George Carlin remembered 15 years after his death by his publicist, Jeff Abraham

15 years ago today – June 22, 2008 – the world lost George Denis Patrick Carlin.

And the next day newspapers everywhere printed his obituary opening with… “George Carlin, the acerbic, Grammy-winning comedian whose career spanned more than 50 years, died of heart failure Sunday evening after being admitted to the hospital complaining of chest pains, his spokesman said. He was 71. Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, died at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica shortly before 6 p.m., said his publicist Jeff Abraham.”

As you can imagine my entire life flashed before my eyes. Well at least, the last 11 years, as that’s when I represented George.

Like so many people, I was shocked to learn that George had died. But like the obituaries reported he did have a history of heart problems, so I can’t say I was completely shocked.

However, six weeks earlier on May 8th, George was saluted by The Paley Center for Media and was full of life and was very much look forward to his future.

George had just done his 14th HBO special titled It’s Bad for Ya on March 1st and said he wanted to do one more – because 15 was a nice round number – and then do a Broadway show about growing up in New York when he turns 75. I thought to myself, Well, I know I have a job at least for the next 4 years.

For the last question of the evening, someone asked George how he would like to be remembered and he humbly replied, “I know when they write the history of comedy, I know I’m good for a paragraph.”

When the evening concluded, George and I went our separate and I headed out to dinner. Less 30 minutes later, George called my cell saying how much he enjoyed the Paley event and could he please get a copy of the program.

Ten days later, on Sunday May 18th, I saw George perform at The Grove of Anaheim. George did two shows that day – an afternoon and an evening one. I went to the afternoon show and went backstage to give him a belated birthday gift – a Spike Jones DVD Box Set – since I knew he loved the pioneering comedy-musician.

Two things I remember about that day. One was George was not too thrilled about performing while it was still daylight out. They had no choice. The evening show sold out and they had to add another show.

The second thing was I was barely out of the parking lot when George texted me saying he couldn’t wait to watch Spike Jones and all his City Slickers.

Little did I know that would be the last time I would ever see or talk with George.

About a month later, I got a phone call from my good friend Mark Krantz who created and produced The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He said, “How would George like to follow Billy Crystal?”

Mark and I had a running gag, every year I would call him up and say “How about Jerry Lewis and George Carlin?” It took 10 years but I finally got my wish fulfilled. Next thing I did was call George’s ever present manager, Jerry Hamza, and told him the exciting news. On June 17th, AP announced that George Carlin would be 11th recipient of the prize in a ceremony to take place on November 10th.

As the saying goes, everyone knows the rest of the story – George passed away 5 days later. Since that day, I’ve always had to correct people when they write about Carlin’s posthumous honor. I tell them that honor was not posthumous only the ceremony was.

Since George’s passing, I’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Carlin Estate in promoting various CD and DVD releases and helped the National Comedy Center make the announcement of the acquisition of the George Carlin Archives. I’ve also worked very closely with George’s daughter, Kelly, in promoting both her one woman show and memoir called A Carlin Home Companion.

Lastly, I was honored when I was asked to be one of the interview subjects for Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s Emmy Award Winning documentary George Carlin’s American Dream. By the way, if you sneeze, you might miss me in part two.

Having said all of above, I was completely taken by surprise when I walked into a small independent book store on January 12, 2023 and noticed there was a new biography of George Carlin on the shelf. Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin (Applause) written by John Corcelli which came out on December 15th 2022.

How did this book get released without me knowing about it or even more so, how was it written without my knowledge? I had to read this book so I contacted the author via email and he was kind enough to send me a signed copy.

Before I read a book from cover to cover, I always skim it to see if there are certain subjects or people included in the text. The first thing I wanted to see if my name might appear in the text – it doesn’t. But I did notice a mistake and problem with the follow paragraph on page 224.

Corcelli writes… ”Not long before his death, George Carlin was named a recipient of the Mark Twain Prize…The first comedian to get the award had been Richard Pryor in 1998. Carlin was the tenth. He learned of the news about a week before he died and appreciated the honor. “Thank you Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people. (Daily Variety, June 19th).”

First of all, George was not the “tenth” recipient of the Mark Twain Prize, he was the eleventh. If Corcelli wrote 10th instead of 11th that might be a typo, but he wrote out the number. How does a mistake like that happen?

Throughout the book, Corcelli is very good about giving exact dates but here he writes, “not long before” and “about a week” – it was five days before he died as proven by the published reports on June 17th.

Speaking of dates, Corcelli often jumbles dates; he refers to The National Comedy Center hosting an event to celebrate Carlin’s influence and unique contributions to comedy history in 2020 on page 218 but six pages later on page 224 he is writing about Carlin being honored by the Twain Prize in 2008.

Once I started reading the book which Corcelli states was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, my disappointment grew. Corcelli did very little in ways of interviews with people who knew George except for Laurie Abkemeier who was Carlin’s editor at Hyperion where he provides some nice insight about how his first book Brain Droppings came to be.

And Corcelli does a nice job of giving credit to Jerry Hamza for playing such an influential role on George’s life and career.

I would like to say I really enjoyed the book but I can’t. As a whole, the book feels like – been there – done that before. The book is filled up countless quotes taken from previous books about Carlin and interviews the comedian did over the years, therefore very little new ground is explored.

There is also a lot of padding in the book – three are mini-bios devoted to the so-called Holy Trinity of Comedy: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Richard Pryor totaling 30 pages. Even in the photo department there is padding – the book includes publicity headshots of Leno, Maher and Shandling because they were fans of Carlin. And do you really need two photos of Lenny Bruce in a Carlin biography? And neither of them is the one where George is behind Lenny as he Bruce is being arrested. You might say too much unnecessary STUFF is included in the book.

Also the book is not a conventional biography going from birth to death. It is an affectionate take of the outsider status of renegade comedian George Carlin to quote one reviewer.

The book is broken up into 4 parts — #1 Class Clown (1937 – 1961), #2 Jester (1962 – 1970), #3 Poet (1971 – 1989) and #4 (Philosopher (1990 – 2008) and in turn Carlin’s various books, cable specials and acting roles are examined together. This can be both helpful and confusing. For example, the death of George’s wife Brenda in 1997 is mentioned three different times in the book – Page 86, 200 and 202.

And if you can figure out what Corcelli is writing in this sentence on page 19, you are a better person than myself…

“New York has given birth to a long list of buoyant comedians ranging from Larry David to Michael Rapport and Whoopi Goldberg and Julia-Louis Dreyfus.”

So if you really want to know how I am going to remember and celebrate George Carlin – I’m going to revisit his debut HBO special On Location: George Carlin at USC which premiered April 11, 1977 that I first saw as 15 year old kid on Long Island which featured George’s infamous “Seven Dirty Words.” It was preceded with this warning appearing on the screen – “THE FINAL SEGMENT OF MR. CARLIN’S PERFORMANCE CONTAINS ESPECIALLY CONTROVERSIAL LANGUAGE, PLEASE CONSIDER WHETHER YOU WISH TO CONTINUE VIEWING.”