George Carlin wasn't funny.
At least, that's what HE said the first time I spoke with him.
It was sometime in the early '80s and he was a major star. He had made the transition from Al Sleet, the hippy dippy weatherman, to George Carlin, the profane, anti-establishment, hippy-looking comic.
His seven dirty words had gone to the Supreme Court. He had been the first host of an edgy new show called "Saturday Night Live. And he was in my town for a performance.
So I took a tape recorder to his backstage dressing room, put the microphone in front of him and waited to hear what I was sure would be one of the funniest interviews I had ever conducted for the radio show I was hosting at the time.
I don't remember any of it. All I remember is that it ended with him saying, "Aw, man, turn that thing off. I'm just not very funny."
But if George Carlin was not funny that day, he more than made up for it when the lights went up. His career crossed five decades and generational lines. I was in college when I first heard him broadcast on his mythical radio station, "Wonderful WINO."
My youngest son was in college when Carlin's HBO special mocked, the shallowness of the '90s and white guys over 10 years old who wore their baseball hats backwards.
He went from the clean-shaven weatherman declaring, "Tonight's forecast . . . dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning," to the bearded social critic asking, "How come when it's us it's an abortion, but when it's a chicken it's an omelet?"
My personal favorite was part of a riff he did on sports I heard just a few years ago. In a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to speed up the game of baseball, he proposed limiting the batter to one missed swing. "Strike one, (bleep) you, siddown, you're out."
A few years later, Carlin was returning to my town for another appearance and I interviewed him in advance by phone. Again, there was little humor in the conversation. He talked about how he met the woman who would become his first wife and how they spent the first two years of their marriage on the road, living out of a Dodge Dart.
About the impact of drugs on his life, acknowledging the truth of an earlier Playboy interview in which he admitted, "I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out." He said he and his wife both were clean of their cocaine habits, although there would be other addictions to come.
In a separate interview, Brenda Carlin declared, "We almost both lost our lives because of that drug" and expressed concerns that it had contributed to the two heart attacks her husband had suffered.
It was a heart attack that ended George Carlin's life at the age of 71, five months before he was to receive the Mark Twain prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. And, while it will awarded posthumously, it will be richly deserved.
Because, no matter what he said that day in his dressing room, George Carlin was a VERY funny man.
D.L. Stewart is a columnist for the Dayton Daily News. He may be contacted at dlstewart@daytondailynews.com.
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