George Carlin Has Nothing Left to Say

A.I. and the fall of American democracy

Years ago, when I was still figuring out my stand-up comedy career, I took a day job at The Punch Line Comedy Club in San Francisco. It was my job to call people and tell them they had “won” free tickets, the fine print being that you could only use your “winning tickets” on a night when the club wasn’t going to already be packed with a paying audience. People were excited until they found out that they would only be able to use them on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday — not popular date nights to say the least. 

One of the hidden benefits of this job was that I got to see behind the scenes of a comedy club. The booker would let me watch the videotapes that comics had submitted to get booked. We would throw them into the combination TV/VCR to get a few laughs. But let me be clear, these usually weren’t the kind of laughs the comics wanted. These were mostly the “laughing at” kind of laughs and not the “laughing with” kind. If a comic had a legit resume or I had heard of them before, I wouldn’t watch them. That was the booker’s job. But if a comic had one of those resumes that read like a cry for help, then I was all over them. Those resumes would start like, “After getting a divorce and being fired from his corporate job, Steve found a new home in the comedy club… No seriously… He lives there. He lost the house in the divorce.”

But one day a submission came in that I actually really wanted to watch. Like in a sincere way. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with a tape. It was a submission from England, which was already a little strange. Also, the guy was not just a standard club comic looking for stage time. He was an actor with a one person show… a one person show where the actor performed as a famous comedian. The comedian the actor was portraying was Bill Hicks. I had to see this.

Side note: If you don’t know who Bill Hicks is, here’s my quick and insufficient explanation. Bill Hicks was basically white Dave Chappelle, but years before Dave Chappelle. And again, let me be clear, I’m referring to the Dave Chappelle before Netflix and even before “Chappelle Show.” Much like Dave Chappelle, Hicks started comedy in his teens and was quickly acknowledged by his adult peers as being the rarest of rare things: a preternaturally gifted stand-up comedy prodigy. Even though he was a teenager, Bill had the stage presence of a seasoned veteran. And he was a good joke-writer from the start, a skill that takes many comics years to acquire. (Present company included.)

Bill came out of the gate strong in the late 70’s in Houston, Texas, and he only got stronger. Then he grew up, became an alcoholic and drug addict, cleaned himself up, and refocused his act. By the late 80’s Bill was an underground comedy legend, and his peers knew he would break big at some point, just like his friend Sam Kinison did. Bill’s story had all the elements of the hero's journey. He was often compared to Lenny Bruce, because like Lenny, he was both politically and comedically unflinching. Bill was just as likely to destroy the room (comedically) with his jokes, as force the room to walk out because of his perspective and unwillingness to bow down to the audience. And like Lenny, he died young. But even younger than Lenny. Bill Hicks died of cancer in 1994, at the age of 32. A true tragedy.

Bill Hicks is on my Mount Rushmore of stand-up comics. And I am far from alone in saying that in my generation of comics. (Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of stand-up comics? Tell me in the comments.)

So the idea that there was a person doing a Bill Hicks one person show that was performed as if Bill had returned from the dead and had a new hour of jokes was fascinating. I asked the booker if she could ask them to send the tape. I know there was no way the Punch Line was going to book something like that. She said yes. The tape eventually showed up. I quickly put it in the TV/VCR. After a few moments it began, and I was quickly like, “Uhhhhh… No thanks.”

I applauded the actor for being bold enough to try and pull this off, and I was also not surprised that it was a near immediate “No from me, dawg.” The first thing that put me off the performance was the actor's attempt at Bill’s Texas drawl. I know we are used to British actors effortlessly nailing American accents, but he was not one of them. Honestly though, a big part of me wanted this person to have somehow figured out how to channel the spirit of Bill Hicks. Either figuratively or literally. I would have been fine either way. I also wanted the person to look like Bill Hicks. Kind of like how every time an actor gets cast in a biopic of another famous person we all wait for that first set photo to come out so we can see if they look enough like the person they are playing. Hell, we even do that when the actor is playing a pretend person, like Superman.

Does David Corenswet look enough like Superman, a person who has never existed and who has looked different depending on who was hired to draw Superman at that moment?

