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For those of you just joining us, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings, there's more to the Kennedy name than a dubiously talented former MTV veejay, and George Carlin has not always been a long-distance telephone service pitchman.
In fact, had you taken a survey just a few years ago, Carlin might have ranked just behind the pope in a list of those least likely to be flacking for a phone company. These days, though, it's all about marketing, Carlin will tell you. Not that he's happy about it.
The acclaimed quintessential counterculture comedian brings his latest show to The Fox Theatre Saturday night, one in a series of road dates leading up to the broadcast of his 11th live Home Box Office comedy special.
"It's the best show I've ever done," Carlin says. A biased opinion for sure, but still a significant pronouncement considering Carlin's knack for telling the truth - and the vast body of his comedic and satiric work that precedes this outing.
Carlin, 61, got his start in radio at the age of 19 while serving a brief stint in the U.S. Air Force. In 1959, he teamed with newsman Jack Burns at KXOL in Fort Worth and the duo began developing comedy routines. Their partnership lasted two years. Carlin moved on to solo gigs, performing in folk clubs and coffeehouses, where more progressive audiences were drawn to his wry, cynical comic style.
It was in this setting that Carlin developed many of the set bits that gained him extensive television exposure, among them the "Indian Sergeant," "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" and "Wonderful Wino." Carlin became a regular guest on shows with Jack Parr, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Carol Burnett.
By the late '60s and early '70s, the American "counterculture" was taking shape, largely from the same audiences that had laughed with Carlin in the coffeehouses years before.
"I think that particular period was unique because it was the beginning of the effective use of mass media by people with an axe to grind of any kind," Carlin said. "It was also fueled by some very new cultural frontiers being breached, and that was the drug and the sex aspects of life."
That environment freed Carlin to perform routines that mirrored his own beliefs. Sexual and social mores could now be discussed more frankly, an opportunity seized by Carlin and contemporaries such as Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Lenny Bruce and troupes such as Second City and St. Louis' own Compass Players.
Today, Carlin continues to perform 150 live shows on the road each year, mostly mid-range concert halls and showrooms. What happened to the counterculture?
"We do still have people who feel opposed and counter, but society learned to co-opt those people a long time ago. It learned that back in the '60s, how to turn hippies into marketing tools," Carlin says. "That's what happens with punk or the music of the day, any of these things that have a chance of solidifying an opposition are co-opted by the culture in its own interest.
"I don't think the culture does it consciously to head them off; I think it just does it because it's good marketing. I think most kids in school now are just there to find out how to get a good job because we've become nothing but consumers in this country."
That may be at least something of a benefit, at least for a performer who retains the attitude of the radical coffeehouse comic while selling out the big houses. Still, the encroachment of consumerism on nearly every aspect of daily life is a source of disappointment to Carlin.
"I'm not even thinking left- or right-wing, any of that kind of stuff," he says. "It's disappointing that a species with this magnificent brain and all of the potential we were given by nature to objectify things, to be able to speak about things outside of ourselves, and to be able to have abstract and conceptual thought, these things are wonderful gifts that we're squandering.
"The balance between cooperation and competition has gotten to a dangerous imbalance. Competition is now the boss, whether it's friendly competition in business or who's got the best suburban utility vehicle, it's just a soulless, soul-deadening pursuit of goods and power and money and position.
"That, and this ignorant belief that there's this man up in the sky watching everything, is dispiriting and discouraging to me."
Ah, yes: religion. It's a notion Carlin himself has little use for, but a topic he exploits mercilessly in his manifold rants on human folly. Organized religion will certainly figure prominently in what Carlin calls his "points of attack" in his new stage show, including "praying as a specific, democracy ... and the hypocrisy of 'all men are created equal,' a good strong attack on men, white people, policemen, airport security and germs and the slavish devotion to children's welfare in this country."
In other words, a typically rich assortment of things that stick in George Carlin's craw, peppered with trenchant observations on language and its butchery by commercial culture.
"I see this as art," Carlin says. "I know it's entertainment, I know I'm a stand-up comedian and I don't shrink from those descriptions but I know there's a process of art at work in interpreting the world and presenting it back to the audience in an altered form.
"That's why I think my voice has grown and changed over the years because I've been open to the art side as opposed to strictly stand-up entertainment. I really enjoy finding what's in my heart and mind and what I can do with it."
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Brad L. Graham is a writer, editor, riverboat gambler, fashion consultant, softshoe dancer, professional assassin, freelance factotum and singer of sentimental ballads.The BradLands is his home on the web.
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