Here’s how old I am: when we were kids, we (or our parents) bought comedy albums…on vinyl records!
We’d lie on the floor listening to Bill Cosby albums (sorry, we were kids and also, who knew?) and as we aged into teens, it was all about Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor and eventually Steve Martin.
What we did not have in the house, though often saw the covers in the record stores, were the recordings of one George Carlin. He was a “hippy” who smoked weed and was clearly too anti-establishment for the parents.
No, guys my age had to discover Carlin on TV – on HBO, where he did 14 specials over 30 years (also made 100 Tonight Show appearances).
He was funny – damn funny. I somehow got an 8-track tape of his first release, back when his hair was short, and, for my money- his pointed rants, always relevant and on point, never quite elicited the belly laughs of the tame, observational stuff.
By the time of his death in 2008 at the age of 71, he already seemed older than his years- the irascible old man shaking his fists at the sky.
Thankfully, as we see in the two-part documentary, George Carlin’s American Dream, there were plenty of bright spots located in the middle of his life’s comedic spectrum.
Judd Apatow, surely the most gleeful jock-sniffer of his stand-up heroes, has assembled an engaging, if exhaustive, look at the life of the pissed off rebel. Along with co-director Michael Bonfiglio, Apatow not only gets a lot of mileage out of the decades of available footage, he also somehow captures glimpses of the man who loved his daughter to the moon and was married to the same woman from 1961 until her death from cancer in 1997.
A veritable Mount Rushmore of famous comedians appears to speak of Carlin with wide-eyed admiration and wonder. He really was loved within the community and many claim to have been influenced by him—many of whom would seem to have nothing in common with Carlin’s content.
The narrative arc follows a logical timeline – Irish kid from the boroughs, less than ideal circumstances, etc. – all the way until his end.
I have to say, by the end of it all, I was quite moved. And I couldn’t think of a single point of disagreement between that old man and, well, this old man.
George Carlin’s American Dream will stream on HBO on two nights, beginning May 20th
