“but they’re all aiming to get on the Ed Sullivan or Steve Allen show.” Professor Irwin Corey, who was already fifty by 1964, was more sympathetic to the new breed, who so evidently had been influenced by the uncertainties of the cold war. A madcap wordsmith who was blacklisted in Hollywood for his ties to the American Communist Party, Corey, like the truly outlandish Lord Buckley, a self-made aristocrat with gargantuan appetites and an unchecked id, was a kind of spiritual forefather to the next generation of satirists. “The future seems so precarious,” he said, “people are willing to abandon themselves to chaos. The new comic reflects this.”
For the better part of two years Carlin scraped by in New York. Golden found him occasional work outside the city—taking fifty bucks to play Brown’s Hotel in the Catskills, for instance. He went over well at another jazz club in Boston, Paul’s Mall; bombed at a New York bistro called the Sniffen Court Inn; took a quick trip to Bermuda to play the Inverurie Hotel. Still, Café Au Go Go was his real incubator.
For Carlin, a high school dropout who possessed a lively, inquisitive mind, the electric surge of ideas in the Village was intoxicating. “I wasn’t very well-educated, but I saw this beautiful stream of intelligent comedy coming out of those people”—Newhart, Cosby, Nichols, and May—“and it really got to me,” he said. At Café Au Go Go, he befriended an unlikely stockbroker named Bob Altman, a high-IQ, deep-reading dope smoker who’d been owner Howard Solomon’s roommate at the University of Miami.
“I’d hang around the club ’cause I could fuck the waitresses,” says Altman, a discursive firecracker who later had a lucrative, if short-lived, career as a campus comic known as Uncle Dirty. “I’d tell them, ‘I know the owner. I’ll get you a better station.’ George was funny. He was brilliant. He smoked pot, and I smoked pot. Plus I had access to a car. When he had a gig out of town, I’d drive him.” Carlin sometimes brought Brenda and Kelly over to Altman’s place to scrounge up something to eat: “He was broke, really bust-out.” Altman frittered away many nights with Carlin and his old friends from the neighborhood at the Moylan Tavern, playing darts and bumper pool and introducing his friend to the ideas of such radical spiritual thinkers as G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Carlin especially liked the French psychologist Emil Coue’s notion of autosuggestion: “ I equals W squared, where I is the imagination and W is the will,” explains Altman. “It shows you how powerful the imagination is.”
Altman also turned Carlin on to a new book by Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon . Called The Act of Creation , the book explored the author’s theory of human ingenuity, the ability to integrate previously unrelated ideas. Jokes, as Carlin was well aware, are rooted in incongruities. To Koestler, scientific discovery, mystical insight, and “The Logic of Laughter,” as he named his opening chapter, can each be traced to the unique human ability to make cognitive connections. The author designed a triptych showing a continuum from jester to sage to artist. “Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits,’” he wrote, “and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful back-door entry . . . into the inner workshop of creative originality.” By falling into dream-states or finding other ways to transcend our stagnation, Koestler argued, we can achieve a “spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and elicits a new response to it.”
All this was heady stuff for a young man plumbing the recesses of his imagination in search of his own sense of humor (and smoking considerable quantities of funny cigarettes to get there). Years later Carlin recalled studying Koestler’s triptych:
The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes
For the better part of two years Carlin scraped by in New York. Golden found him occasional work outside the city—taking fifty bucks to play Brown’s Hotel in the Catskills, for instance. He went over well at another jazz club in Boston, Paul’s Mall; bombed at a New York bistro called the Sniffen Court Inn; took a quick trip to Bermuda to play the Inverurie Hotel. Still, Café Au Go Go was his real incubator.
For Carlin, a high school dropout who possessed a lively, inquisitive mind, the electric surge of ideas in the Village was intoxicating. “I wasn’t very well-educated, but I saw this beautiful stream of intelligent comedy coming out of those people”—Newhart, Cosby, Nichols, and May—“and it really got to me,” he said. At Café Au Go Go, he befriended an unlikely stockbroker named Bob Altman, a high-IQ, deep-reading dope smoker who’d been owner Howard Solomon’s roommate at the University of Miami.
“I’d hang around the club ’cause I could fuck the waitresses,” says Altman, a discursive firecracker who later had a lucrative, if short-lived, career as a campus comic known as Uncle Dirty. “I’d tell them, ‘I know the owner. I’ll get you a better station.’ George was funny. He was brilliant. He smoked pot, and I smoked pot. Plus I had access to a car. When he had a gig out of town, I’d drive him.” Carlin sometimes brought Brenda and Kelly over to Altman’s place to scrounge up something to eat: “He was broke, really bust-out.” Altman frittered away many nights with Carlin and his old friends from the neighborhood at the Moylan Tavern, playing darts and bumper pool and introducing his friend to the ideas of such radical spiritual thinkers as G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Carlin especially liked the French psychologist Emil Coue’s notion of autosuggestion: “ I equals W squared, where I is the imagination and W is the will,” explains Altman. “It shows you how powerful the imagination is.”
Altman also turned Carlin on to a new book by Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon . Called The Act of Creation , the book explored the author’s theory of human ingenuity, the ability to integrate previously unrelated ideas. Jokes, as Carlin was well aware, are rooted in incongruities. To Koestler, scientific discovery, mystical insight, and “The Logic of Laughter,” as he named his opening chapter, can each be traced to the unique human ability to make cognitive connections. The author designed a triptych showing a continuum from jester to sage to artist. “Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits,’” he wrote, “and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful back-door entry . . . into the inner workshop of creative originality.” By falling into dream-states or finding other ways to transcend our stagnation, Koestler argued, we can achieve a “spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and elicits a new response to it.”
All this was heady stuff for a young man plumbing the recesses of his imagination in search of his own sense of humor (and smoking considerable quantities of funny cigarettes to get there). Years later Carlin recalled studying Koestler’s triptych:
The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes
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