“Somebody has to think of this stuff. Apparently, I’ve been appointed,” George Carlin said midway through Life Is Worth Losing, his newest live HBO comedy special.
“This stuff” includes dozens of unprintably profane riffs about, among other things, beheadings, mass suicides, stupid Americans and natural disasters. Prior to the show’s start, Carlin’s unmistakable rasp came over the PA system, encouraging audience members to turn off not just cell phones and beepers, but all electronic devices, including pacemakers and heart monitors.
At 68, Carlin still has his edge, performing an act that can only air on HBO. This is the man, after all, whose performance of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” resulted in a Supreme Court decision on indecency, and in turn, he later expanded it to a poster version containing 2,443 filthy words.
Carlin engages the audience in what is best described as bare-knuckle comedy. At the HBO show on Saturday night, he is unapologetic – delighted, actually – when the audience recoils in discomfort as he begins a detailed meditation on autoerotic asphyxiation.
“I like to know where the audience draws the line,” Carlin said, in an interview with The Muse. “Once I know, ‘This is going to make them uneasy,’ I like crossing that line, and I like taking them with me – across the line, on the journey – and having them be happy that I did.”
Carlin crossed that line and made people uneasy about the topic of school shootings in his 1999 special, You Are All Diseased: “Kids today are too soft … When I was in school and someone came in and killed three or four of us, we went right on with our arithmetic. 35 classmates, minus four …”
Life Is Worth Losing continues Carlin’s remarkable evolution as a performer, a journey that includes an unmatched 13 HBO specials, countless albums and three best-selling books. Carlin gained many fans in the 1970s with his laid-back comedy and characters like the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark.”
But his style changed, most drastically in the early 1990s. If Carlin earned his reputation as a groundbreaking comic with ’70s albums such as Class Clown and FM ‘ AM, then it was in the ’90s, on records such as Jammin’ in New York and Back in Town, that he claimed his spot as comedy’s most daring thinker.
“Besides being an entertainer, I’m an artist,” Carlin said, of his comedic growth. “And artists are always on a changing path. Exploring the subject matter, exploring the culture, exploring the species.”
Lately, the exploration takes the form of a direct challenge. Through performance, Carlin transcends what it means to be a comedian. Instead of merely making us laugh, he forces us to question what we dare laugh at, what we dare hold as sacrosanct in culture and in religion. Life is Worth Losing is arguably not his funniest comedy special, but, as a testament to his fearlessness, it is certainly his most satisfying.
On the surface, Carlin seems to be cranky and cynical. But, after the show, he happily signed autographs and chatted with fans waiting outside the theater. Carlin describes himself as a “disappointed idealist.” He enjoys watching America self-destruct, especially under the man he refers to as “Governor Bush,” because “that’s really the last thing he was elected to.”
“We had a chance to be glorious,” Carlin mused. “I think we gave it up for, in this case, cell phones and laptops and jet skis and 39 different flavors of Jelly Beans.” m
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