I remember sitting on the floor of my friend Mario’s place in the early 90’s, as he put  George Carlin’s Class Clown LP on the record player, and losing myself to laughter as Carlin ran through his “7 words you can’t say on television” bit. Recently, I picked up his Last Words memoirs, expecting myself to howl through several hundred pages of diafragm-rattling material. Surprisingly, although there were many hilarious sections in the book, I found myself looking into a sincere and thoughtful work of self-reflection by one of the most outrageously insightful and incisive social critics in recent memory.

Last Words chronicles Carlin’s development from an unruly juvenile delinquent on the streets of mid-century Brooklyn to the irascible and unrelenting elder statesman of comedy most of us remember him as now. Along the way we follow his wild stunts: racking up court marshals in the air force, nose-diving on cocaine-fueled rides in his private jet and engaging in bizarre self-destructive experiments in order to break free from his success in establishment comedy.

The work certainly doesn’t shy away from documenting and critiquing his own screw-ups and his journey from conservative knucklehead to liberal to anarchic provocateur and more is quite interesting to behold. Also energizing, is his disaffection from hollywood bullshit and his search for authenticity in his work.

What really shines for me is his later more politicized content. He came to a sort of rubicon later in his career where he realized his work had degraded into self-involved navel gazing and began to keep a research diary of everything that was going on in the Reagan administration. This led him to statements such as:

“See that’s what you’ve got to remember, this is the Ronald Reagan administration we’re talking about. These are the Law and Order people! These are the people who are against street crime! They want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals! Yeah! They’re against street crime, provided that street isn’t Wall Street.”

and to more general commentary on American society:

“You know Time Magazine and Newsweek put cocaine on the cover, but they put the liquor advertisements inside the magazine. It’s the old American double standard, you know say one thing and do something different. And of course the country is founded on the double standard, that’s our history, we were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.”

I found Carlin’s final years (and his blackest humor) also profoundly intriguing, as he seemed to adopt a bleaker anti-humanist stance, lambasting the follies of the human race in our collective destruction of the planet’s biosphere:

“I look at it this way… For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers… so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.”

It’s certainly a shocking sort of honesty. Apparently he just up and decided to emotionally disinvest from the catastrophe and take on the mantle of trickster and spectator. I think this fearlessness allowed him to say things that would have destroyed the careers of others. In his own frequently repeated words:

When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.”

This is definitely a book worth picking up… and thinking about.