Last Words by George Carlin
home or in themselves, but they weren't bad. But then Kelly got into
a relationship with one of them, who began treating her bad. He
beat her up as well as abusing her emotionally. She began to spiral
out of control, cutting school, ramping up her drug use with cocaine and Quaaludes; there was depression, ulcers, even pregnancy.
I didn't know about any of this. We'd always kept our distance
when it came to talking about her problems and her feelings. It was:
"Kelly, I won't ask you any questions." "Dad, I won't volunteer any
information to you." "Okay?" "Okay." Right or wrong, my understanding of life was if my daughter needs me she will come and
tell me that there is something on her mind. It's not my place to
be constantly saying to her: "Is everything all right? You don't look
well. Are you okay?" I didn't want to be an intrusive parent. My own
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parent's fearsome need to control me scared me off any behavior
like that. Don't be like Mary. The old, old story.
So I assumed there were no bad feelings. No bad stuff happening. We coexisted like that. What I never considered was the degree
to which she'd been hurt from the drugs and drinking and fighting
Brenda and I did when she was a kid.
When it came to Kelly's problems—especially pregnancy—I
really abdicated my responsibilities. And yet it was all directed at
me, all designed to get my attention. I just took an emotional walk
on that. What I should have done was to be more aware; intervened,
opened up. But I was afraid of what lay behind that door; afraid of
what might come out. One of my biggest fears—the most difficult
area of my existence—has always been unleashing my feelings.
I did come through in the end. Kind of. She finally told me about
everything the kid was doing—his physical and verbal abuse of her,
getting pregnant, everything. I went to his father: "First, you're footing the bill for all this. Second, I don't want him near her anymore."
To make sure the kid got the point, when he came around anyway, I got my baseball bat. I showed him the bat and said: "I don't
play baseball. Neighborhood I come from, we use bats a different
way. To change a person's behavior." Without actually threatening
the kid, I made it clear that if 1 ever found him on my property again
I'd beat his fucking head in.
He got the point. Never came near Kelly again. Later she told
me it was the first time in her life she felt I'd done a real traditional
fatherly thing. She was shocked, she said. And very proud.
At some point in 1980 I left Monte—Artie was already out of the
picture—and drifted without management for a time. My career
was really flat. I was out all the time on the road, and I was still drawing people, but there was no new, inventive, exciting direction, and
the number of empty seats I saw over the footlights each night was
growing.
To make matters worse, it was a time when there was an enormous amount of activity going on all around me in the world of
comedy. SNL had gotten huge, a continuing hit and a cultural
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phenomenon; its cast members—Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd—were
moving on to movie stardom, and other future comedy stars were
taking their places. Animal House— the biggest-grossing comedy to
date—was being imitated all over Hollywood. Monty Python had
done Holy Grail and was about to release Life of Brian. Comedy was
coming out of the walls.
Brick walls. Comedy clubs had been appearing everywhere for
the last few years, like an infectious rash. A whole new generation
of stand-ups were competing to appear in them. Some of them possibly inspired by my success. Some who might soon be competing
with me. Most important, and closest to home, there was a new
phenomenon sweeping comedy concerts nationwide. A wild and
crazy guy who was doing unheard-of things for a comedian, packing
fifteen-and twenty-thousand-seat arenas as if he were a rock supergroup. Steve Martin was not only white-hot, he was sucking up all
the live-appearance comedy business there was.
And I was regressing, spinning my wheels, stagnating.
I began to get ominous signals. National Lampoon ran something in their letters column where it was done in their style—as a
letter to the editors supposedly from me. It read: "Dear Editors, Hey
man, like you guys, wow man, do you think man, like there is such
a thing as, well, man, like self-parody?"
It stung, but I realized what they were talking about. They weren't
wrong. There were other signs.
On the Road had a piece about peas (which happen to be my
favorite vegetable). The ending was "Give peas a chance. I ask everybody, please, give peas a chance." Rick Moranis of SCTV used this
to do a satire of me that went to devastating lengths. (I could make
an intellectual argument that if you can take something as mundane as peas and turn it into a minor oratorio, that's not nothing.)
But again I had to admit there was a certain truth to it. I did too
much of that kind of shit. I was over some kind of limit.
In an article in Rolling Stone, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong
picked up on this. Cheech said, "George Carlin is irrelevant. George
Carlin is obsolete. He's talking about peas now. If all you can talk
about is peas, you're obsolete. What about the issues of the day?"
