The mad scientist as 'black belt comedian': Deceased Artiste Chris Rush (part 1 of two)

Photo by John Blenn

Chris Rush was the neighborhood wiseacre gone absurdist science professor. An engaging conversationalist who would listen and then respond with the funniest insights and deft turns of phrase. He was a “comedian's comedian” who, according to his friend George Carlin, was prone to “ad-lib five careers worth of material backstage.” He died at the age of 71 on January 28, 2018, in Forest Hills, Queens (although he lived in Manhattan at one point for several years, he remained a boroughs guy, having grown up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn), after a number of ailments took their toll on his system.

Chris certainly had the ability to make anyone he met laugh — he was one of the only people I've met who could “tune in” to your personal sense of humor and begin to make you laugh out of the blue, even while discussing the grimmest topics.

Chris's first LP, First Rush.
Art direction: Thomas Hachtman

Chris put in several decades on the standup circuit. His beginning was auspicious — after only a year as a standup, he scored a record contract with Atlantic Records.

The resulting album, First Rush, moves through the subjects that had made up his life to that point (in his mid-20s): a strict Catholic upbringing and, stricter yet, a Catholic education; a fascination with science (he had been a molecular biologist prior to becoming a comedian); fantasies, delusions, and mindfucks sparked by the use of drugs, from pot to hallucinogenics; and a love of television. The last-mentioned remained a lifelong fascination — Chris was an inveterate nature-channel viewer and a collector of details about the strange behavior of animals and insects.

Back cover of First Rush. Photo by Michael Sullivan.

The album is not the best introduction to Chris’s comedy, since his later material was far funnier and didn’t rely as much on drug humor. Some of the shorter bits are still wonderful, though, particularly the ones about religion:

Judeo:

Christian:

As I’ve been preparing this piece I’ve been speaking to Chris’s partner Megan, who has been receiving very nice messages from his friends that have been supplying pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was his life. When I asked Chris about past events, he often dodged the subject or said he didn’t remember — he clearly was a man of the present and future, who didn’t want to dwell in the past. He told Megan about his childhood and his strict Italian father (he was born Christopher Mistretta).

He remembered the first time he made the family laugh, as a tiny kid aged one and a half, by standing on a chair and impersonating opera. The kid liked the reaction he got, so he continued to be the family clown as he got older (what better way to stave off a strict parent?).

A bearded Chris (left, with hair!) in the early Seventies.
Photo by Michael Sullivan.

A posting on Facebook by Chris’s ex-wife Michele adds a bit more to his biography: She noted that the two were married for a decade (1968 to ’78) and were “hippies” who wore the fashions of the time. Both were Brooklynites (she an 18-year-old from Bensonhurst, he a 21-year-old from Williamsburg).

Michele and an early science teacher encouraged Chris to be a professional comedian. The most interesting detail in Michele's touching reminiscence was this nugget: “The first time he dared to perform was at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village. He got a standing ovation, and knew he wanted to be a comedian.” She paid tribute to his ability to make people laugh until they hurt, and added, “He was the kind of husband that would help me find important things when I lost them. My smile, my hope, my courage.”

An ad for Chris's debut album,
which ran in National Lampoon.

A humor break from the biographical info — Rush on food. As quoted in Allentown's Morning Call newspaper, “Nightclubbing” column: “In almost no other place in the world besides America, Rush noted, do the words 'unfavorite food' have any meaning. His 'unfavorites' include liver, tongue sandwich ('How can you enjoy something that tastes you back?') and sushi ('My family calls it bait').”

Back to the bio: Chris’s fascination with science manifested itself early on. Megan recounts his wild and reckless (well yeah, crazy) early years as an amateur “scientist”: “As a youth, probably a teen, Chris got his hands on a CIA manual and/or an army manual and regularly used the 'recipes' in it around the neighborhood. He stopped traffic on his street with smoke camouflage. He severed a toilet from a park bathroom wall with one explosion. He threw a jar of nitroglycerin gel down the sewer near his home. A minute later all the doors along his street swung open. Sewage had shot into the homes. Sewage splattered one guy while he was shaving.

