Playboy: Yes, but it’s also pretty funny.

Carlin: Not to me. It was my car.

Playboy: Then what happened?

Carlin: Brenda went into therapy and I soon joined her. First we put the drugs behind us, then we began serious work on our relationship. And, in time, we got well together.

Playboy: Did you have affairs?

Carlin: No.

Playboy: Encounters?

Carlin: Only during our worst period of drug abuse. The coke made me incredibly horny.

Playboy: During your college-concert years, did you have many groupies?

Carlin: Anyone who’s onstage is going to attract a certain number of misguided people. But I was never very interested in groupies. Instead of thinking about the sex, I’d always think about the clap and the crabs those people have.

Playboy: How are comedian groupies different from rock-star groupies? Are they smarter? Funnier?

Carlin: The women who line up at a comic’s dressing-room door are not what you’d call your class groupies. I mean, there are some decent star fuckers, but they all want to fuck musicians and movie actors. To be a comedian fucker is like being a juggler fucker. Can you imagine a girl who wants to fuck only the opening act? It’s like watching an animal trainer and then wanting to fuck the chimp.

Playboy: You had an auto accident yourself recently. A bad one, though, fortunately, no one was hurt.

Carlin: Only the car and my nose were totaled.

Playboy: This is a delicate question, but—

Carlin: No, I was clean and sober. A tire blew at the wrong time and I lost it. That’s all.

Playboy: Are you sure that’s all?

Carlin: Actually, I suspect there really was more to my accident than bad luck. I think it was God’s way of punishing my nose.

Playboy: Just when you finally got clear of coke, you had a heart attack. What sort of heart attack was it?

Carlin: My left descending septal branch artery decided to close without consultation with any of my other organs. It happened on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1978. I woke up that morning and my jaw muscles were tight and achy. I thought it was from the way I slept, so I took three Tylenols. But the pills didn’t go down right, or didn’t seem to. It felt like they’d lodged in my esophagus. I was driving my daughter Kelly to school and the jaw ache and this feeling of a lump in my chest continued. And that’s when it hit me, Jesus, I’m having a heart attack. So I got Kelly to school and went straight to my doctor. It didn’t show up on the EKG right away, but because of my symptoms, he put me in the hospital for tests. They don’t take any chances with comedians. The blood sample confirmed the heart attack and the angiogram supplied the details. I loved the angiogram. They stick a thing in your thigh and it goes all the way up to your heart. Isn’t that a thrill? Well, at least the nurse scored thigh.

Playboy: Had you suffered any previous heart problems?

Carlin: I’ve always had irregular heartbeats. They’re called P.V.C.s—premature ventricular contractions. A lot of people have them, that feeling your heart almost stops for a moment, then starts again. I had a lot of P.V.C.s in intensive care and they became life-threatening.

Playboy: Both you and Richard Pryor suffered heart attacks after years of cocaine abuse. Did any of your doctors suggest that the coke had actually brought on the attack?

Carlin: I suspect it might have. Sometimes, after I’d gone at the coke like one of those snow plows moving up First Avenue, I’d think my heart was over on the dresser, pounding, and I was watching it. I asked some of the doctors who drifted through the intensive-care unit what kind of effect total cocaine abuse has on the heart and they said things like, “Well, there’s not enough valid information.…” That kind of answer. But I consider the coke a major cause. Of course, you could also make the argument that because cocaine speeds up the heart, it’s good for you.

Playboy: A drug-induced aerobic exercise? That’s a unique theory.

Carlin: But not a very good one. I’ll tell you this: When I was really coked up, those P.V.C.s were much more dramatic and more frequent than they are now. Each episode was so apparent. It would go, “DOONG, DOONG, DOONG–DUCK-DUCK…DUCK-DUCK…DUCK-DUCK-DUCK…DUCK-DOONG, DOONG.” And I’d go, “Whoa, Jim. Let’s go lie down.”

Playboy: What were your worst episodes during those years of cocaine abuse and heart irregularities?

