Carlin: Religion. When the Catholics start laying their trip on you, you notice very early in life what a load of shit it is. The hypocrisy is just breath-takingly apparent, even to a child. But what I hated most was seeing those priests and brothers getting so much pleasure out of inflicting pain. I wondered what was wrong with them.

Playboy: Do any other religions interest you?

Carlin: None of the Christian religions do. They’re all outer-directed. “Who can I convert?” “Let’s go to this country and make them Christians.” “Wear this.” “Do that.” “No, don’t worship that way. Worship this way or I’ll kill you—for the good of your soul, of course.” Meanwhile, followers of Eastern religions are sitting in the middle of their minds, experiencing a bliss and a level of consciousness that Western man can’t begin to approach. Christianity is all external, all material. Gold. War. Murder. The big churches operate, morally and economically, just like the big corporations. Yet they don’t pay taxes. Let them pay their fair share, those fucking religions.

Playboy: Can you see any good at all in Western religion?

Carlin: The only good thing about Western religion is the music.

Playboy: Do you pray?

Carlin: I say things that can be defined as prayers. But I don’t pray to a power or ask an entity to intercede in the earthly scheme, because I don’t believe that happens. But if I see a really unfortunate person in the street, I do pray, yes, though I suppose it’s really more like a mantra to ease my own sorrow.

Playboy: You spent your adolescence running away from home, parochial school and the future your mother had mapped out for you. But until you hit 16, you really couldn’t go anywhere. Did you take any positive action during those years to try to make your life a little freer and more satisfying?

Carlin: I decided what I really wanted to do was go to the New York High School of Performing Arts, the school that was in the movie Fame. So I went down to 46th Street and laid my rap on this lady in the admissions office. “Hi, I’m George Carlin. I’m real funny. I do impressions. I’m gonna be an actor and a comedian and I’d love to come to your school.” And she said, “Fine, but you’ll have to repeat the last year and a half.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “Well, you don’t have any background in fencing and speech…” and she named about five things that I didn’t know had anything to do with becoming a show-business legend. So I said, “Hey, OK, I’m gonna have to get back to you, lady,” and I was gone.

Playboy: And that’s how you wound up at a public high school for your last six months, studying fractions and running up your streak?

Carlin: Yeah. I couldn’t go back to Cardinal Hayes. I mean, I had to get away from those priests and brothers, those maniacs.

Playboy: Then, at 16, you quit school, bounced around for a year and joined the Air Force on your 17th birthday.

Carlin: In those days, we avoided the draft by enlisting. Now, that’s an interesting concept.… But I had a plan. See, I was engaged at that time, so I figured I’d join up, marry my girl, live off base, then use my GI Bill to go to disc-jockey school.

Playboy: But you never did get married.

Carlin: You get away from home for the first time and you’re true to your girl for a while, and then you start realizing, Jeez, I’m horny. So we both started dating other people, and eventually we drifted apart.

Playboy: You mentioned having a subscription to Down Beat when you were 12, and your record collection is incredible. Yet you don’t talk about music very much in your act. Just how important is music in your life?

Carlin: It used to be more important than it is now. I overdosed on music during my period of cocaine abuse. I’d be playing rock all the time to feed my speed head, until I finally burned out on it. Also, the music took a turn for the worse. Also, I began to get well. I needed peace of mind. I didn’t need the fucking amplified levels of rock, and I’ve never needed heavy-metal music.

Playboy: When you were following rock, how did your tastes run?

Carlin: I always enjoyed people like John Prine, soloists who wrote their own songs and had a point of view. The bands I liked tended to be soft rock. I’ve always preferred the gentle approach as opposed to the strident approach.

Playboy: The Beatles as opposed to the Stones?

Carlin: There are things the Stones did that I couldn’t ignore, but I’ve always listened to the Beatles four to one over the Stones.

Playboy: What do you listen to now?

Carlin: Classical music, mostly.

Playboy: And when you were a child?