“In high school Chris read a recipe in a newspaper article for a laxative weapon the military was using. He formulated it in class. It went airborne and the entire class, including the teacher, shit their pants. Chris was like a mad scientist and he frequently created drama around the neighborhood with his antics.”

Chris's love of science was more serious by the time he reached college. He never did complete his undergraduate degree, but he became the head of surgical research at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital supervising staff with doctoral degrees. His study of molecular biology — his favorite scientific topic at that moment – soured when he became deeply disturbed by what they were doing to animals in the course of the surgical research.

Michele encouraged him to go onstage. As he put it to Heavy Metal magazine in an interview in the January 2012 issue [p. 14.]: 

“I went to Catholic school, see? There was a lot of stress and tension. We had SS nuns and the humor would come as a source of tension relief. I was always the funny guy in grammar school and later in high school…. I used to be a chemist, a research biologist, actually, so I started, instead of working with chemicals, I started eating some of these chemicals, and I would just start to rap comedy for hours on end. I didn’t know where it came from. I still don’t. The news, universal consciousness, whatever the hell it is that takes you over, and I would just hook with another human being and laughs would be produced. It was my greatest high and my greatest love. Now, I lucked out. I was doing it in a loft building for free, I never thought of becoming a professional comedian…”

A great bit from his second album, encompassing evolution, animals, deaths, sex, and flirting at a bar:

On First Rush he sounds a lot like Lenny Bruce — the nasal intonation, the NYC accent, the use of street slang and hipster argot – but he noted to me in the interview for the Funhouse TV show that his appreciation of Lenny came as the Seventies wore on (in the form of “books and movies” as he put it). He grew up idolizing free-wheeling comedians, the people he referred to as “black belt comedians,” like Jonathan Winters, and more sedate standups like Bob Newhart and Funhouse interview subject Shelley Berman.

Due to his hip credentials, Chris worked a lot as an opening act for rock bands from the Seventies through the Nineties. I first encountered his work in print, in the book Breaking It Up, edited by Ross Firestone, but it took another decade before I saw him live, opening several times for Flo and Eddie at the much-missed Bottom Line nightclub. (To illustrate what company Chris was in, other opening acts for Mark Volman [Flo] and Funhouse interview subject Howard Kaylan [Eddie] included Bill Hicks and a very young Chris Rock.)

At the Bottom Line you often didn’t know who the opening act was until you arrived at the club. Having done countless gigs before rock audiences waiting (im)patiently for their favorite band, he was used to having to win over the crowd — so his first topic was, thus, impatience, especially at his NYC gigs, where he could go straight into a dissection of the New York personality and the *complete* lack of patience contained therein. 

Megan informs me that, when he saw a big line waiting to get into the club, he would sometimes go over and start chatting up and performing for the folks on the line, seeing that they were bored and unhappy (a brilliant strategy to make sure they enjoyed his opening set, it also reflected Chris's love of shooting the shit).

One of my fave Rush lines about NYC living – the real reaction to King Kong. “Lookit that big gorilla – hope he don't shit or fuck up traffic. [honks car horn]”

***** 

By discussing Chris’s interactions with other comedians and the bands he opened for, we get a clearer picture of his energy and invention (through his riffing with and relating to other comics), and also his dogged determination and innate understanding of how to handle disparate audiences (through the sets he did to open for various musical acts).

Chris maintained long-lasting friendships with comedians on every level of the business, with the most notable friend and cheerleader being George Carlin. Chris admitted in the Funhouse interview that he got his contract with Atlantic because they viewed him as another Carlin. Chris and George maintained a connection for a few decades, mostly through phone calls and correspondence.

In 1985, George included Chris as a cast member in a pilot that never went to series called “Apt 2C” (the cast also included co-writer Pat McCormick, Blake Clark, and Bobcat Goldthwait!). He also recommended Chris for various things he didn’t want to take on himself, like hosting a Sirius talk show (this was after Chris had been a regular on two different “morning zoo” AM radio shows).

