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Sharps & flats
Oh, Captain, my Captain.
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[06/23/99]

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Over the years, Carlin has branched out into tame television (a failed Fox sitcom, the children's show "Shining Time Station"), some minor film roles ("Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "Prince of Tides") and bestselling books ("Brain Droppings"), but stand-up performances remain his main gig. And even with 40 years behind him, Carlin is as busy as ever. He recorded "You Are All Diseased" for HBO at the Beacon Theater in New York earlier this year and released a CD version last month. The set is vintage Carlin, peppered with clever slams on religion, advertising and cigar smokers, or, as he calls them, "White pussy businessmen smoking a big brown dick."

The "Diseased" get another piece of Carlin this fall, when Atlantic will release a box set of his classic '70s Little David-label comedy albums. And in the next year, the comic will appear in Kevin Smith's "Dogma," the religious satire dropped by Disney and picked up by the Weinstein brothers. In it, Carlin plays Cardinal Glick, a marketing hustler who runs a project called "Catholicism, Wow!" Carlin says he hasn't seen the film, but he isn't surprised that the Catholic League has already promised to protest. "It's very irreverent," he says from a hotel phone in Los Angeles, "which is probably an understatement."

You call this album "You Are All Diseased." Who are you talking about?

Everybody but me. The whole country. I never like to say, "They're doing this to us. We this, We that. Why don't we have more freedom?" Rather than this we're all under siege thing, I say, "Look what they're doing to you. First, they focus-group and find out what it is you're thinking. Then they take what you're thinking and they change it and then they have an advertising campaign and they re-teach it to you a different way. And then they take another focus group to find out whether it sank in."

But much of your audience must be the same cigar-smoking venture capitalists you criticize. They laugh, think it over for a few minutes and head home.

My purpose is not to change anything. I don't give a shit about this country. This country could explode tomorrow and I'd just move to Ireland. I don't care about America, I don't care about democracy, I don't care about the human race. And I don't care about religion or God or any of those things. I care about friendship, family ties and romantic love. Those are the things I believe in. And I love my writing.

Now the problem with that is that when you scratch a cynic, you find underneath a disappointed idealist. And there's still some little flame alive somewhere that says, "Wouldn't it be nice if only this or only that." But I gave up on saying that out loud because a lot of people say that and I don't want to sound like a lot of people.

I know what you're saying, but that idealist always seems to be leaking through.

And I don't try to completely stifle him because that's the lamp inside of me. That's the thing that makes me the human that I am. It's part of being a compassionate person. But as an artist, I like to push all of that aside for the sake of the rhetoric. That's the key word to what I do. It's rhetoric. It's exaggerated prose and it's done to make a point usually in a very, I hope, funny way. Or at least in a new, interesting way. And the point is not for you to believe it and take it and go home and act on it. The point is for me to hear myself say it. That's kind of a showing-off thing. This job's a job for show-offs. It's called, "Hey look at me. Hey, I only had nine years of school and I can think like this -- ain't that a bitch? And listen to how funny I am."

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