Something I was happy to see was that you made room to talk about Carlin’s fart jokes. They were people who believed that we are all in this together. They weren’t people who believed in heaven and hell. They definitely were critical thinkers, and at the end of their lives, both of them came to a place of thinking that we’re all connected in some way. So it certainly makes for very sensitive, thoughtful people who are looking at the world suspiciously. Garry lost his brother to cystic fibrosis. And coming from a house where his mom divorced her husband because he was beating up Carlin’s brother (when his brother was between the ages of 2 and 6) - I’m sure it changes how you look at reality when you’re hiding from the beginning of your life.
They liked to be alone, but George loved being on the road.
They both had overbearing mother figures that affected how they moved through the world. Garry was someone who created his own shows and invented a type of career that not many people had up until that point. He was very nice to comedians, but he wasn’t part of the social world of it. You didn’t see George at the clubs he wasn’t hanging around. They were both part of the tribe of comedians, but they blazed their own paths. How else do you think Shandling and Carlin are similar?īoth of them seem to exist in their own worlds. It made me think of your Garry Shandling doc, because so much of it is about Shandling working on himself and meditation - and meditation and psychedelics are similar in that they’re both about expanding consciousness. Something that popped out to me was Carlin talking about how doing acid changed the way he did comedy. I’m sure on many levels, by examining people’s work - but more importantly their life choices and their evolution - I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to behave in the world. It makes me sad to think of these experiences and performances disappearing down the digital black hole. I like organizing all of the material and finding a way to tell the story of somebody’s life. I paid my friend to write it in, because he had better handwriting than me. Looking back, that seems like a really strange thing for a young person to do. When I was in sixth grade, I wrote this 30-page report about the Marx Brothers, but it wasn’t an assignment for school. You know, I’m not sure, because I was always interested in how things get made and who the people were who made them. Where does your need to document come from? You’ve been interviewing comedians for years and doing these documentaries lately - which I know isn’t what pays your bills, but you still do it. I’m thinking of Scorsese with his Film Foundation or Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock.
#Diamond rush distrust full#
He just put the pieces in place in a way that offers a compelling, full picture of a person whose legacy can be both misunderstood and misrepresented.Īpatow discussed what drew him to that legacy on a rainy day in his native New York City he was in a good mood, because he’d made it to a Mets game the day before.Ĭertain filmmakers seem intent on documenting the culture they love and trying to keep it alive. Kamau Bell and Jon Stewart as well as Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, that help fill in some blanks, Apatow mostly lets the late comedian’s work and actions tell the story. While there are appearances by modern comedians like W. Unlike in his last doc on a comedian, 2018’s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, Apatow - a person who knows the comedy world from just about every possible point - lets Carlin’s words and stand-up bits do most of the talking.
From discussions of freedom of speech to comedians getting attacked onstage, it is hard to figure out where Carlin would fit in today’s comedy landscape or how he’d approach it. The release of the docuseries George Carlin’s American Dream couldn’t be more timely - considering the multiple conversations on the state of stand-up comedy in America. But before the pandemic, the writer, director, and man of a bunch of other titles had already started working on another project that is now seeing the light of day. If Judd Apatow had only released one new feature this year ( The Bubble) and put out one new book ( Sicker in the Head), then, as people say at Passover Seder, dayenu - it would have been more than enough.
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