The executives at Sirius didn’t opt for him, but that didn’t stop George from helping out his old friend a second time — Chris’s first investor in his dream project, a one-man show to tour theaters and not nightclubs, was Tim Allen (for whom he ghostwrote a best-selling book; more on that in part two of this piece). When Allen was no longer onboard, Carlin stepped in to finance and produce the show.

The title of the show at that time was a line of Chris’s that George thought served as the best introduction to the material: “Laughter is the sound of bliss.” When 9/11 came along and the project floundered, George stepped away from Bliss (as it was later known) because he felt that he should be actively ready as a sounding board for Chris, and he (George) was having heart trouble and other issues that didn’t permit him that investment of time.

Chris had the utmost admiration for George — whom he called a “bloody genius” in the Funhouse interview” and a “black belt comedian” in our talks on the phone — and he was particularly touched, according to Megan, by the fact that George used to send him newspaper reviews of his (Chris’s) shows he found in local publications as he traveled around the U.S, in case Chris hadn’t seen them.

Upon hearing that story, I was reminded of my own mother and the many older ladies who are prone to saving up articles, reviews, and coupons to give to their loved ones. (Carlin was raised by a single mom, so one wonders if he picked up that habit from her.)

Another humor break from the biographical info — Rush on cockroaches. “In New York, the adult cockroaches are into method acting. And they train their young. I won't use Raid on them. It's a nerve-blocking agent and it takes three minutes for them to die. I can't take the guilt when the cockroach tells me: 'I've got three kids and a wife under the fridge.'”

Other comedians whose work Chris loved, loved him back. He spoke often about what a privilege it was to meet Sid Caesar, who presented him with the Best Male Comic award by the Association of Comedy Artists. Dick Shawn enjoyed Chris's work as well and the two worked together on at least one occasion at the Bottom Line. On Aug 2-3, 1985, the club presented “Together again for the first time: An evening of standup comedy” with Shawn, Chris, and Larry Storch (!). The amount of energy on that stage must've been overwhelming.

Chris with Dick Shawn and Stiller & Meara.
Photo by BL Howard of the Brooklyn Roads site.

One of the many other comedians who enjoyed Chris's company was a young Robin Williams. Chris recalled an evening in L.A. when the two matched wits for a while, trying their best to crack each other up. He and Robin were riffing on each other's style of comedy; they went at it for at least an hour, to the point where the deli owner locked the door and let them keep going while the place was closed. Robin tried to persuade him to stay in LA, suggesting that he could get a sitcom. Chris said the only way he would do that would be if he got to play an alien. Two weeks later, Robin started Mork and Mindy, Chris said.

Chris didn't like to nostalgize when I spoke to him — again, he was an “onwards and upwards” kind of guy. He did recount, however, how he enjoyed talking with Andy Kaufman after their sets at comedy clubs in the Seventies, with Andy staying in character as “Foreign Man” all the while. A few years later, when Andy was a TV star, he spotted Chris in the street and ran to talk to him, nearly getting hit by a car in the process. The two old acquaintances were happy to catch up – and Andy never once spoke in his normal voice. (Foreign Man Kaufman referred strictly to Rush as “Mr. Chris” every time the two met each other.)

At the Bottom Line. Photo by BL Howard
of the Brooklyn Roads site.

Chris played every known venue that presented comedy performers. When he was beginning his standup career while in college, he performed in loft spaces. As he became established, he played nightclubs and eventually the comedy clubs that began to dot the American landscape (he was the debut act in several clubs that opened down in the South during the “comedy boom” of the Eighties).

Chris at an in-store appearance for Beaming In.
Photo by BL Howard

The biggest challenge, however, was one that he tackled with ease for more than a decade and a half — opening for rock bands in concert halls, college auditoriums, and even arenas. The line-up of acts Chris opened for reads like a short list of “thinking man’s rockers”: Tom Waits, Steely Dan, Electric Light Orchestra, Talking Heads, etc.