Carlin: It’s worst when you combine coke and fucking with an irregular heartbeat. That’s when you really feel like you’re on the edge.

Playboy: You’ve been on the edge—of a stage, anyway—since you were a child. As a fatherless Irish street kid from the Upper West Side, it’s at least a twist on the typical show-business background. Was there any particular incident or influence in your childhood that sparked your ambition to become a performer?

Carlin: By the age of six or seven, I was already doing voices and faces, making my friends and my mother laugh. Then I saw Danny Kaye in a movie, and he was doing voices and faces on that big, big screen and making whole audiences laugh. It was just an instant hookup.

Playboy: So you were always funny.

Carlin: First I was a mimic. Practically from the moment I began talking, I did impersonations of the people in my neighborhood—the storekeepers, the policemen, my teachers. I always knew I could hold people’s attention and make them laugh every 30 or 40 seconds, and I got approval and attention for that, so the behavior was reinforced. Later, that became an important skill on the street corner.

Playboy: Did you know your father?

Carlin: My father and mother separated when I was two months old. Although he lived until I was eight, I literally didn’t know him. My mother had been a secretary, and after she and my father split, she went back to work for an advertising executive. So my older brother and I were “latch-door kids.” We went home for lunch and after school by ourselves.

Playboy: Were you a lonely child?

Carlin: My mother didn’t get home until about seven most nights and, yes, there was a sense of being very alone after school. She gave me all the proper guidance and influences, but physically, she just couldn’t be there. So I became a radio nut. I loved the afternoon serials, and I got into jazz through the radio. I had a subscription to Down Beat when I was 12. And I’d spend a lot of time in front of the minor, miming records.

In my fifth-grade yearbook—it’s right up there on the top shell—the last page says, “What about your future?” and under my name, it says, “When I grow up, I would like to be either an actor, a radio announcer, an impersonator or a comedian.” By the way, another item on that shelf up there, next to the fifth-grade yearbook, is a Dodgers program autographed by all my heroes. Being a Dodgers fan led to my first Air Force court-martial, but that’s another story.

Playboy: Which we’ll get to later.… But for now, we’re doing today’s interview session in the little office next to your house, and it’s a fascinating work space: two desks, a typewriter, a lot of recording and video equipment, books, records, tapes, files, all kinds of signs on the walls. Yet despite the clutter, there’s an almost archival feeling of order.

Carlin: My books and records are arranged according to subject, and within each subject, they’re alphabetical by author or artist. The music tapes are alphabetical and the performance tapes are in chronological order.

Playboy: Is that something you did on one of your coke runs after all the nuts and bolts were sorted?

Carlin: There are two types of people: One strives to control his environment, the other strives not to let his environment control him. I like to control my environment, because I feel if I have my physical space in order, then I’m free to dream. So there is some compulsion involved. But the dividend I get is the freedom to be totally disorderly in my dreamworld.

Playboy: What about all these hundreds of signs you have on the walls? Although they’re all very interesting and funny, they’re also obviously stolen.

Carlin: I guess that makes me part vandal, part museum curator.

Playboy: Do you enjoy stealing?

Carlin: I think it keeps the child alive in me. There’s a thrill when you steal something in plain view of other people. When you drop a newspaper over a sign and walk away with it, or take something off a wall and the sound of the glue ripping makes people turn around. Your heart is racing, it’s a rush.

Playboy: The one in the bathroom is marvelous: “The Maclaine Hotel Commemorative Nixon Visit, 1968.” And Nixon signed it at the bottom.

Carlin: Yeah; as soon as I saw it in the hotel lobby, I said, “That’s going.” I guess they’ll be after me now.

Playboy: In your routines, you return constantly, almost obsessively, to your parochial education. Did you ever attend public high school in New York?

Carlin: I went to George Washington High School for six months before my 16th birthday, when I could legally quit. That was an even worse experience than the Catholic schools. I mean, they were still teaching fractions. But mostly, I played hooky. I had one 63-day streak.

