who wasn't just an advocate of death on a massive scale but a real
lover of it. Finding this out was wonderful. I used a very calm voice
and manner, a really friendly, really open and honest clinical sociopath:
I have a confession to make. If I confess my secret to you, I would
hope that you would not judge me—not think of me as a bad
person. Maybe many of you, if the truth were known, would
have to make the same confession. Here it is: I kinda like it when
a lot of people die. I really do. I can't help it. It makes me feel
really good.
. . . Every time there's a big disaster, I always wish it were bigger.
I always wish it happened in rush hour. And—forgive me for
this, but. . . near a school? Or a hospital? Or a nursing home?
I apologize if that bothers you . . . I know some of you will say,
"Well, you'd feel different if someone close to you were killed in
some big disaster." I say: "No, I wouldn't."
What was great was that now I could be the clinical sociopath,
play his glee at all the carnage, enjoy it, not just suggest it. And,
by getting them to go along with my glee and laugh at it, driving
home that this was something deep down in our psyche. That was
confirmed by hearing this certain laughter of complicity from the
audience, a knowing, accepting laughter.
2 6 2
DOORS CLOSE, DOORS OPEN
Things have a way of telling me when they want to be done and
this piece wasn't bursting out of me yet. It would need a lot of writing and polishing, stage time to get all the parts working together.
Plus a major memorizing job, which doesn't get any easier when
you'll never see sixty again.
I already had enough stuff for the HBO show in '99, including a
great closer: "There Is No God." But there was no question that this
new piece would be ready to go for the next HBO show, two years
later.
I honed it all that time and it evolved into a complex catastrophe
leaving millions dead in every possible kind of disaster, unfolding
across the continent, disrupting the laws of nature, full of a kind of
grisly poetry, a real tour de force, along the lines of "The Planet Is
Fine," but darker and madder.
I had big hopes for the next HBO special. It would be my twelfth
and twelve is a magical kind of number. And it had the makings of
an explosive show, with a big fat target in the White House: Governor Bush and his Christian fucks. I had a sledgehammer values
piece: "Why We Don't Need Ten Commandments." And I had this
major new tour de force.
Taping was set for the Beacon Theatre on November 17.1 named
the entire show for the new piece. I had a hunch it was going to be
the first HBO in a decade to equal, maybe even surpass, Jammin'.
I held on to that hunch right up to 8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001,
when the first plane hit. Because the show was called:
I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die.
Who says there was nothing funny about 9/11? There were a
couple dozen eggs on my face that day. Osama bin fucking Laden
hadn't just blown up the World Trade Center. He'd blown up the
best piece I'd written in ten years.
I'm a realist. We changed the name of the show to Complaints
and Grievances. (If there were such a thing as generic George Carlin, that title would be stenciled on the box.)
Hard-core fans were probably hoping I'd do something about
9/11. I did mention it—the elephant in the living room no one was
talking about—which got a kind of hopeful laugh. But I left it at
2 6 3
LAST WORDS
that and kept the focus on strong observational stuff with the basic
theme, Assholes of Our Time: "People Who Wear Visors," "Parents
of Honor Students," "Guys Named Todd." And "Ten Commandments" killed.
But there was a hole in the show the size of Ground Zero.
When I'm on the road doing promotional interviews for concerts
I love it when someone from the Great Falls Gazette or the Pitts-
burgh Post and Nasal Drip says: "You must have a lot of stuff about
Cheney and American Idol and Hillary's pantsuits." And I pull the
rug right out from under them: "I never talk about events or people
in the news."
I hate topical material because I hate to throw anything away.
I don't want to develop a nice little thing about Bush and Scooter
Libby and it kills, then I do it for a month or so and really tighten it,
add three more jokes, get the whole fucking thing down cold, but
it's not getting laughs anymore because it's old news. I'd have to
abandon it! I fucking hate that. I like to polish, polish, polish, get it
perfect, put it on tape and keep it forever.
The fate of "I Really Like It When a Lot of People Die" is a reverse example of why I hate topical humor. A piece based on stuff we
see on the news was killed by stuff we saw on the news.
At least I didn't have to abandon it. It made it into the next HBO
show in 2005, Life Is Worth Losing. That would be about seventeen
years after it had first come down the birth canal. But I wasn't taking any chances. I called it "Coast-to-Coast Emergency." It was the
finale and the best thing in the show. So—now I have it, polished,
perfect and put on tape. And I'll keep it forever.
The piece had evolved into a narrative of a nationwide cataclysm
with small beginnings in L.A. A downtown water main breaks and
floods an electrical substation. At the same time, a monthlong
global-warming heat wave hits. Because everything in L.A. runs on
electrical power, including air-conditioning and hospitals, social
chaos soon spreads through the city, bringing with it cholera and
smallpox and fires that firefighters can't fight with no water, until
the entire city is ablaze . . .