He certainly had a home at the Bottom Line. The BL“timeline” website has many entries for Chris. The acts he opened for at the club included Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (with special guest Shel Silverstein!), Ray Barretto, George Duke, John Mayall, Taj Mahal, Larry Coryell, Warren Zevon, Ginger Baker, Tower of Power, Al Stewart, Fairport Convention, David Bromberg, and Buddy Rich (!).

Outside of the Bottom Line, he opened for several other jazz and blues acts – Wes Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, B.B. King — and even world music legends (Hugh Masekela). Chris’s friend Bill Kates notes that he first saw Chris live as the MC and opening act for the Alice Cooper group on their “Billion Dollar Babies” tour at Madison Square Garden.

Chris didn't discuss these gigs at any length in later years, but he did volunteer when questioned that he loved winning over the musicians' audiences and got along famously with the musicians themselves, from the jazz gods to the “art rockers” (Talking Heads).

He had specific memories about specific acts — like the time that he was picked up in the air by the mighty Meat Loaf, and his ride in a car driven by none other than Tom Waits. (His verdict: never ride in a car driven by Tom Waits, but that might have changed since the two played together at Stonybrook university on Nov. 6, 1976.)

Chris's second LP, Beaming In.
Design by Michael Sullivan.

During this period Chris honed a set of material that was released as Beaming In, his second LP. A friend remembers Chris playing an NYC Star Trek convention, which follows, given the sci-fi bent of his material at this point and the fact that he was a diehard Trekker himself.

The best thing on the album: Chris talks about cohabiting with one's beloved, then admits being tired and decides to keep going with his set, and accepts topics from the audience to keep moving. He goes all over the map, and the result is exactly like it was talking to him one on one — delightful and lightning-fast thinking:

*****

Jumping ahead in time (we’ll jump back in the second part), I wanted to close out this part of my tribute to Chris with the episode of the Funhouse TV show that I made from my interview with him in 2009. He was doing his one-man show Bliss down at the 45 Bleecker theater and was in rare form.

I am extremely proud of having played straight man to him, and count this among the most delightfully “fast” interviews I’ve ever done. When we spoke on the phone, Chris would make a point of saying he liked my fast way of talking (he called me “caffeine in human form”), but I gotta say Chris was a veteran fast-talking New Yorker, whose mind functioned very quickly, retained an endless amount of knowledge and trivia, and instantly clicked in to what the listener found funny (in my case, you can make me laugh endlessly by mocking the Catholic church) and exploring that topic.

In part two of the episode we discuss Lenny Bruce, Carlin, and quantum physics, which Chris taught in a simplified and highly understandable manner:

In the third and last part, we talk more about quantum physics (he in a very funny way), compulsive TV watching, and his development of Bliss.

Coming soon to a blog near you! Part two of this piece, which will explore Chris's writing, his time on the radio at various stations as a guest and sidekick, and his latter days as a performer, including his one-man show Bliss. 

Thanks much to Megan De Caro, Chris's longtime partner and “angel,” and the various photographers who allowed me to use their work in this piece.

Ratz leaving a sinking ship: the pope resigns

I am an ex-Catholic who takes great delight in making fun of the church because... well, it is so certain it is right, and it isn't. It also pretends to be moral and isn't, and is often about as far away from the teachings of Christ as it's possible to be and not be a Nazi. Oh wait...

I'll get back to the Nazi aspect of this latest pope below (“he didn't want to be – everyone had to join the party back then....”). I'll also get around to the fact that the guy knows more about sex abuse in the church than any other pontiff ever has and did nothing to stop it or to punish (or even just excommunicate) the guilty. That stuff just ain't funny, and this is supposed to be a humorous blog post.

So I'll start with the light stuff and then bring on the heavy material toward the end. First and foremost, the media attention given to the abdication... er, resignation of this high-hatted fool has fascinated me, in that it's always fascinating to watch the news media fawn over a leader who literally exists in a dimension where the past is always present and what “we” say is always right (and everyone else? Why they're ALL going to hell....). The coverage has died down, but is sure to be ratcheted up again when the cardinals do their arcane wizardry (puff of smoke, my ass).