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This from Cheech and Chong7 masters of cutting-edge, state-ofthe-art political and social satire.
Finally, in the last days of 1979, somebody wrote a column in a
paper I admired (and when 1 say admired, it wasn't just some mainstream newspaper—on the other hand, I've completely blocked who
it was). He wrote:
Well, the '70s are over. Say goodbye to lava lamps. Say goodbye to
wide lapels. Say goodbye to disco. Say goodbye to platform shoes
with goldfish in them. Say goodbye to Studio 54. Say goodbye to
CB radios. . .
. . . And say goodbye to George Carlin.
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It's impossible to overestimate the importance of Jerry Hamza in
my career and life. Without Jerry I don't think I would've escaped from the financial and creative swamp that bad choices
and drugs had landed me in by the late seventies. Without his support and unerring instincts I would've never had the confidence to
go beyond stand-up and begin to explore comedy as art. Along the
way he also became something I'd never allowed myself before: my
best friend.
Jerry's father was one of the biggest country music promoters in
America. He worked out of Rochester, New York; from there he'd
promote appearances all over the Northeast, the Midwest and Canada, and he'd been doing it since the Hank Williams days. Later
it was with country superstars like Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn,
Tammy Wynette and Porter Wagoner. From a young age Jerry
worked for his father, selling programs at the front or helping out
backstage, gradually learning the business. By the time I met him,
Jerry knew concert promotion inside out.
But he wasn't happy. His father was a tough man to work with,
&n
"road-rats" he called them—who thought nothing of clocking up
hundreds of thousands of miles a year on the road, a lifestyle their
promoters were expected to share. So he quit, and for a year or so,
resisted his father's efforts to get him back into the business.
In 1977 I entered the picture. A friend of Jerry's father had promoted a couple of dates I'd done in Ohio, selling out both. (In 1977
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I still had enough heat from the four gold albums to sell out in a
market where I hadn't yet appeared.) Jerry's father was impressed
that a comedian could sell out concerts and suggested to Jerry he
promote some dates with me in Syracuse.
Jerry had no idea who 1 was and no familiarity at all with drugs or
my on-the-road lifestyle, which basically consisted of trying to score
coke from any local with a vague connection to show business and
a beard. But there wasn't much driving involved—Syracuse is only
eighty miles up the road from Rochester—and when he caught my
show he liked what he saw. He thought I had something special.
Just as important, I sold out four shows in two nights. From then on,
Jerry promoted more and more of my concerts until by 1980 he was
handling them all.
Of course, in promoting me, Jerry was making a break with his
father, striking out on his own, establishing his independence. His
father didn't get me at all. He told Jerry once: "I've been calling
people cocksuckers all my life, and I never made a quarter with it!"
But by 1980 I was not only creatively at sea, I was no longer selling
out two-thousand-seat houses. In venues I'd once sold out easily, we
often saw only a few hundred faces. Sometimes we barely made expenses. And the audiences were showing definite signs of wear and
tear. Aging hippie about covers it.
To stop the rot I needed new management. I checked out a couple of L.A. managers—in particular Bernie Brillstein, who managed
Lome Michaels and therefore several of the stars of SNL, like Belushi. I'd always liked Bernie, a funny guy in his own right, and he
was hot. Bernie wasn't interested. He told me my problem was that I
was too worried about managers stealing from me. Up front of him.
I mentioned my search to Jerry because the first thing a new manager would have to do would be to get people back into the concert
seats. And he said: "What about me?"
I'd never thought about that; I had no idea he'd be interested.
But he was, and he'd thought about it. His plan was to take over
all aspects of my career. I would be his only act. He wasn't interested in managing talent and becoming a Hollywood schmuck. He
was interested in an association with me based on friendship. He
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would move out to California, bringing his second family with him
from Rochester. A major, life-changing move for him and, as things
turned out, for me too. All it took was a handshake.
Jerry nursed me at first. He didn't tell me the awful truth. His
perception of where my career was didn't match mine. He was more
realistic. I still thought I was sustaining and maintaining myself at a
certain place and forget about posterity: "Am I famous? Am I making any money? Am I at least out there? Do they know my name?"
An awful lot of self-delusion, self-deception about how frightful the
prospects were for anything further happening to me. I've always
been good at seeing the brightest side of things; but I was bullshitting myself.
