Journey
George Carlin
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4m 30s
Carlin’s comedic roots were in 1950s coffee houses and nightclubs, performing clean-cut humor with his partner, Jack Burns. Into the 1960s, propelled by the encouragement of peers like Lenny Bruce and Johnny Carson, Carlin evolved a new style that spoke to a more youthful audience, garnering acclaim (and coveted national TV airtime) with routines like his “Hippy Dippy Weatherman.” Into the 1970s, he shifted the tone and content of his work drastically, using his platform to speak intelligently, forcefully, and courageously about issues that were dividing America: the Vietnam War, race relations, drugs, religion, and freedom of expression. With his long hair, powerful liberal voice, and youthful perspective, George Carlin ascended as a countercultural comedian, encompassing the ethic and the outrage of a generation. During the 1990s, Carlin again evolved to become a sort of “elder statesmen” – adopting an almost philosophical outlook that used comedy as a vehicle for expressing his deep-seated concerns about the very fabric of American social life, politics, and civil liberties.
This video includes exclusive interviews with Robert Klein, Richard Zoglin, W. Kamau Bell, Margaret Cho, Pete Holmes, and Lewis Black.
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Process
Throughout his 50-year career, George Carlin meticulously recorded his thoughts and observations on thousands of small scraps of colored paper. “Every day I take a lot of notes,” Carlin explained. “They can be a sentence, a word, an idea, two things that connect or contrast, an afterthought, a ne...
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Words
From an early age, George Carlin was attentive to the rhythms and meanings of words – marveling at a perfectly placed adjective in a newspaper article or the virtuosic wordplay of his boyhood idol, the tongue-twisting comedian Danny Kaye. This lifelong fascination with language became a cornersto...
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Carlin & Language
From an early age, George Carlin was attentive to the rhythms and meanings of words. This lifelong fascination with language became a cornerstone of his work, which assumed a cadenced, melodious form that was not unlike spoken word poetry. To achieve this effect, Carlin meticulously took notes; g...
