I didn’t want to end up on the end of his skewer.īut the Carlin I met was everything I’d hoped for - relaxed, friendly, thoughtful, humane.
At one point in his show he poked fun at the name “Todd” (an easy name to make fun of, let me tell you). In Vegas, Carlin was at his best - which meant carving sacred cows into so much finely sliced meat. So I was intimidated, to say the least, that day in late 2004 when he came by CNN Center for an interview. When my wife and I went to Las Vegas in 2002, the one show we took in was Carlin’s. I was the kind of kid who repeated Carlin lines and routines to my friends (and received more Carlin lines and routines in return). And they didn’t come much bigger, for me, than George Carlin.
#George carlin youtube seven or ten years ago free
Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.One of the great joys of this job is that you occasionally get to meet your heroes. Staying conceived literally required a miracle.Įxcerpted from Last Words by George Carlin with Tony Hendra. This marriage had gone south long before. So while I sprang from something good and positive, by the time I showed up I was a distinct inconvenience. According to those who knew them they were one of the great pairings of all time. The two of them were crazy about one another. Their reconciliations were sudden because my father had a terrific line of bullshit. My mother's theory was that while my father had been very free with his hands where his first family and Patrick were concerned, he didn't abuse her, because she had four brothers and her dad was a policeman. (My older brother, Patrick, can't say the same.) His first marriage ended disastrously when his first wife died of a heart attack not long after one of his beatings. My mother told me that my father hit her only once. The separations were long because my father had trouble metabolizing alcohol. In fact the preceding six years of my parents' marriage had consisted entirely of long separations, punctuated by sudden brief reconciliations and occasional sex-fests. The odds against my future existence were even longer: this particular weekend was a single isolated sex-fest during a marital separation that had lasted more than a year. By the time my father's eager, whiskey-fueled 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.
Not that my conception was the tale of two young lovers, carried away by passion and strong wine.
But we must admit that Irish foreplay consists of little more than "You awake?" Or the more caring, sensitive "Brace yourself, Agnes!" Popular ethnic slurs to the contrary, the Irish do enjoy sex - at least the last ten seconds or so. Meanwhile at Curley's Hotel on Beach 116th Street, Mary and Patrick Carlin starred in yet another doomed Catholic remake of Rhythm in the Sack.įor several generations Rockaway Beach had been a favorite weekend retreat for New York's alcohol-crazed Irish youth in search of sex and sun. High humidity and temperatures in the 90s send millions to the beaches."Īt the Paramount Theater in Times Square, Bing Crosby and Frances Farmer starred in Rhythm on the Range. A headline in that Saturday's New York Post said "Hot, sticky, rainy weekend begins. I was conceived in a damp, sand-flecked room of Curley's Hotel in Rockaway Beach, New York.