If you like George's humor, this is a great book! Loved reading about his early years, and how he developed his routines.
Brilliant and throughly enjoyable. From hosting the first SNL show in 1976, appearing on The Tonight Show over 130 times and winning 5 Grammys, to winning the eleventh Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2008, George Carlin said it the way only he could: "I have this real moron thing I do? It's called thinking". Hi memoir does a great job of keeping the voice alive, albeit never as eloquent, or smart, as the real thing. Trying to summarize the overflowing contents of this book would be like trying to understand a man that kept "thousands of notes and ideas in hundreds of files on four Apple computers" by picking one of those notes and claiming it explained the man. His observational skills are legendary, and his way with words was simply unique. If you read this book, and I strongly recommend you do, you'll very likely come to the same feeling I had when I finished: this can't be the end, can it? Seventy one may seem like a ripe enough age to die, yet the New York Boy seemed to just be getting warmed up. Years ago he may truly have "began to recede past Jupiter and its moons, out to the Oort cloud of trillions of comets, beyond the planet formerly known as Pluto, back home with my fellow atoms", but luckily he still liked to "drop in every now and then to show my former species how fucked up they are". For a reader/listener like me, I'm glad he did.
I really enjoyed this. I have been a fan of GC ever since I saw him host the very first SNL in 1975 when I was 10. This is not one of his "humor" books but more of an autobiography. Much heavier on his career than his personal life. I would really love to hear more about his life with his late wife and daughter.