I find it very hard to laugh about the cruel realities of the church, but I can enjoy those who speak about its rampant hypocrisy and its backward-looking mindset – and yes, I do think that the other key religions have their backward-looking, we-are-completely-right-on-everything sects, and I have as little regard for them. I was brought up Catholic, however, so I can personally attest to the stupidity and tunnel vision of that faith.

So what is there to laugh about? Well, there is one humorist who always mocked the Catholic clergy in a pretty friendly way. I'm talking of course about Don Novello, whose “Father Guido Sarducci” character I first encountered on a Smothers Brothers comeback variety series in the mid-Seventies (I believe Fr. Guido first appeared on a David Steinberg LP called “Goodbye to the '70s”).

Father Guido is a priest who talks common sense, a gent who will never be promoted to archbishop or cardinal (that stripe “gets you the good veal in restaurants”), most likely because he's been the “gossip columnist” for the Vatican newspaper for the past 35 years. Novello infused the character with brilliant bits like this one, explaining how we all do literally “pay for our sins”:

He also came up with a foolproof way to learn only the stuff that you're left with after a regular education is over. Novello's routines as Fr. Guido have always been impeccable (that sadly misguided bit at the what-was-all-that-about “Rally to Restore Sanity” excepted); Novello's other work, on the Laszlo Letters book and as a comedy writer, has always been spot-on.

With all the affection I have for the Fr. Guido character, I should be doing a whole mock campaign here to get Signore Sarducci to be elected pope. He reported on the selection of Pope Benedict for the Al Franken radio show on Air America; the segment heard here is actually the weaker of two appearances I heard – his explanation of how the pope was chosen was far funnier (as I remember it, the process included being hit in the head with a hammer), but that particular appearance on Franken's show has not been preserved online.

There you have it – there's one guy in a priest's garb that I do love and have loved for over a third of a century. As for my evolving religious beliefs – that went from agnosticism (a discovery made in Catholic high school, mind you) to atheism – I tend to side more with the angry ex-Catholics who know how to sum up the situation in a pithy way. Guys like George Carlin, who pretty much was the poster boy for an evolving consciousness (evolving away from the church).

George inspired many standups over the years, and one who has professed his devotion and debt to Carlin is Louis CK, currently helming the best comedy series being produced in the U.S. Louis has been directing short films for a few decades now, but one of his finest hours (well, four minutes) is this little item from 2007 about the true “point” of the Catholic church:

Yeah, Louis' contention that the church “exists solely for the purpose of boy rape” may seem like a comic exaggeration – but only a little. I personally never was never raped by a priest, but was taught religion in grammar school by a priest who was arrested on child pornography charges (he was arrested in an alley off Times Square, no shit).

He was not excommunicated, merely shuffled off to another parish. My parish was abuzz for a few days with this “outrage,” but all the crazy people who believed kept believing that the church needed our collection-plate dough and all was soon forgotten. (By the way, he had also been running the parish branch of the Brownies.) A small handful of the priests and nuns I was taught by in twelve years of Catholic school were exemplary individuals; the majority, though, were afflicted with alcoholism, sadism, or flat-out insanity.

Thus we arrive back at the soon-to-be ex-Benedict, a man who served in the Hitler Youth and who, according to many, was “complicit in child sex abuse scandals.” To quote a Guardian article from last week, Pope Benedict (according to David Clohessy, the executive director of the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) “read thousands of pages of reports of the abuse cases from across the world. He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than anyone else in the church yet he has done precious little to protect children."

Back when he was just Cardinal Ratso Ratzinger, the Pope was put in charge of investigating sexual abuse problems in different countries (among them Ireland and the U.S.; as Pope he also ignored major cases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria). In each case, the perpetrators pretty much got off scot-free. To quote the Guardian one last time, I cite Jakob Purkarthofer, of Austria's Platform for Victims of Church Violence, who says that "Ratzinger was part of the system and co-responsible for these crimes."

So this pope is not a good, moral human being, he's a bureaucrat and administrator. And therefore I felt that the monologue and sketch about him from the first season of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle needed to be online. The series in its entirety was up on YT at one point, but now exists only as small shards.

