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(In some quarters) there was this feeling that, well, he's just grown his hair and he's trying to cash in on the hippie thing. I had to prove that wasn't the case, so I went out for free for a while in coffeehouses, and they could see it was genuine, and things began to change. It was a wonderful example of what happens in this country, that people can reinvent themselves and discover new parts of themselves, and make those things a part of their lives.
Bankrate: Knowing what your material was like in the early days, it's amazing that you played Carnegie Hall in 1972. Were people shocked by that at all?
George Carlin: I don't think so. Once I established what I was doing and stayed in venues where they knew what to expect, such as colleges and coffeehouses, then I was fine. I started to build my own audience. The Carnegie Hall show was a result of my having started my recording career, so people knew who I was, and knew what they were getting.
Bankrate: Your 1992 HBO special, "Jammin' in New York," reinvigorated your career. How exactly did that special affect you at the time?
George Carlin: I think it was largely internal for me. I had been rolling right along doing an HBO show every two years, I was in gear and everything was fine, but what this did for me internally was this thing I referred to before. These were essays, these weren't comedy routines. So the show's popularity, especially with other well-known comedians, was a big booster to my confidence and sense of myself, my sense of the art growing in me.
Stand-up comedy is art, especially when you create it yourself and put it out there on your own terms. So that moment in my life really lifted me and pushed me to dare to do some better things in my career.
Bankrate: You've talked about your father being a great ad salesman. How great was he?
George Carlin: My father, Patrick Carlin, was the national advertising manager of The New York Sun, and he also sold space for The New York Post back when it was a broadsheet. In the 1930s, for three years, he was the leading ad salesman in the United States by actual lineage count. Ben Duffy, who was the head of BBDO (advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) at the time, was the best man for my mother and father when they got married, and he used to say that no matter how carefully he had planned his media buys for the entire year, he knew they would change when Pat Carlin walked in the room. My father was just highly respected, but unfortunately he couldn't handle his drinking, and that unwound him.
Bankrate: After the boxed set, what's the next big project for you?
George Carlin: HBO is my next thing. I'm doing another HBO show on March 1 in Santa Rosa, Calif. called, "It's Bad for Ya." So I have to pay all my attention to working on this material. I work about 80 or 90 shows a year, and every two or three years I do an HBO show.
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