2 6 4
DOORS CLOSE, DOORS OPEN
Everybody panics and tries to leave the city at the same time and
they trample one another to death in the streets by the thousands
and wild dogs eat their corpses and the wild dogs chase the rest
of the people down the highway and one by one the dogs pick o f f
the old fucks and the slow people because they're IN THE FAST
LANE WHERE THEY DON'T BELONG ...And big sparks
from the city have lit the suburbs on fire and the suburbs burn
uncontrollably and thousands of identical homes have identical
fires with identical smoke, killing all the identical soccer moms
and their identical kids named JASON and JENIFERRRR . . .
Now the fires spread out beyond the suburbs to the farmlands . . .
. . . and thousands of barns and farmhouses begin to explode
from all the hidden METHAMPHETAMINE labs! The
meth chemicals run downhill to the rivers where wild animals
drink the water and get completely GEEKED on speed. Bears
and wolves amped up on crank start roaming the countryside
looking for people to eat—even though they're not REALLY
HUNGRY. . . And now the forests burn furiously and hun-
dreds of elves and fairies and trolls come running out of the
woods screaming, "Bambi is dead, Bambi is dead!!" and he is!
He is! Finally that FUCKING LITTLE CUNT BAMBI I
S
DEAD!!
All the regional fires come together into one huge interstate inferno which engulfs the West and Midwest and races through the
South, then turns northeast and heads for Washington, D.C. . . .
. . . where George Bush can't decide if it's an EMERGENCY
OR NOT. . . And the fire moves to Philadelphia but it's a week-
end and Philadelphia's CLOSED on weekends! So the fire
moves to New York City and the people of New York tell the fire
TO GO FUCK ITSELF! And while all this is going on Canada
burns to the ground but NOBODY NOTICES! . . .
265
LAST WORDS
With the entire North American continent on fire the thermal
updraft causes an incendiary cyclonic macrosystem that forms a
hemispheric megastorm . . .
. . . breaking down the molecular structure of the atmosphere
and actually changing the laws of nature. Fire and water com-
bine, burning clouds of flaming rain fall upward, gamma rays
and solar winds ignite the ionosphere . . . and bolts of lightning
20 million miles long begin shooting out of the North Pole. And
the sky fills up with GREEN SHIT!
Then suddenly the entire fabric of space-time SPLITS IN TWO!
A huge crack in the universe opens and all the dead people from
the past begin falling through: Babe Ruth, Groucho Marx,
Davy Crockett, Tiny Tim, Porky Pig, Hitler, Janis Joplin, Allen
Ludden, my uncle Dave, your uncle Dave, everybody's uncle
Dave, an endless stream of dead Uncle Daves . . .
And all the Uncle Daves gather around a heavenly kitchen table
and they light up cigarettes and they begin to talk about how
they never got a break, their parents didn't love them and their
children were ungrateful and how the Jews own everything and
the blacks get special treatment. And their hatred and bitterness
forms a big pool of liquid hate and the pool of liquid hate begins
to spin, around and around, faster and faster. The faster it spins,
the bigger it gets until the whirling pool of hate is bigger than the
universe and suddenly it explodes into trillions of tiny stars and
every star has a trillion planets and every planet has a trillion
Uncle Daves.
And all the Uncle Daves have good jobs, perfect eyesight and
shoes that fit. They have great sex lives and free health care.
They understand the Internet, their kids think they're cool. . .
And every week without fail Uncle Dave wins the lottery. Forever
and ever until the end of time every single Uncle Dave has a
winning ticket and UNCLE DAVE IS FINALLY HAPPY. . .
266
DOORS CLOSE, DOORS OPEN
Awards and honors started coming in the nineties. Awards and honors are nice. They feed a part of me I don't consider that important,
the superficial showbiz ego. If there's any reason I do what I do, it's
not to win awards.
Isn't there SOMETHING I can say that WON'T make them
want to give me an award?
Most awards are just an excuse for a television show. Showbiz
congratulating you but also congratulating itself for being so relevant and important and having the good judgment to pick the best.
There's more than a whiff of that empty showbiz bullshit I used to
hate in my sixties nice period, the celebrity club pretending to know
and admire and care for one another in their acceptance speeches.
And where there are acceptance speeches, you can be certain that
pretty soon children will enter the picture.
The Aspen Comedy Arts Festival in '97, where I was honored for
forty years in comedy, had a little of that. Not totally: I was proud of
the HBO compilation of my work to date— 40 Years of Comedy, my
'97 HBO special—and it was my first taste of )on Stewart. He was
just a kid at the time and he did a great interview. Maybe a little too
respectful, but he soon got over that. Boy, did he go on to do brilliant
things.
