George Carlin - Napalm and Silly Putty

6. While attending the First Communion of a Mafia boss’s grandson, you suddenly begin to pistol-whip the boy’s mother, screaming, “I’m gonna hit you some more, you ugly dago bitch, and if one of these greasy, dickless criminal morons who call themselves men makes a move on me, I’ll break his guinea neck. I’m hungry! Make me some fuckin’ spaghetti and go easy on the oil, ya hairy greaseball cunt!”

7. You’re standing in a crowded Harlem bar dressed in the robes of a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, holding a Confederate flag, and singing “Dixie” in a real loud voice with a Mississippi accent. You jump on the bar, shit in the drink of a huge man with numerous. razor scars on his face, wipe your ass with a picture of Martin Luther King, and yell at the man, “Hey, boy! Get your momma down here, I want some dark meat. And get that fuckin’ jungle-bunny music off the juke box, or I’m gonna start killin’ me some boogies!”

Have a nice afterlife.

I never did well at Monopoly. I guess I don’t have a business mind. Oh, I’d usually manage to own a couple of railroads. And Water Works, of course. I’m not a complete asshole; I know a monopoly when I see one. Everybody needs water. But it always frustrated me that the other guys wouldn’t let me build houses on Water Works. They said it was zoning or some shit like that. I think they were jealous that I had vision. The worst fight I ever got into was when I tried to put hotels on the Electric Company. Vision.

As far as other properties were concerned, naturally I’d snap up Baltic Avenue as soon as that became available.

“How much is that son of a bitch? Sixty bucks? Gimme that mother. I gotta have a place to live.”

About the best thing I’d ever own would be one or two properties in the light blue series. Maybe Oriental Avenue. No houses, of course. Just an excavation or two. That’s about all I ever had on my property—plans. Surveyor’s marks. I just couldn’t get financing. All my friends would have shopping centers, malls, condominiums, industrial parks. And they liked to rub it in.

“Oh boy, Carlin, you’re comin’ down my side of the board now! Get ready to pay up!”

“Ohh, no! Please God, gimme a big one.”

Then I’d roll.

“Hot shit!! A twelve! Thank you, God! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!

Fuck you, Tony. I ain’t even stoppin’ on your side. Fuck you and Boardwalk, too!”

“That’s all right, Carlin, you’ll be around again.”

Of course, you can’t move your token until you remember which one is yours.

“Which one is mine? Am I the hat? I could swear I was the hat. No, that was yesterday. Wait! I know. The racing car. I’m the racing car. Hey, who’s the ship? Richie, are you the ship?”

“No, he’s not the ship, I’m the ship. I get the ship every game. Don’t even touch the ship.” Tony was the biggest guy.

None of them wanted to be the iron. Too feminine.

The worst token to have was the cannon. The big gun. It was the only topheavy token. It kept falling over. Throw the dice anywhere near it, and it fell on its side. And then some anal retentive would say, “Who has the gun? Are you the gun? Would ya pick it up, please? And you, Paulie, are you in jail or just visiting? Well, if you’re just visiting, put the car on the of the jail, not on the actual jail part.”

Some guys really cared. That’s why they won.

I never won, but I was always in there at the end. Because I had all the one-dollar bills. Twenty-five hundred dollars in singles, and they needed me to make change.

I would try to borrow money.

“Please, Tony, Just five bucks. I wanna buy some gum.”

“Fuck you, Carlin. I’ll give you five bucks for Water Works.”

“Ten.”

“Seven-fifty.”

“Tony, they don’t have a fifty-cent bill.”

“Tough shit. Tear a dollar in half.”

No, I wasn’t very good at the game, but I spent a lot of time landing on Chance. And I always tried to buy it. I got in more fights trying to buy Chance.

I’d move my token. “…three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine… Chance!” Turn over the card, a little man with a hat: “Two hundred dollars for being an asshole.”

“Hey, Richie, shuffle those cards, will ya? That’s the second time I got that one.”

Brain Droppings

Standup comic George Carlin follows up his dark-horse smash bestseller Brain Droppings with another compendium of cranky meditations, cinching his reputation as the Andy Rooney of boomer hepcats. “Road rage, air rage,” Carlin rails. “Why should I be forced to divide my rage into separate categories? To me, it’s just one big, all-around, everyday rage. I don’t have time for fine distinctions.” Carlin is not into the lengthy essay—he’s a sprinter of the mind. Most sentences in the book could be lifted out to stand alone and provoke deep thought: “How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on television that it’s a spy satellite?” Good question. “Why do they bother saying ‘Raw sewage’? Do some people cook that stuff?” Yuck, but yes, Carlin’s got a point.

He can do an extended bit too, most memorably the transcript of Jesus on a talk show plugging his new tell-all memoir about the Trinity, Three’s a Crowd . Carlin is funny, but genuinely angry and poignant at times: “You live 80 years and at best you get about six minutes of pure magic,” he says. Sad, but about right.

And how did Carlin get into his line of business, “thinking up goofy s---,” as he puts it? There’s a clue in one entry in this book: “As of 1995 the number of people who had lived on earth was 105,472,380,169… it means that at this point there have been almost 1 quadrillion human bowel movements and most of them occurred before people had anything to read. These are the kind of thoughts that kept me from moving quickly up the corporate ladder.”

Thank god Carlin stayed low on the corporate food chain and high on his own utterly idiosyncratic ideas!

Politically incorrect comic and Grammy winner Carlin has shown no signs of burnout during a four-decade career arc as solo stand-up, TV writer and sitcom actor ( That Girl ; The George Carlin Show ), with 18 hit recordings and 10 solo HBO specials, plus film roles ( Dogma ; The Prince of Tides ). Living in L.A. and Vegas, he continues to take his act to stages across the country. Four years ago, Carlin’s huge fan following kept his Brain Droppings on the New York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks, so it’s no surprise he’s back for another round of acrid and oblique observations on modern mores. He covers a wide range of issues from rape and religion to the homeless: “There’s no war on homelessness… it’s because there’s no money in it.” And any topic is fair game: abortion, airport security, cars, funerals, language, organ donors, sports, technology, TV and war. On the latter, he says, “Men, insecure about the size of their penises, choose to kill one another.” Over 100 scintillating short pieces are interrupted by loony lists and hundreds of clever one-liners. The fragmented format and colloquial style of writing suggest that much of this laugh-out-loud book is drawn directly from Carlin’s stage act. Several satires here (“A day in the life of Henry VIII,” a nine-page interview with Jesus, an avant-garde play program) indicate a different direction Carlin might consider for future books.

(May 1) Forecast: HighBridge’s abridged audiocassette and CD might lead some to peruse the book, which splashes in the wake of a massive Carlin retrospective (“From Class Clown to Social Critic”) two months ago at the Museum of Television & Radio (N.Y./L.A.). With a 10-city author tour and national publicity, sales could equal those of Brain Droppings (700,000 copies).