Remembering George Carlin in Vegas

So, history will record that George Carlin's last public performance turned out to be in Las Vegas on June 15, 2008 at the off-Strip casino Orleans. Vegas was a town he told me he hated, filled with audiences he loathed: “It is the most dispiriting, soul-deadening city on earth." We agreed to disagree. After all, to Carlin, Vegas was the town that fired him again and again, whereas to me Vegas is the town that gave me the chance to speak to him at length and see him perform.

I had hoped to transcribe my interview with Carlin for you here, but that turned out to be impossible, totally impossible, because of his great gift for colorful language. In writing up the conversation, I realized that because there are so many more than seven words you can't write for the L.A. Times I would be doing the recently departed a huge disservice to obliterate and edit out his constant use of what we call obscenities. And, Carlin was very exact about his words. He is the only comedian I have ever seen perform in Vegas using written notes. As he had told me and other interviewers, he had come to see himself as a writer who performed his own material rather than as a comic.

When I saw him do stand-up in 2007, his first run at the Orleans (pictured above), he was still able to offend some audience members enough that they walked out early in the show. Carlin expected, accepted and encouraged that in Vegas. He started off with hard material (I think a joke about kiddie porn when I saw him) to train his audiences here:

“Las Vegas provides something for me. In other places like Pittsburgh you can sell out two nights in nice-sized halls and you get the hard-core George Carlin fans, but then, to be crass, you need to give the market a rest for a couple of years. The same is true of Dallas and Portland and Seattle or wherever. But for a person who develops the material out there on the stage into these more-permanent forms like DVD, it is necessary for me to get the exercise on stage. So, Las Vegas provides an easy place to go to where the audience keeps changing. You don't tap it out. But the price I pay for that is the audiences are not the best in Vegas. In Pittsburgh, I get the hard-core fans who know what I am about. In Las Vegas often I get people who saw me on 'Leno' or got a coupon. It doesn't work easily. Each night [in Vegas] I have to find out how they are going to be and I have to train them."