George Carlin on two subjects
His new i-Phone:
"I just love it. It has got me out of the closet on a lot of these applications that on my previous phone they seemed too dense to do. But getting your e-mail and your Internet on this when you are out of the house, it is just so easy that you do it."
On being fired from the Frontier in Vegas in 1969:
"As a kid I wanted to be a comedian in the movies. I called that an actor. 'I'm going to be an actor someday like Danny Kaye.' He is the one I focused on. I began to plan how to do that as an adolescent. I did everything I could to expose myself to anything I needed to know, understand or experiment with. I knew I had the gift of gab. Here was my plan at 11 years old. The first thing I planned to do was to be a disc jockey, because there the audience couldn't look at you and you could develop your confidence. So I was going to be a disc jockey. After that, I would become a comedian at a nightclub and get really good at it and then travel around doing that. Eventually, I would get good enough at that, I could get into the movies. That was the boyhood dream. I put it into motion as best I could. I left school early. I got into radio and had a good head start by the time I was 20 and was on my way. That is what we will call the A story.
"There is a B story all along that I am not really crediting. I am a pot-smoker. I am law-breaker. I am a rules-breaker. I don't like authority. I got kicked out of three schools. I got kicked out of the Air Force, essentially. I got kicked out of Boy Scouts, choir and summer camp. I got kicked off of all those things. I was a kid who was completely out of step, and they were constantly trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I just didn't like structure. I didn't like all those rules. I was way ahead of these people. That was the B side.
"Finally, what happens is that I find myself pursuing this mainstream dream, this Danny Kaye dream where you have to be a people-pleaser. It is a mainstream dream. You have to play the game, and you have to go along to get along. These things made me uncomfortable. I especially hated the TV variety shows where you had to be in a skit and also the opening song. It was all stupid shit I hated, because I was full of weed. There was this torture going on inside of me. Yet, I never acknowledged it. Then comes the '60s and the free speech movement. Here comes youth culture, freedom of expression and a counterculture. My musician friends were dropping acid and growing their hair. They were using their music to express their feelings, thoughts and attitudes about society. And here I was entertaining these assholes in nightclubs doing cute, harmless media parodies.
"The tension between those two things was so great that there came a series of moments where the fabric ripped. One of the places was at the Frontier two years in a row. The first year I said 'ass,' and they suspended me; and the second year I said 'shit' and they fired me. That was my signal to put a halt (to the Danny Kaye dream)."
Carlin will be appearing at the Orleans through August 19 (For more information: 365-7075)