George Carlin

Yesterday was a pretty uneventful birthday.  Hanging out in Alabama with family.  Instead of showing them the rough cut of the film I just finished or the zillion pictures from the recent trip to Cuba, we ate sinfully rich chocolate cake and watched Design Star on the DVR. I came home to a big empty house, packed for the trip back to LA and headed to bed.  Then at midnight I get a text message from my friend Ian Harris that just says, OMG, George is dead. Sad day.

I remember my dad listening to George Carlin albums when I was a kid.  I knew I wasn’t even supposed to hear them.  He didn’t listen to them in the house. He had a little record player down in the basement with the pool table and car parts, all the guy stuff that didn’t make it into the house.  He would sit down there with drinks from the abandoned old fridge and his friends and they’d laugh and laugh at George and the then very funny Bill Cosby and the raunchy Richard Pryor.  For some reason they let me stay and it was great.  I think the best way to get to really know my dad was to see what made him laugh and George made him laugh.

Of all the comedians that were relegated to the basement, George was my favorite. He was smart and quick and took you with him on his quest to make one question everything.  I was lucky when I moved to LA to get to know him in person.  He called me Zel.  Sometimes he would come by and I would hear him yelling out, “Hey Zel, you got a fax machine in there?”  One day I was roaming the neighborhood looking for who had hit my car and in that typical style told me, “Definitely blame somebody.”  As usual, he stopped me in my tracks and I gave up the stupid quest because in the scheme of the world it really didn’t matter.

That’s what I loved about George.  He always cut to the chase.  

We had been talking recently about working on a new film together, “Inventing the Buzz.”  The film is about the world of stand up comedy and we had great talks about all the new comedians who come to LA just to land a TV deal and don’t really care about the true art of telling a story and entertaining a crowd. 

The last conversation I had with him was about death.  A good friend of his had recently died and he was in charge of scattering the ashes in Malibu.

So, I get home today and George’s car in the driveway won’t mean he’s home.  And I won’t hear him calling out for his beloved Gertie (one of his cocker spaniels) or see the big black SUV that came by every week to take him to Vegas or Palm Springs or wherever he was performing that week, or see him sitting in his living room working on new material.  I’m sorry he won’t get to see his new house remodel finished.  I’m sorry for his wife and his daughter and his puppies and all those who loved him.  I knew him for a tiny amount of time and for all my life and he definitely made a difference.

If there’s a line to get into the afterlife, then I’m sure George is putting everything into perspective for those privileged enough to be in his company.  I know I am very grateful for the time I spent with him.