There were a bunch of us: Dennis Miller, me, Laraine Newman
and Janeane Garofalo thrown in for gender equality, and an SNL
contingent: Chevy, Lome, Martin Short, Steve Martin. I have a lot
of respect for Steve Martin. I think he's got a great mind. He's made
some good choices. And I like Martin Short's talent. But it's a club.
I had something in my head for each of them: you fantasize these
encounters beforehand and prepare. A little personal thing I wanted
to say to each one, Chevy, Lome, Martin and Steve. Just to make
human contact, because I'm out of this club. Steve Martin came by.
I hadn't seen him since 1967 on the Smothers Brothers show, where
he gave me an eight-by-ten signed: "Not just another pretty face." I
pulled him aside and said, "Steve, you know I haven't seen you in a
long time. And I want you to know how happy I am for your career
and the things that you've done."
2 6 7
LAST WORDS
He was touched, I could see, a little taken aback, but kind of
touched. I'd made human contact. I told him about the photo—that
I still had it and occasionally have it out to show people.
Now I see Lome, for whom I have no respect, because he's a fucking hands-and-knees cocksucker, but I wanted to make contact so I
put on a nice face and I said, "Lome, all these years I've wanted to
apologize to you for making that first week so difficult because of
the cocaine." He nods and thanks me. Like he's accepting my apology and that's that. No clear human contact like I got from Steve.
By now we're in a big briefing room that looks like the Council
on Economic Affairs; everybody has a pad and a glass of water and a
pencil. The room is largely empty and is where they're supposed to
brief us before we go to the dais for the press conference.
So it's Lome, Martin, Chevy, Steve and me. That's it. And HBO's
camera. I do a little thing with Lome that's funny, we laugh, there's
a couple of good cocaine jokes. But then it becomes Lome telling
the others Famous Cocaine Stories From SNL: "Gary Busey in the
countdown to air . . . he s n o r t s . . . 5, 4 . . . he s n o r t s . . . 3, 2 . . . he
snorts . . ." Okay, fine. But I never got another glance, never another
word.
Martin Short came over. When I'd done SNL the second time,
Martin had been nice and I'd never told him I was grateful. So I
said, "I always wanted to tell you—I saw you in Toscana a few weeks
ago and I didn't get a chance—how nice that was of you on SNL and
how touched I was by your words." And he said, "Oh, I didn't know
that." Some empty words. Just—WHOOSSSSSHHH: no contact.
And Martin is a person who, when I see his work, I feel has something really human in him. I forget what I said to Chevy.
Then it's just movie talk, yuppie talk. Nothing stuff and still not
a glance or a word. And I'm realizing that this group of people, who
were once considered radical and revolutionary, has become just
another fucking Hollywood celebrity club. The Lome Club. That
their chitchat is a modern version of the fraudulent showbiz crap I
was expected to do forty years ago in Mike Douglas's gazebo.
We move on to the press conference and first of all there are a
r /> lot of Saturday Night Live questions. Chris Albrecht from HBO,
2 6 8
DOORS CLOSE, DOORS OPEN
who's moderating, tries to direct a question or two toward me so I'm
included, but I dismiss them with short answers. The press is not
interested in me at all. Now people start asking these pretentious
questions about the effect of television on CHILDREN. Dennis
Miller's next to me, who I think is an arrogant person but I kinda like
his mind. Dennis occasionally says something and I occasionally
say something. But they're all talking about CHILDREN.
Steve and Chevy were very funny. They're very funny people,
though Chevy might not want to be doing so many pratfalls now
that he's a little larger than back when he was doing Ford. But
they're quick and bing! they land on each other and the banter was
wonderful.
I'm letting it go whenever it's CHILDREN this and CHILDREN
that. Now it's the Internet and THE CHILDREN and we can't protect THE CHILDREN and porn and THE CHILDREN. This goes
on and on and even Chevy, when he's not doing structural damage
to the building, is being self-important and pretentious about THE
CHILDREN.
They finally call on me and I say: "There's TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO CHILDREN in this country! Leave them ALONE!
They're gonna BE ALL RIGHT! They're SMARTER THAN YOU
ARE!"
There was a big laugh on it. HBO used it as the punch line in
their on-air version of the event. Fuck the Lome Club.
On April 5, 1997, Brenda was diagnosed with cancer of the liver.
They said the cancer had metastasized from her breast cancer and
attacked her liver, always vulnerable because of the hepatitis C. A
liver transplant was not an option because of her previous cancer.
Some part of me probably knew it was the end. The part of me
that always looks for the brighter side got the better of it. The doctors
fed that a little, sugarcoated it, I think—that she might have three
to four months. I wanted to believe them. Maybe even that she was
going to live. They'd given her only a few weeks to live when she got
sober in '75, and ten years later worried that she'd have a recurrence
of her breast cancer. Yet here she was: she'd survived so often. With
2 6 9
LAST WORDS