Carlin: I loved the R&B bands, Budd Johnson and Earl Bostic. The hallway groups—you know, do-wop music. I loved black music that other whites weren’t into, and I was jealous of that prerogative. One of the things that bugged me as a kid was when the white music industry moved in on that black music.

Playboy: May we assume that you weren’t a Bill Haley fan?

Carlin: To me, Bill Haley was a horrible phenomenon. When I hear all this nostalgic shit about the Fifties, the image that comes to my mind is of a bunch of really lame white kids with fucked-up clothing dancing to Bill Haley and His Comets. That might have been America’s Fifties, but it sure wasn’t mine. My Fifties were hanging around Harlem, wearing conservative clothes—a vest, a four-button suit with no peg in the pants, wing tips, eyelet shirts, thin ties—walking like a black dude and smoking grass and going to parties and dancing so slow you’d hardly notice it.

Playboy: Folk music must have gotten to you in the early Sixties.

Carlin: There was a short period when folk music was of great interest to me. It seemed authentic—just like black music was. Most rock ‘n’ roll struck me as inauthentic. It sounded like it was being created by an industry, not by a people.

Playboy: Did you ever get into country music?

Carlin: Oh, I loved real country music. Again, not the kind they manufacture in Nashville. I loved bluegrass and the real country people, you know, like Bill Monroe and Hank Williams.

Playboy: What about today’s country music?

Carlin: There’s still some with that real white man’s working-class soul in it. I love those strains of stark reality: hopelessness, sorrow, broken love, death. Like authentic R&B, authentic country music speaks for a people, and the similarities and differences between the two forms have always fascinated me.

Playboy: For example?

Carlin: The very appearance of a black man singing R&B music is full of expression, full of a physical revelation of his feelings—sexual and otherwise. The body is never held back. The freedom that a black expresses by merely walking down the street is even more evident when he sings onstage. By contrast, the white Protestant Southern country man singing onstage barely moves his body. If he’s playing the guitar, his fingers will move and his lips will move and one foot will tap—and that’s all. He is a tight asshole and that’s his hang-up. But the lyrics those two men will write are precisely the opposite. The black man sings in symbolic terms about jelly rolls and sugar pies, while the white man tells you exactly what’s on his mind. “Ohhh, a truck ran over my baaa-by in the ro-o-o-ad.” It’s a marvelous paradox that tells us so much about those two cultures.

Playboy: Getting back to your stint in the Air Force, somehow, it just doesn’t seem as though signing up for military service was the best way for you to escape the regimentation of a parochial education.

Carlin: That’s true, and by the time my second court-martial rolled around, it had become fairly obvious to both me and the Pentagon that, as they say in a marriage, it just wasn’t working out.

Playboy: Your second court-martial?

Carlin: Discipline has never been my strong suit. But, in the end, the Air Force was a great experience for me. I met a local d.j. at an off-base party, began hanging around the station and eventually, when somebody got sick, I filled in. By the time I was discharged, I had my own show on KJOE, the number-one station in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Playboy: When you weren’t getting your show-business career off the ground, what were your military duties?

Carlin: I was a radar, optics and computer mechanic on B-47s at a SAC base.

Playboy: Interesting job for a future counterculture hero.

Carlin: Yes, wasn’t it? There I was, impeding the war machine just by showing up for work.

Playboy: You said earlier that you smoked grass virtually every day of your life for 30 years. Even in the Air Force?

Carlin: Sure. A friend used to mail it to me from New York—all cleaned and everything. I smoked right on the base all the time. People weren’t familiar with the smell then. They thought it was some kind of cigar.

Playboy: Tell us about your courts-martial.

Carlin: The first one came the day after the Dodgers won the world series in 1955. Our SAC unit was in England on a TDY, a sort of mobility drill that’s supposed to be fairly serious business. But when Johnny Podres beat the Yankees in that seventh game, I went sailing into this little town off base, got drunk on cooking wine, then went back to the barracks with the intention of celebrating for the rest of the evening. When my tech sergeant expressed his displeasure at my actions—not to mention my noise level—I replied in a manner that lie didn’t consider in strict accordance with military protocol. I told him to go fuck himself. And to be honest, I don’t think my salute was entirely up to standards, either. I didn’t do any time for that one, but I did lose a stripe.

