And what had been a kind of casual acquaintance gradually become a close friendship. But in general we just had a tremendously good time.
And that we shared a lot of tastes, a lot of, you know, sort of ideas and analyses about humor. And you know, if anyone, if anyone got this it was George, who obviously, you know, very deftly defined that adversarial relationship in that piece.Īnd then we found that we were, in doing - in the course of doing my interview with him I just found a tremendous rapport with him, despite our obviously different backgrounds as you can probably tell from my accent. And part of my premise in this book was that this kind of radical humor that I was examining had always had a rather adversarial relationship to television, as defined obviously by the piece you've just sampled. And it - this was the mid-�80s and he was now in the top rank of people I wanted to interview, and in large part because he performed 99 percent of the time live. Then I met him met again, when I was doing a book called "Going Too Far," which was a history of modern satire. And then we sort of parted company into different directions. And we, in fact, remained competitive friends -friendly competitors perhaps throughout the �60s, doing the same dreadful television shows, you know, and the same nightclubs like Mister Kelly's and the Hungry i and so on, until he basically became completely disillusioned with the repression of �60s television, as did I. HENDRA: I actually first knew him in the �60s because we were both, I was a comedian also at that time and we were both scuffling around the Village trying to make it in television. So we decided it was part biography and part autobiography and therefore we would call it a sorta-biography. And in addition to that, he had asked me to write these kind of historical interstitial pieces that would place George in historical context throughout his more than - eventually more than 50-year career. He also didn't want to call it a memoir, which we decided was a linguistic mongrel of me and moi. It was actually because in the course of it, as you pointed out, George didn't want to call it an autobiography. ROBERTS: So how did you end up working on this not-autobiography? What's the term you want to use - sorta-biography? TONY HENDRA (Comedian Author): Hi, nice to be here. He worked with Carlin on his autobiography, "Last Words." He joins us from NPR's New York bureau. Tony Hendra is a comedian, author and longtime friend of George Carlin. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our email address is And you can join the conversation at our Web site. If you have questions about his work and life, our number here in Washington is 80. But first, the life of comedian George Carlin. Later in the hour - is blackface more irreverent or just insensitive? We talk race with Dawn Turner Trice. He used a word other than jerk - which reminds me, Carlin used a lot of foul language, so if you call in to quote your favorite routine for us, please remember you are not actually George Carlin and so please do clean it up for our audience. Although he apparently hated the term autobiography, as only the pinheaded criminal business jerks and politicians wrote autobiographies. Today, "Last Words," the autobiography of George Carlin. ROBERTS: That's George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." Before his death, Carlin spent 10 years working on a memoir with longtime friend and writer Tony Hendra. And they are the only words that seem to have that restriction. Sometimes, well, hell yeah, sometimes it's okay, but not all the time. That's about the only thing you can really say about them for sure, that they're just some words, not many either, just a few, that we've decided, well, we won't use them all the time. You know, what are these words that I'm talking about? They're just words that we've decided, sort of decided, not to use all the time. Man, I'm trying to decide what to call this whole thing. GEORGE CARLIN (Comedian): You know, that's the trouble, is trying to decide what to call these words. His 1972 album, "Class Clown," featured the now-legendary "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." His performances were often rants against authority and censorship. Carlin had a - well, adversarial relationship with politics and religion. Irreverent, strong-willed counter-culture comedian George Carlin stood in front of millions, questioning, condemning, cutting through what he daintily called middle-class crap.