Controversial comedian, actor, and author George Denis
Patrick Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in New York City. His mother, Mary, was
a secretary and devout Catholic, and his father, Patrick, was a national
advertising manager for the New York Sun. George was
raised by his mother, who left his father when he was two months old. He
attended parochial school and was an altar boy, to which he credited his avowed
atheism by the time he reached adulthood. At fifteen he’d had quite enough of
formal education and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He also developed
a pattern of running away from home on a regular basis, thanks to a very
contentious relationship with his mother, and his enlisting in the U.S. Air
Force in 1954, at the age of seventeen, seemed like a good idea at the time. He
was stationed in Bossier City, Louisiana, trained as a radar technician, earned
his high-school equivalency, and moonlighted as a disc jockey on KJOE radio in
nearby Shreveport. On the downside, he also received three court-martials and
several disciplinary punishments, was declared an “unproductive airman,” and was
discharged in 1957.
While working at KXOL Radio in Forth Worth, Texas, George met
co-worker Jack Burns, and the two of them formed a comedy team, refining their
act at a coffeehouse called the Cellar before moving to Los Angeles in February
1960. Calling themselves “The Wright Brothers,” they hosted a morning show on
KDAY Radio in Hollywood, performed at West Coast coffeehouses at night, and
attracted the attention of the brilliant and highly controversial comedian Lenny
Bruce, whose influence opened the door for a Burns and Carlin appearance on Jack
Paar’s The Tonight Show. Not incidentally, it was also
in 1960 that George met Brenda Hosbrook while touring, and they were married in
1961. Their daughter, Kelly, was born in 1963.
Burns and Carlin went their separate ways, and George became
a popular guest on variety shows, most famously The Ed
Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In fact,
between appearances as a guest and as a guest host, George was booked on The Tonight Show 130 times during both the Jack Paar years
and the Johnny Carson decades. He sharpened his stand-up skills in Las Vegas as
well, perfecting such classic routines as “Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippie
Weatherman” and “Stupid Disk Jockeys” and recording them in 1967 on his first
album, Take Offs and Put Ons.
As his career progressed, his style and the subject matter of
his routines became more and more unconventional. His short hair gave way to
long hair. His clean-shaven face began sporting a beard. His conservative suits
evolved into jeans and T-shirts. And on July 21, 1972, George was arrested at
Milwaukee’s Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws for his
landmark comedy routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The case
was ultimately dismissed. A similar Carlin routine broadcast on a New York City
FM station in 1973 resulted in the station being fined for broadcasting
“indecent but not obscene” material during the hours when children were most
likely to be listening.
The controversy, combined with George’s edgy, unconventional
brilliance, made him even more popular, and he was a natural host for the first
episode of the equally edgy and unconventional Saturday Night
Live in October 1975. By then he’d already unapologetically declared
himself a regular cocaine user, so it wasn’t surprising when, after an
unexpected five-year semihiatus from stand-up comedy during which he filmed the
first few of what would be fourteen HBO specials between 1977 and 2008, he
acknowledged that he’d suffered the first of three heart attacks.
George’s acting career took hold in the 1980s, launching an
impressive list of credits that included such feature films as Outrageous Fortune, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and
Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Prince of Tides, Dogma, Jersey Girl, and Cars (a Disney/Pixar production in which Carlin is the voice
of Fillmore, a psychedelic VW microbus). He also provided the voice for the
children’s television favorite Thomas the Tank Engine and
Friends from 1991 until 1998 and appeared as “Mr. Conductor” on the PBS
Shining Time Station from 1991 until 1993. And in 1993
he launched twenty-seven episodes of a Fox sitcom, The George
Carlin Show.
Tragically, in 1997, Brenda Carlin, George’s wife of
thirty-eight years, died of liver cancer. In June 1998 George married Sally
Wade, a marriage that lasted the rest of his life. (In fact, his death occurred
two days before what would have been their tenth anniversary.)
George enjoyed long-standing status as a headliner in Las
Vegas. But in 2005 he was fired by the MGM Grand after an ugly, profane exchange
with his audience, and within a few weeks he checked himself into a rehab
facility for addictions to alcohol and Vicodin. He announced to his audience at
the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California, on February 1, 2006, that they
were witnessing his “first show back” after being hospitalized for heart failure
and pneumonia.
In mid-June 2008, George returned to his home in Los Angeles
after a reunion with performing stand-up at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las
Vegas. A week later, on June 22, he was admitted to St. John’s Health Center in
Santa Monica, complaining of chest pains. He died at 5:55 p.m. of heart failure that same day. At his request, his
body was cremated and his ashes were scattered, with no memorial or religious
services to mark his passing.
George was once asked what he was proudest of in his career.
He answered that it was the number of books he’d sold, totaling nearly a million
copies. Beginning in 1984, he wrote six books, the last two of which—Watch My Language and his autobiographical Last Words—were released posthumously.
From Francine
I wish you could have seen the look of
shock on George’s face when he emerged from the tunnel and rediscovered that
there really is life after death after all. And when
he found his first wife, Brenda, waiting to greet him, he was stunned into a
long silence while he held her, after which I’m told he gaped at the hundreds of
spirits and animals who gathered for the reunion and said, “I’ll be damned.”
George is an excellent example of the fact that atheists are embraced on the
Other Side as surely as the most devoutly religious, and with his humor,
self-honesty, and misguided but honorable intentions, he tried to live a godly
lifetime, no matter what words he used to define it.
Once he spent time at the Scanning Machine
and in Orientation, all his memories came flooding back, not only of the life on
the Other Side to which he’d just returned, but also of the life that preceded
this most recent one—he was a black man in the mid-1800s, wrongly convicted of and executed for a murder he did not
commit, the murder of a white woman, which, it was later learned, was actually
committed by the presiding judge. It was
understandable that George arrived angry and rebellious against “the system,”
and it was brilliant of him to have charted a sense of humor that would allow
him to express his outrage through the power of laughter. He regrets that he found it difficult to distance himself from the
penetrating anger that drove his comedy, so that he could genuinely relax and
enjoy his success from time to time. He also
recognizes that he was conflicted about his success, loving the comfort it
afforded him, but also not wanting to get so comfortable that he’d lose his
edge, and it was in pursuit of that edge that he allowed himself to indulge in
his addiction to cocaine. He wants his daughter to
know how much he adores her, wishes he’d been the father she deserved, and is
intensely proud of her. He’s also grateful to his second wife, who he says was
more understanding and compassionate about the “baggage” he brought to their
marriage than he could ever repay.
His life at Home is blissfully happy, in
its own unique way. You need to remember that all of
us maintain the same basic personality traits throughout the eternity of our
spirits—the outgoing remain outgoing no matter how many times they incarnate and
return to the Other Side, the introspective remain innately introspective, the
humorless remain humorless, those with a sense of humor eternally have a sense
of humor, and so on. George is no exception.
He loves spending time in the Hall of Records, researching
past and present charts of historically powerful men and women and entertaining
at large gatherings with his singularly insightful perspective on those who
experienced power on earth. He’s also very devoted to
study and meditation on the charts of his own lifetimes, intent on tracking the
onset of his avowed atheism in an effort to learn how he grew to be so loudly,
outspokenly wrong about the existence of God. He has
no plans to incarnate again.