Playboy: And your second court-martial?

Carlin: That was more serious. We were having a simulated combat drill. The whole base was on alert and everybody pulled guard duty. So I was out there one night, and it was cold, you know. And I was tired. So I left my gun on the ground and went up into the crawlway of a B-47, smoked a joint and went to sleep. Fortunately, it was Christmas and I had a really benevolent judge, who said, “I should send you to jail for this, but I don’t think any 18-year-old should spend the holidays in prison.” So he let me off.

Playboy: Then what happened to you?

Carlin: Well, I had this d.j. job in town, and the commander of my squadron figured I might be more valuable as a PR tool working full time at the radio station than short-circuiting nuclear bombers and telling everybody to go fuck himself. So he gave me an off-base work permit and took me off the flight line. Eventually, they pulled the permit and another stripe and mustered me out.

Playboy: Which freed you to become a professional disc jockey.

Carlin: Yeah. I worked in Boston, Shreveport again and Fort Worth—that’s where I began to develop my voices.

Playboy: Where did you meet Jack Burns, your first comedy partner?

Carlin: In Boston. Jack was the morning d.j. and we roomed together. We ad-libbed off each other and talked vaguely about doing a comedy act. But we split when I got the job in Fort Worth. Then, one night, Jack showed up in Texas in a car with four bald tires and said, “I’m on my way to Hollywood.” This time, we did get an act together and began playing a coffeehouse in Fort Worth called The Cellar. It wasn’t a very good act, but people laughed. So we went to Hollywood.

Playboy: Just like that?

Carlin: It was crazy, but when we got to L.A., the first radio station we walked into was looking for a morning comedy team. Suddenly, there we were, in the second biggest market in the country, making $350 a week each—which at the time was a fortune—but after three months, we walked away from that to go into night clubs full time. That was the fun of it. We really felt strongly about ourselves and were willing to take outrageous risks.

Playboy: What was your first night-club job?

Carlin: A coffeehouse in Hollywood called Cosmo Alley. That’s where Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul saw us. We did skits and two-man situations about race and religion. Nothing memorable, but most comedy teams of that era did moron stuff. At least we were trying to say something.

Playboy: What, exactly, did Bruce and Sahl do for you?

Carlin: Lenny got us a contract with a major agency, which was incredible. I mean, we’d been comedians for a month and a half when we got booked into the Playboy Club circuit purely on the basis of Lenny’s going to bat for us. And Mort got us into the Hungry i in San Francisco. And because of those bookings, Burns and Carlin got work at a place called the Racquet Club in Dayton, Ohio, where the hostess was a young girl named Brenda Hosbrook. We dated every day I was there, wrote and called each other constantly afterward, and within a year, we were married.

Playboy: You’re not exactly a guy to agonize over important decisions.

Carlin: Actually, it has always been a dreadful flaw in my character to stick with relationships and career plans far too long; but in those days, I was moving very quickly. And Brenda and I clicked on all levels right away.

Playboy: What sort of love life did you have before meeting Brenda?

Carlin: I did a lot of dating.… Well, dating may not be exactly the right word for it. Trying to get laid is a little more accurate. And please notice the wordtrying. I always wanted and enjoyed sex, but I never put much importance on scoring or having an athletic sex life. I guess I define myself more by my career and my commitment to a relationship than by my ability to have a lot of chicks or achieve ten orgasms in an evening.

Playboy: Would you describe yourself as a very sexual person who doesn’t consider sex very important?

Carlin: No, sex is important to me. I just never lead with my dick.

Playboy: You and Brenda got married and lived the life of a road comic. Where was your home base?

Carlin: Nowhere. For the first year and a half, we lived in a Dodge Dart.