The Chris Moeller Archives

Last Words

I have an entire shelf at home filled with books written by comedians. Truth be known, most of them are not that good. I like the performer so I bought his/her book, and I like people to see them on my shelf. Collectively, I consider them to be America's great truth-tellers. But George Carlin's memoir "Last Words," published posthumously in 2009, is actually a great book. It's intensely clever, bracingly funny, and a damn interesting narrative. Though I have long considered Carlin almost without peer in his profession, I never realized how little I knew about his background. He's a talent so literate and in love with words, yet so marvelously vulgar. It all makes sense now that I know he's the child of some economic privilege, from Manhattan's upper west side, that was raised by a well-to-do, but drunken, violent father-- a successful newspaper ad-sales rep when New York City newspapers were king of all media (before Stern), and a status-seeking mother who saw her husband as being of the low-class, so-called shanty Irish, and herself of the "lace curtain" Irish.

And oh, the Catholicism. When I envision a young class clown getting rapped with a ruler across the knuckles by a sadistic nun, I envision young George Carlin. His teen years, spent in and out of parish schools in Morningside Heights and Harlem on upper Manhattan isle, would help shape and define his world outlook, his comedy, and his art even up until his death. Though he never comes out and says it directly, I imagine his entire career, especially the last three decades on stage, being fueled by an emotional need to piss off an entire order of nuns that might be listening.

"Last Words" is a beauty, as terrific as its opening line promises: "Sliding headfirst down a vagina with no clothes on and landing in the freshly shaven crotch of a screaming woman did not seem to be part of God's plan for me." He goes on to describe his very conception this way: "By the time my father's eager, whiskey-soaked sperm forced its way into my mother's egg-of-the-month club, she was forty and he was forty-eight-- certainly old enough to be carrying rubbers."

And it goes on from there. You get the idea. Check it out.

posted by CM @ 5:53 PM