Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian Read Free

the people I’ve loved and lost, I off-road into absurdist comedy perversion. It’s both a means of protection and a kind of denial, a blessing and a curse. Wait, it’s not a blessing at all. I guess it would be a bad habit and a curse. Some people spout clichés for no reason, just because it’s how we’re trained by society. “Look for the silver lining,” a lovely and hopeful cliché. But some things don’t have a silver lining.
    At least that one’s better than “It was meant to be.” That’s what someone says after something terrible happens, as a way of rationalizing or making themselves feel better. That crane fell off that forty-story building and landed on Aunt Betty because it was “meant to be.” So it was preordained the day Aunt Betty was born, from their point of view, that at some time in her life a giant crane would fall off the roof and crush her flat? And that’s okay, because it was meant to be? I don’t look at life that way. I think things just happen to people. That’s healthier, I feel, than believing there’s some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten. This one definitely got rewritten and this is still what I wound up with. I’m looking up at this moment, making sure there are no cranes in sight.
    George Carlin was so eloquent in pointing out clichés . . . “He’s out walkin’ the streets. You hear this when a murderer gets paroled from prison. Guy’ll say: ‘Now, instead of being in prison, this guy is out walkin’ the streets.’ How do we know? Maybe he’s home watching TV.”
    George was very kind to me when I moved to L.A. in 1978 when I was twenty-two. Always asked me how it was going, asked me if I “saw the light at the end of the tunnel.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “but it’s connected to a train headed straight for me.” I was so depressed for so many years over trying to become a working comedian that my sense of self-worth would plummet . . . I’d go from being the kid with the dream, positive he was going to be the biggest comedy star ever, to a young man who feared he was going to wind up that guy paroled from prison “out walkin’ the streets.”
    George knew the journey of show business, and he knew about following your own voice, no matter what the cost—but more significantly, he knew that the life of a comedian is about survival. Succeeding as a comic isn’t just about writing some funny stuff, or having a good comedic persona, or getting lucky and winding up with a TV or movie career. It’s about being a survivor. Going into it for the long haul. George was more prolific than just about anyone I’ve ever seen. Much like Chris Rock and Louis C.K., who follow in his path (metaphorically) with their hard-core work ethic of writing and developing fresh material. They’re part of the new Mount Rushmore of Comedy.
    At the time that I am writing this, my newest stand-up television special is behind me, my first in five years—and I found the experience profoundly rewarding. But that significantly pales in comparison to George, who did fourteen HBO specials starting in 1977 until his death in 2008.
    He was a philosopher. And if you listen to his “stuff,” it’s the highest level of the form. He had a lot to say. And he said it. I wish he’d had a chance to say more. After I appeared in The Aristocrats, in which George was the Obi-Wan Kenobi, I reached out to him to go to lunch. I’d been paid high compliments by a couple people he was close to about how he dug my stuff. He knew how hard it was to reinvent oneself—from family TV to the kind of adult humor that made me laugh, then back to family TV, while continuing to spin what I found funny in my stand-up.
    Anyway, the end of the George story is obviously sad. He passed away shortly after we were trying to schedule lunch. I think he wanted to avoid having lunch with me so badly that he chose death. My narcissistically