One would think the Comedy Vehicle sketch about Pope Ratz would be up online, though, since it interestingly enough links the Pope to Jimmy Savile. Lee and his producers are not accusing the Pope of pedophilia at all – the gag is that Il Papa wanted his strikingly garish red shoes and received them thanks to Jimmy Savile on his “Jim'll Fix It” TV series. But yeah, it seems like a fascinating link to make anyway, between a man who made a habit of molesting young folk and another gent who did nothing to stop the abuse he heard about.

Savile is played by the master Scottish comedian-provocateur Jerry Sadowitz, who did material on Savile being a pedo way back in the late Eighties – that material (less than two minutes worth) got his CD “Gobshite” completely pulled from distribution.

Lee also devises a commercial use for a likeness of Benedict's horrifyingly mean-looking face. (Those racoon eyes, man, those eyes....). Please enjoy:

Note: some of the illustrations in this piece came from http://www.gospelaccordingtohate.com/

The Madness of King George: Deceased Artiste George Carlin

It used to be that when a recording artist died, you broke out their records to reminisce. With the advent of video, you could supplement your wistful memories of the person’s work with a “video night,” watching old tapes of their performances. Now in the era of YouTube, when a beloved performer dies, it’s onto that hub site… and just hope the copyright holders haven’t caught on yet.

So it is that I salute George Carlin with a “survey post” of amazingly rare (and amazingly thorough) uploads on YT. Carlin was a very important performer to me for numerous reasons, the No. 1 being that I attended Catholic school for waaaaay too long, and his Class Clown album helped me survive the experience, by pointing out how absurd the whole thing really was (and, I’m sure, is). He also is, along with Groucho Marx, one of the first comedians I really began to personally identify with, on an attitudinal level. I had all kinds of heroes and icons during my childhood and adolescence (and still do, as evidenced by the Funhouse), and Carlin was one of the ones who spoke directly to me — through the set, through his vinyl, and, yes, through his gloriously cartoonish tones of voice. I revered Steve Allen for the same reason: obviously smart guy making silly jokes, doing silly gestures, not afraid to make a fool of himself while still being really, really fucking sharp intellectually.

I guess my interest in Carlin as a kid was also a function of the “forbidden”-ness of his comedy. I began hearing about him from my Dad, who stayed up “late” and watched things like the Tonight Show, and was a major fan of really silly/smart comedy. Thus, I had the experience everybody in those days had with both George and the fucking immortal Richard Pryor: his stuff was on TV late, you weren’t allowed to hear his humor, therefore it must be sought out. And like every kid who did hear Carlin and Pryor, I was richly rewarded with insane laughter from the “new” language, crazy voices, and ungodly brilliant delivery, but also learned about rebellion in a way that was far more subtle than the eventual discovery of the rockers and actors who dominated my adolescence. Both George and Richard were obviously developing the turf that Lenny Bruce conquered first (in fact, one of the many reasons I wanted to hear Lenny so much was Carlin’s constant nods to him in interviews). They both moved off in separate directions: Richard with intensely personal material and broadly, brilliantly cartoonish characters and voices; George with his examinations of language and social hypocrisy, the minutiae of everyday life (what later got tagged as “observational” comedy), and sheerly silly musings and images that ranged from the in-your-face puerile to an almost sophisticated weirdness. In the latter regard, I HAVE to point out an influence on George no one ever cites, one I can hear heavily in his work: Lord Buckley! Check out my blog post on the “Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat” and tell me if you don’t think George’s low-down gravelly voice (used for those strangest-of-strange concepts) wasn’t copped with love from the Lord.