Playboy: That’s quite a streak.

Carlin: Yeah, and I didn’t count weekends or holidays.

Playboy: Would you describe yourself as a problem student?

Carlin: I was a discipline problem, and I never did homework.

Playboy: What sort of trouble did you get into?

Carlin: When I was in seventh grade, I was caught stealing money from the visiting team’s locker room during a basketball game. So I was sent to The Brothers. That’s what they called this parochial school up in Goshen, New York. I was supposed to get closer supervision there and more “masculine influence,” whatever that means. But I was thrown out for telling a couple of really lame kids on the playground that I had heroin.

Playboy: Did you?

Carlin: It was just a joke, but back I went to my old school, where all the kids I’d been with for eight years were about to graduate. But the sisters wanted me to repeat the whole term; so I went to the principal and pleaded with her to allow me to graduate with my class. She finally agreed on the condition that I write the graduation play. It was called How Do You Spend Your Leisure Time?Catchy title, huh? But, once again, I was rewarded for my cleverness, my show-business skills.

Playboy: Even before adolescence, the essential themes of your adult life and work were pretty clearly laid out: humor, rebellion and drug use.

Carlin: And the patterns became even more vivid at Cardinal Hayes High School. That’s when I began failing subjects and running away from home for days at a time.

Playboy: What, exactly, were you running away from?

Carlin: My mother and her plans for my future. She had it all worked out. I would attend a nice college, then get a job in advertising. “You’ll be one of those smart-looking fellows in their Madison Avenue suits.” She was in advertising and had become friendly with all those assholes from G.M., Procter & Gamble, General Foods. She’d rattle off their names like a litany of deities. And they really were almost like gods to her, gods she tried to foist off on me, along with the gods of the Catholic Church. And I rebelled against her and her values and her plans for my future at every opportunity.

Playboy: That must have made for a tranquil home.

Carlin: The older I got, the more apparent it became that my mother was losing control over me. She fought back fiercely with black moods, silent treatments and martyrdom. “You’re letting me down.” “How can you do this to me?” “You hang out with those bums on the corner till all hours. They’ll never amount to anything. Water seeks its own level.” And, of course, all she did was run my ass out of the house even quicker. The pressure was unbearable.

Playboy: Later, during your college-concert years and on your early albums, that rebellion against your mother’s values resurfaced. You were over 30 then. Were you still feeling that anger? Or were you just drawing on the memory of it to please your audience?

Carlin: Oh, I was still feeling those angers…no, let’s call them hatreds, because that’s what they were. The rebellious mood of the country during those years allowed me to plug right back into my old hatreds. I could scream and holler, as I did on the albums, against religion, government, big business—all those assholes and their values. That hatred was very real.

Playboy: Do you still feel hatred toward the establishment?

Carlin: The visceral aspect of it is gone now. But I still hold all the values I held when I was screaming more. They just don’t take a physical and psychological toll on me anymore. I’m not possessed by an us-versus-them mentality. Well, I still have my days when I’m answering the television with a little more hatred than necessary, when the “Fuck you, Dan Rather” comes out with a harder edge than it should. But that’s much less frequent than it used to be. I think I’m getting well on that level.

Playboy: When you came to L.A. in the early Sixties, it was a justifiable career move. But was it also another way of running away from your mother?

Carlin: Yes.

Playboy: Is your mother still alive?

Carlin: Yeah, she’s 85 now.

Playboy: Will she read this interview?

Carlin: Probably; but it really doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve told her these things and I have what I used to call “the problem with my mother” out of: my system now. Occasionally, she’ll still push a few of the old buttons, but my anger lasts only a few seconds now, because I recognize them as old buttons. I tell her, “That doesn’t work anymore,” and we have a much better relationship. She even lives out here now. I no longer have to get away from her physically in order to escape the feelings that made me so unhappy in my teenage years.

Playboy: Of all the values you rebelled against as a child, what was the one you most despised?
