"Last Words"

-by George Carlin
(with Tony Hendra)
2009
You know those disclaimers reviewers write when they have some personal connection to their subject matter? I feel i ought write one. But my connection is simply the overwhelming sense of identification that i (and many millions more) have felt with George's material. Whatever nerve he touched, whatever vein he sourced, he's the only comedian who ever made me feel like i was listening to some funnier version of my own thoughts.
His career was towering, enduring, and unprecedented. His 60s work was impersonal and apolitical (even though he knew and adored Lenny Bruce, it took a long time for him to evolve in a similar direction). In the 70s, he realized he could be funnier if he mined the experiences of his own life, but it wasn't until the following decade that he let rip his more naked self. It was at this point that he leapt past the boundaries of stand-up to join a rarefied pantheon, along with Paine, Twain, Thoreau, King, and Mr. Bruce.
The book was culled from decades worth of association with Hendra (THIS IS SPINAL TAP), collecting material for what would be the crowning of George's career, a one-person (sorry, George) Broadway show about his life. He died a year or two shy of realizing that dream, but all the material is here. In that respect, it's much more personal than anything else he's written.
Reading the book, i'm struck with how alike George and i were, at the end. We took different paths to get here - he had a rougher youth, with larceny, military courts-martial, and decades of drug abuse. But at the end, when he sums up his understandings of life, it's an almost eerie mirror for me. He even invokes an alternate version of himself who is almost entirely me - the loner who works in anonymity, running around on no one's hamster wheel, writing his thoughts on his own time and sending them in accordingly.
Another difference between us is that he spent almost all his adult life married...which may be the reason why monogamy is the one glaring social ill he never railed against, even though he may have very much wanted to. Very few of us don't have to kiss somebody's ass, if only to keep domestic peace. If i presume too much, George, it's not without cause.
About drugs however, if i may make an observation hopefully worthy of him, we all use drugs in one form or another, and many of the distinctions between them are so much bullshit. At the most basic level, drugs alter our mind and take us out of our reality. In those terms, comedy is a much more literal drug than you've probably ever considered. In that respect, George Carlin was one of the greatest drugs that several generations of humanity ever ingested.