questioned, reinforcing those things for them and reassuring
them that I'm not leading them into a cul-de-sac, that the journey
is to somewhere new. And if I'm engaging them in forward movement, from a familiar place to an unfamiliar place, I have to do it
with marvelous language or some other attention-getting element
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that transfixes them and moves them along to their destination—
and then we can get back to the laughing all night.
That gets away from the most formal definition of the word
"teaching," but in a way that's what it is, laying it out for them in an
amusing and entertaining way, taking them on an instructional tour.
Because there's something you want them to know that they didn't
know, or didn't know they knew when they sat down in their seats.
I'd never use the word "teaching" (rhymes with "preaching"), if
for no other reason than when new ideas are conveyed via instruction (or speechifying or debate), people seem to have an instinctive
defense against them.
But when you're in front of an audience and you make them
laugh at a new idea, you're guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever more herself or himself than when they really
laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment.
They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can
be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance
to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, I own them. That's
one of the things—maybe the most important—I seek by following
this path: to have that power. To be able to say: stop in your tracks
and consider this!
At the same time, I've had to surrender myself to that moment,
and it's a communion. A genuine, momentary communion. Which
they wouldn't have experienced without me. And I wouldn't have
experienced without them.
You have attitudes when you're young, but you don't have the
ammunition to go with them. Especially if you're self-educated and
you're just trying to find out what you need to know to get through.
You haven't had this overlay of other information. I was fifty-five
when I did ]ammin already well past fifty—a big turning point for a
lot of guys. And I was chasing sixty when I did Back in Town. But I've
found the perspective of time lends texture to your ideas. The longer
you live, the richer your matrix gets and the observations you make
have more interesting information against which to be compared.
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The difference between what you see and what you know is richer
and more full of possibilities. It's an accumulation of attitude and
information that people respond to.
And of course, after a certain age you get points just for not being
dead.
If you've been paying attention you'll notice there was a four-year
gap between Jammiri and back in Town. Because as always there
was my two-tiered personality to be reckoned with. Just when my
craft and artistry and self-discovery were maturing, I started to feel
the old longing to belong, to find a group I wanted to be part of. The
result was two major diversions in the midnineties, one good, one
not so good.
On my Web site it says:
January 1994: The George Carlin Show premieres on Fox Television. Lasts 27 episodes. Lesson learned: always check mental
health of creative partner beforehand. Loved the actors, loved the
crew. Had a great time. Couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there.