She (his mother) sat me down on a little stepladder that doubled as a chair-I still have it- and handed me a death notice from that day's New York Journal-American. I didn't need to read beyond his name (his father); I knew what death notices looked like. I don't recall any emotion. I just knew my brother would be happy and my mother relieved.

And he got his wish, though there are very few people alive to whom it matters. Not only did I outlive the gossip-by which I'm sure he meant my mother's quite public and vocal negative opinion of him-but I lived to write this book which will serve as testimony to my old man's great heart and soul.

My mother's capacity for good living had long been blunted by the realities of salaried employment, but she retained her clasc pretensions and tried to realize some of them by using us kids as advertisement for her taste. Pat, when he was young, had always been dressed like a little sissy in Eton collars and short pants, explaining in part why his fighting skills developed so rapidly. I escaped the worst of that because she couldn't affort it, but she still took me to have my hair cut at Best & Co. on Fifth Avenue, because she knew that was where "the better people" had their kids' hair cut. The better people went to Best.

And yet she was my mother, so she's deep in my art, both for what she gave me-especially that love of words- and for what I rebelled against in her. And she made me laugh, she had a way with a punch line. Once she told Pat and me about coming home on the bus that day. A big fat German man plonked down beside her. "A big Hun sat next to me," she said, "a big mess! He was taking up far too much room. So I took out my hatpin and showed it to him and said:'Condense yourself!'"

I'll never forget the moment when I made my mother laugh for the first time. That I actually took an idea and twisted it and she laughed. And it was real-not just cute-kid stuff. I provoked a laugh in her by means of something I thought of. How magic that was, the power it gave me.

After much effort I learned "Frere Jacques" and one day played it for the class. My first ever public appearance! A real charge! Having thirty people (okay, six-year-olds, but they had pulses) sit without fidgeting and watch something you were doing- which they couldn't do- was intensely satisfying. Having them applaud at the end, even though many had dfficulty bringing their hands together with any accuracy, produced an odd sense of power. It was an intoxicant. As would be the case with many intoxicants, I immediately wanted more.

Class clowns are dedicated to attracting attention to themselves. Traditional Freudians might attribute my chronic need for attention to the fact that I had no father and half a mother. Naaah. The truth was much simpler. Then as now, I was a consummate show-off.

A fifth-grade autobiography assignment I still have required a closing paragraph on "What I want to be when I grow up." I wrote, "When I grow up I'd like to be an actor, impersonator, comedian, disc jockey announcer or trumpet player."

Lenny was incredibly important to me. I’d come across his album Interviews of Our Times when I was in Shreveport and I was changed forever. The defiance inherent in that material, the brilliance of the mimicry, the intellect at work, the freedom he had. I had no sense I could approach it ever, but I wanted to emulate it in any way I could.

Later still, throughout the eighties, my Irish street guy was a powerful element in the evolution of what finally became in the early nineties my authentic voice. He and his White Harlem relatives are the core of the family of characters that still live inside me.

(After being falsely accused of armed robbery)It was clear that the cops had fucked up big-time, but they wouldn’t let us go. … The lead cop… later turned up as the guy in charge of investigating the Kennedy assassination, Will Fritz. He interrogated Oswald after his arrest. The obvious conclusion: Oswald had as much to do with the assassination as the three of us did with the Motor Club robbery in Chicago.

Only a couple months and it was kicking in just how hard this shit was. How few places there were where I felt secure. How many times I had to repeat to myself after the died-a-death nights: “Remember that terrific set three Fridays ago? Hang your hopes on that.

(Referring to Second City) I could do material in these places I didn’t always trust to a nightclub: about integration, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan.
There’s a textile mill in South Carolina where the lunchroom has been integrated but the restrooms are still segregated. That’s like, “Hell, I’ll break bread with ‘em but not wind” … The textile industry moved south for one reason- there’s a bigger demand for sheets.

As Brenda’s mother was dying, our child was born. A daughter. We named her Kelly.

Like most people, I remember where I was when the (JFK's)assassination happened and what I was doing… I went into Rexall’s or Liggett’s or some drugstore and called Brenda. I said, “Turn on the television,” and I realized I was crying.

Two years earlier, in 1961, Lenny Bruce had begun to be hit with a series of arrests for obscenity in San Francisco, Los Angeles (at three different clubs), Chicago and finally in New York
By now it was becoming pretty clear that Lenny wasn’t being arrested for obscenity. He was being arrested for being funny about religion and in particular Catholicism.

That I knew intellectually there was an anal, uptight world out there I didn’t feel part of didn’t erase the fact that I was a living, breathing example of it.

That felt wonderfully subversive. I’ve never been a full-blown radical. I wasn’t cut out to man the barricades. But any time the subversive part of me is satisfied, it delights me.

In short:Acting. And I was NOT ABLE to do that! I was absolutely at sea, completely lost. Whatever competence I might have had going in had vanished.

It was traditional for comedians to try out a bit in clubs to see if it worked and then do it on Sullivan. I tried out things on Sullivan and if they worked, I’d do them in clubs.

We were together all the time, on the road or back in New York, And just like before, Brenda was my manager and bookkeeper, collaborator and comforter.
She had to be mother and father to Kelly. Then I’d come home with an armful of presents and it would be: “Daddy’s home! Fun time!” Which cast her as the domestic tyrant, the one who said No. Time for bed. Time for school. She hated being that. So she got drunk.

The establishment was winning-its war, its assassins, its secret government-and that fact overpowered and debilitated me more than it enraged me.

And however much kinship I had with the counterculture, it brought up again the eternal dilemma: of longing to belong but not liking to belong-even though the group I wanted to belong to now were non-belongers.

Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience.

This is what devout-Catholic-Eisenhower-Republican Mary had to say to her wayward son about his latest developments:
Dear George:

I should be on the check-out line at the supermarket but I must say these words to you. Please read these reviews. You will someday be a Beckett or a Joyce or maybe a Bernard Shaw. You seem to have their kind of disturbance… Some day you will release what you have down inside of you and it will be listened to and heard. They condemn you for idolizing Lenny Bruce-how little they really know what you see in his courage, sincerity and daring. Please George insist on being yourself. Don’t let anyone change you or silence you. I am so hungry for a heart-to-heart with you…Why have I got this restlessness-this groping for answers which I sometimes feel I have passed on to you? Do you follow me George? Why can’t I quiet this undisciplined questioning of what goes on around us? Why am I caught up by it?

I ripped up Representative Bob Dornan… when he’d just become a congressman. He talked about “these hippies desecrating the flag” … So I called him on it: “Wait a minute. A flag is supposed to represent everything that a country does. It doesn’t only represent the good things. If you burn the flag, you’re burning the flag for what you perceive to be the bad things the country has done.”

My sense of US versus Them had been alive and well on the streets around Columbia; and in the air force, where I rejected everything they put on me. But it had been submerged when I got into the nightclubs and the smothering chatter of television.

So it was really disturbing when the time came to record FM & AM in June 1971 and somehow a lot of my confidence had vanished. … I walked around Georgetown, crying all night. I’d had my chance; the sound truck wouldn’t be back the next night.

As usual, a price had to be paid for all this pleasure. I discovered in July of ’72 that not only could you not say the Heavy Seven on television, you couldn’t say them in Milwaukee either. Here’s how the AP reported it:
Comedian George Carlin was taken into custody Friday night and charged with disorderly condust after he allegedly used profanity during a performance at Summerfest, a ten-day festival on the city’s lakefront. Henry Jordan, executive director of Summerfest, said, “Carlin got up on stage and … he used a lot of profanity. The police went up on stage after he had finished his act and arrested him.” Jordan said he supported the police, adding that many in the crowd of 70,000 were children.

(Referring to the Supreme Court Case FCC vs Pacific Foundation)Justice William Brennan wrote the dissent: “In our land of cultural pluralism there are many who think, act, and talk differently from the members of the Court and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve censorship of the communications solely because of the words they contain. The Court’s decision … is another of the dominant culture’s efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its own way of thinking, acting, and speaking.”
Which in turn means that the only thing you can safely broadcast anytime, anywhere, in any medium, is material that’s suitable for kids. Could this be why our society shows so many signs of arrested development?

The timetable on this downward path is not exact-it never is, I guess- except that it began to happen with the success of my first three records… The money didn’t help because she felt she(Brenda) was losing me. She didn’t have a husband. She had a man who was out there for everybody else, but was hardly ever there for her. Or Kelly. I don’t remember this-there’s a lot I don’t remember- but she said that once an interviewer asked me how old Kelly was, and I didn’t know.

That’s when Kelly sat us down and said, “This has got to stop.” She was crying and sobbing: “I have to tell you about how I feel about all this… It’s my turn to talk!” Then and there she wrote a contract for us, which read: “You/I will not drink or snort coke or smoke pot for the next X days of our vacation. We’re going to have a family vacation and we’re going to have a good time.” She made us sign it. …What she’d written and done was like a roundhouse punch to the solar plexus. Even if it didn’t have immediate results, it had a dramatic long-term impact. From then on I tried harder to do right.

When it came to Kelly’s problems-especially pregnancy-I really abdicated my responsibilities. And yet it was all directed at me, all designed to get my attention. I just took an emotional walk on that. What I should have done was to be more aware; intervened, opened up. But I was afraid of what lay behind that door; afraid of what might come out. One of my biggest fears-the most difficult area of my existence- has always been unleashing my feelings.

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Jerry Hamza in my career and life. Without Jerry I don’t think I would’ve escaped from the financial and creative swamp that bad choices and drugs had landed me in by the late seventies.

(After having a near death heart attack)I don’t think I’d let surgery change my personality. First of all, I’m extremely optimistic and positive. Secondly, I hate to behave in clichés.

Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be to be heard above the din. This was a conscious thought-that I’d better raise the level of my voice and therefore the intensity of my metaphors and images and words and topics to get and keep people’s attention.

When are we going to start assassinating the right people in this country? (Why is it, by the way, that the right-wing guys assassins have tried to shoot survived? Like Wallace and Reagan? Don’t we have any marksmen on our side?)

No one is ever more herself or himself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, I own them.

When we’re in the womb, we’re in the oceanic state, we are completely part of nature. We are attached to nature, literally, physically. Everything comes through tubes, you don’t have to do a goddam thing, everything’s cool. You are at one. You are in union with nature.
Then you get torn out of this fucking place there’s pain and screaming and the violence starts…UNION IS OVER.
The rest of your life is spent yearning for reunion.

I hate topical material because I hate to throw anything away.

I hadn’t seen her(Brenda) for a week or more. Jaundice had made her skin yellow. All her hair was gone from the chemo. She was unconscious and unresponsive but her eyes were open. I have no idea if she was aware of anyone, but I saw her eyes were tearing up a little.
I took a tissue and gently wiped away her tears.

You may know exactly what you’re going to do and that they’re predisposed to like you… But the instant I get out there it all starts over again. Right from the beginning. Win them over, and get ’em where I want ‘em! That’s living! That’s the thing that feeds me, that’s my nourishment.

The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity.

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