One thing that made Carlin so exceptional as a comic is the fact that he kept producing new work over a span of decades, and was intent on polishing it as best he could, offering a completely new set of material every few years. I grew to love him, however, through his records, with AM/FM, Class Clown, and Take-Offs and Put-ons (his first LP, I had the Pickwick version, curiously not missing anything!) getting heavy spins on whatever player I had at the time. Although some of his material, including the early ’70s stoner musings bits (“Sharing a Swallow,” “The Elevator”) and even some of his fastest bits (“Wonderful WINO”) were pictures-in-words and worked best as audio material, his rubber-face and incredibly goofy body gestures were lost if you weren’t watching him perform the piece. Thus, the reason to check out even the meagerest of his HBO specials: as Pryor is best viewed as a stand-up in his three “concert” films, Carlin is truly preserved for the ages in his cable specials, which he made the focus of his work for the last two decades of his career, a very wise move (and one that still allowed him to act in a movie here and there — yes, he was actually good in The Prince of Tides! — and write three whimsical humor books in the process).

George's regular TV appearances made him a continued presence in my fan-life, even during what I consider the lowest period of all: he tended to think of the mid-’70s as the meager era (he said he couldn’t even watch his appearance on the first SNL, but I think he’s terrific), but for me the years 1978-1981 roughly are as painful as it got. I haven’t seen it since it aired, but I remember a routine on Fridays that was threadbare (“where’s the blue food? We want the blue food!”), and was the type of thing that probably inspired Rick Moranis’ spot-on impression of him on SCTV (which George, generally wildly open-minded about younger comics, did not like, according to Dave Thomas). He rebounded from that very, very low point with his HBO “resurrection” in Carlin at Carnegie (1982), where he started refining the comedic persona he had for the next quarter-century: a wryly incisive, filthy-mouthed social inquisitor who, as he gained in years, became openly cranky and exhibited no hope for our continuation as a species (in this regard, George is uncommonly like Bob Dylan, whose Endtimes beliefs seem to be the one thing he has kept and nurtured since his Christian sojourn).


I looked forward eagerly to George’s HBO shows, even though I have never in my life subscribed to the service (thanks all of those who let me watch ’em). From Carnegie to Back in Town, he had me amused as well as enlightened (he also borrowed Lenny’s penchant for preaching through sarcasm). The shows did acquire a “bit by bit” success/biding-time ratio from You Are All Diseased (1999) on, with some bits being pure brilliance, and others seeming like wordplay filler. The joy of it always being that, no matter how meager the filler was, his set-piece bits were wonderful — even when he seemed visibly unhealthy, as he did in Life is Worth Losing (2005). At the time he did that special, he was 68 or so and recovering from alcohol addiction with what I believe was that bizarre medication that seems to curb the patient’s tendency to want to drink but also makes their head look like a balloon (check out late 1980s Sinatra for further evidence). Even in that somewhat saddening show, some of the bits were still tight as hell, it was just that his delivery was slightly off, which was deadly for his material, contingent as it was on his rhythms and variance in voice. Thankfully, his last show, It’s Bad for Ya (2008), saw him a little faster on his feet and able to run through his familiar laundry-list bits with more fervor (and with a very nice gesture, a framed pic of the Man, Richard P., on the show’s “set”).

I met the man for only about two minutes, having him sign his first book Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help (a publication his obits seem to have forgotten) at an appearance at the Musuem of Television and Radio. I’m glad I got to tell him how important Class Clown had been to my childhood, and how much I loved his comedy. He was gracious, did the autograph thing, explained something about the photo on the inside cover that didn’t need explaining (he discovered as he was talking that there was already a photo caption for it). In watching the clips I link to below over the past few days, I’ve come to realize how impressive his achievement was (simply staying funny at all after four decades is an amazing task — just look at how many of our comic gods from the Seventies are silent or massively unfunny today; the Eighties guys, well, they began sucking in that very era….). I’m glad he will receive the Mark Twain Prize, which within a few years of its inception became a popularity contest rather than an award of lasting merit (rather like the AFI Tribute awards). Surely Sahl, Berman, Nichols/May, Dick Gregory, the Smothers Bros, Woody, and several others need to be awarded that prize (they needed it well, well before the “Comic Relief” hosts got theirs), but George truly does belong in the company of the award’s first two winners, Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters. Now, onto the clips, man….