Jerry summed up his management strategy in two words: "hot"
and "big." Hot meant getting me hot again, coming up with new
projects, new departures, new material, news about George Carlin,
that I was back, that I hadn't just faded away with disco and lava
lamps. Big meant he believed I had the potential to achieve a permanent place in comedy. He wasn't in this for some quick commissions. He had long-range goals. He said that if we built things
together, made certain moves and took certain steps—and if I was
able to pull out the material—I could be one of the names that
would be remembered from this era of the twentieth century.
That resonated. I knew deep down I had unfinished business.
Things to be said, territories to be explored. I didn't know yet what
they were or how to say them, but the negativity of the late seventies
had given me an inner resolve to be terrific again, to go to a new
level, to fucking show the world what was inside of me. It took Jerry
to put his finger on it. And just in time.
Because now the bombshells began—major ones.
I had not only run out of money trying to fund The Illustrated
George Carlin, Brown and Kraft had run out of money when the
time came to pay my taxes. So they'd rolled over the taxes to the next
year, gambling I guess that my earnings would increase enough that
I'd be able to pay that year's taxes, plus the previous year's taxes, plus
the penalties that had accrued for nonpayment. (If I'd bothered to
open my monthly statements I might've had some inkling of what
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they were up to.) They'd rolled over taxes for at least two years: the
delinquent back taxes plus accumulated penalties were now an astronomical amount and escalating every month. All this is in L.A.,
where the IRS has a definite "Let's go get the stars" approach.
Jerry decided to drop Brown and Kraft and go with his accountants in Rochester, Bonadio, Insero. He and his father had used
them for years for all their real-estate dealings, their country music promotions and their vending business. They were accustomed
to complex tax issues and it moved the case away from the L.A.
IRS culture, lessening the likelihood that the media would find out
about my problems or that the IRS would slap a lien on my house or
my car. Jerry saw that even a tiny news item like that would be toxic
to reviving my career.
To start fulfilling the "hot" goal, Jerry decided I needed a new
album. I hadn't recorded an album in five years—after doing one
almost every year—and it would be a talking point: "Check this out:
George is on his way back."
But the album deal contained a second bombshell. I had a longstanding agreement with Atlantic Records that there'd be a large
advance for my next album: $300,000. Jerry confirmed this with
them: a welcome piece of good news. Later the same day, he got a
call from the head of Atlantic, Sheldon Vogel: "Listen, we've been
discussing George internally and going over his sales figures and it's
not going to happen. We're offering him $100,000." It wasn't something you could argue with or take to court. They had the hammer.
To do something different and attention-getting, I needed to get
back to a concept album. I made it half live, half in studio. It was
called A Place for My Stuff Overall I felt I didn't pull the concept
off, although there's some good material on it. It was the first time I
used the line: "Why is it that the people who are against abortion are
people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?" The stand-up
stuff was passable. The studio stuff really stunk. I had no expe
was something to talk about, and the "stuff" routine, which was the
opening of the live portion, eventually became a signature piece for
the next generation of material.
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There's something in comedy called the Rule of Three. Three
is the magic number. There are three ethnic types in the standard
corny joke. History would've been very different with only Two
Stooges. Repeating something three times is funny but four, five,
eight, ten or sixteen times increasingly less so. I have a supplementary rule to go with the Rule of Three, Call it the Rule of TwentyThree. After a certain number of repetitions, whatever it is starts
being funny again.
The Rule of Twenty-Three is behind A Place for My Stuff Stuff
is a funny word and bears repetition. A lot of it. So although the
piece was tightly written and disciplined, it sounded like a kind
of incantation—or one of those litanies we used to have to say in
church.
All you need is a place for your s t u f f . . . there's my s t u f f . . .
there's her s t u f f . . . and that'll be his s t u f f . . . gotta take care
of your s t u f f . . . a house is just s t u f f with a cover on i t . . . a
place to keep your s t u f f . . . you can get more s t u f f to add to your
s t u f f . . . lock up your s t u f f . . . don't want people stealing your
s t u f f . . . all kinds of ways to get rid of your s t u f f . . . and that's
YOUR s t u f f . . . then there's other people's s t u f f . . . except other
people's s t u f f isn't s t u f f it's shit. . . where'd they get that shit. . .
there's no room for my s t u f f . . .
In a way the album concept was an audio version of The Illus-
trated George Carlin— cutting away from live performance to recorded vignettes. Perhaps that's why Brenda and I decided to revive
the movie at around the same time. Jerry went along, partly because
he didn't want to come in like a new broom sweeping everything
old away: "This stinks, that sucks." Partly he wanted me to go for the