I found that two posters did all the work for Carlin fans on YouTube. A few months ago, the first gentleman posted all of George's albums and all of his HBO specials. I will leave you to move through that wonderful mass of terrific comedy, but will point out (despite the fact that the poster didn’t want people to embed his videos) that he also has put up some “off-road” (as they call it in the trade) recordings of Carlin appearances, plus the contents of the “bonus CD” that was included in the box set The Little David Years, which I never bought because… well, I got all the albums goddammit. The two tracks I would draw your attention to are a short snippet of George as a Top 40 rock DJ (terrific!) and the routine "Lost and Found", which finds him in full flourish moving in and out of his Lord Buckley voice (the routine also has a heavy Lenny influence in the repetition of the words: lostandfound, lostandfound, lostanfound, thankyoumaskman!).

I recommend you pour over George’s splendid Little David albums and his HBO shows at your own leisure, as long as they remain posted (thanks, Devil-guy!). For the video rarities, I point you toward another poster who has taken care to specialize in uploading Carlin TV appearances, which allow us to chart his movement from nightclub comic in a suit, to hippie-dude in a T-shirt and jeans, to middle-aged guy with a perfected delivery. First, what looks to be the oldest footage of George as a solo act (he started in a team with Jack Burns; their album, which was retitled "Killer Carlin" when reissued, is here). He’s doing JFK here (Hefner noted on Larry King that Carlin’s impression pissed off Joseph Kennedy Sr. when he visited the Playboy Club, nice honor for George!). The first full-fledged dose of material we get is from a 1965 Merv Griffin appearance, wherein George does his TV commercial shtick.

The best bit of early George is this Hollywood Palace appearance in 1966 where he’s introduced by Jimmy Durante (!) and does “Wonderful WINO,” one of his classic early bits.



George continued to do formulaic bits throughout the Sixties, with some of them sounding remarkably alike, as in these Smothers Brothers and Hollywood Palace clips (for a real blast, hear Ron Carey do the same damned bit in a different context, on his comedy LP). George finally appears in a beard on Playboy After Dark and seems right on the verge of going hippie:



Here, we have an early longhair appearance, in 1971 on The Mike Douglas Show. I was pretty surprised he could do all the anti-Vietnam and roach-smokin’ humor on staid ol’ Mike’s program, this clip is definitely a great find. George's obit in the New York Times quoted him as saying "scratch any cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist." Here is that idealist (who later urged people not to vote, as it implied "consent" to the corruption of government....):



Where I first saw George (and Pryor, and Robert Klein, and…), on The Flip Wilson Show, here doing his newly minted stoner think-pieces including “Sharing a Swallow.”



In addition to a 1972 Tonight Show appearance , the seminal TV appearance is George’s guesting on the Lennon-Ono guest-hosted Mike Douglas Show. He gives a preview of the Class Clown material, seems particularly mellow, and even does some of his Lenny impression before they cut to a commercial!



And the following year George guested on The Midnight Special. Now completely settled into his hipster role, he talks about when “grass swept the neighborhood.”



Two more TV clips: working through some “werds” on The Midnight Special and doing Mike Douglas again, but seeming worse for the wear in 1975. He does his “God” routine, getting all the voices right, but gravelly as hell (still, some good viewing). Also consulting his notes (Moranis’ impression was indeed spot on, for that period). Once George had fully fused his stoner sense of time and space with his observational outlook, you had some wonderfully trippy work, as here on the Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour. What was the smartest decision George made in regard to the show? He made a deal to just do five minutes of stand-up a week, and never, ever participate in the show’s sketches (like a little island of existential humor in the middle of a vaudeville procession).



By 1978, George was beginning to wilt a bit, as seen here on The Carol Burnett Show. This routine, by the way, was a concept also done by Robert Klein and David Steinberg earlier in the 1970s, the “every record ever recorded” bit. Perhaps the most touching clip from this era for me (and it is a lean era, believe me) is this clip of George entertaining an audience of kids with part of his “Class Clown” routine, if only because I laughed like hell at George at the same age these kids are at (I was a teen when this show aired, though, and never knew it existed… until YouTube).



Farewell, you cranky old bastid, thanks for the laughs.