I wanted all that because, like all of the family members and fans of Bill Hicks, I just wanted Bill back. I never got to see Bill Hicks live on stage. Watching Bill on TV or listening to him on CD wasn't the true experience. Apparently Bill was kind of like Parliament Funkadelic or The Grateful Dead. You need to see him live to really get the full effect. But in reality, this wasn’t the return of Bill Hicks that was promised. And I totally understand why. The degree of difficulty is super high. It would be hard enough to just play Bill Hicks in a movie about his life (a project that has made its way around Hollywood for years). But it is a whole other level of Olympic Women’s Gymnastics difficulty to also promise a new hour of material in his style. Bill’s voice was truly singular. It was intelligent and coarse and goofy and pointed and pained and vulnerable and bombastic and filled with bravado. It was righteous but also contrarian and at times juvenile and also tight and loose in rapid succession. He was also punching up before that was a common phrase. But he was also trying to push new (some would say progressive) ideas that sometimes sound regressive 30 years later. At his core he was a guy who spent his adolescence growing up in a comedy club. Not an environment that child psychologists would recommend. 

I thought of that story recently when I was watching the thing that was advertised as an “A. I. comedy special” entitled, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.” The special was promoted as the creation of Dudesy, an A. I. program and podcast hosted by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen. Sasso is probably best known as a cast member of the 90’s Fox sketch show Mad TV. Kultgen is a screenwriter and comedy writer. I was familiar with Dudesy before this event. I have followed some of Sasso’s post-Mad TV work. In my opinion he is very funny, and he is known for his brilliant impressions. He is the highest level of impressionist, someone who can pull off young Arnold Swartzenegger and current day Arnold Swartzenegger. He can do Hulk Hogan yelling and Hulk Hogan whispering. Most good impressionists can only do their subjects at one level. Sasso is different. I had first come across him in his previous podcast, a podcast that I’m guessing he won’t be returning to no matter what comes of Dudesy.

I heard about this “A.I. George Carlin special” from a friend of mine named Kelly Carlin. Kelly is George Carlin’s daughter. (Saying she is my friend is not a humblebrag. It is just a regular old brag.) Kelly obviously has a stake in George Carlin, to put it lightly. I don’t think people realize that one of the reasons that George Carlin is still a relevant comedy force is because of Kelly’s hard work. She has shared his archive with the National Comedy Center. She was a producer on Judd Apatow’s documentary George Carlin’s American Dream. And she regularly speaks on George’s legacy. When I first saw her tweets (Yup, I said “tweets”. Eff you, Elon.) about the special and how bothered she was by it, I took it as a comedy bat signal. I was immediately down to help.

Within the first few seconds of watching “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” I was in full uncanny valley mode. Many of the proponents of A. I. have pitched A. I. as not a tool of humanity but somehow as something more than human, the idea being that since A. I. is loaded with all of human knowledge, it will somehow accomplish things that humans cannot. And while I possibly understand that argument when it comes to scientific innovation - although the history of science is littered with humans doing human things that lead to scientific discovery — the argument completely loses steam for me when A. I. is supposed to be able to create a great work of art. I actually was a part of an A. I. experiment to see if A. I. could write jokes in the style of W. Kamau Bell. The results were so much less than stellar that they made me question if I was even a comedian at all. And let me say that obvious thing, I. AM. NO. GEORGE. CARLIN.

“George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead” starts with what I’m guessing was supposed to be a legal disclaimer of sorts. The voice of Dudesy makes it clear that the material is not written by George Carlin and that voice we will be hearing will not be George Carlin, buuuuuuuuuuut that Dudesy had seen all of Carlin’s specials and was writing new material based on what it had learned. With that awkward and frustrating disclaimer out of the way, we were off to the ick. I say “ick” because the first thing you see is A. I. images of a comedy audience with those weird A. I. facial expressions that look somewhere between ecstasy and agony. You see the back of mid-career George Carlin, ponytailed and grayed. And then there’s the voice. Unlike Will Sasso’s impressions, this Carlin voice couldn’t pick a side. It sounded stuck between eras of Carlin. It was definitely Carlin-esque, but not nailing any particular version of Carlin. And then there was the material. While it certainly was comprised of subjects and maybe even premises George Carlin would have used, it was lacking one thing… George Carlin. At best this was a first draft of George Carlin. And some of the comedic takes seemed totally off to me. For example it feels too convenient that “A. I. George Carlin” would do a bit that praises A. I. I can’t imagine the real George Carlin having that same take, unless he had figured out how to make it way funnier and darker than Dudesy did. It was another, “No from me, dawg.”

But I’m not everybody. Many people posted that they enjoyed it. Some even said it caused them to go back and watch old George Carlin stand-up. Of course there were many comments about whether this was okay to do or not. But it sort of seemed to stay in the realm of intellectual argument. In the meantime, Kelly was on TV and in the press giving her thoughts about it. And there was so much uproar that in the next episode of Dudesy, Sasso and Kultgen addressed some of the feedback, including some from Kelly. But what struck me is that the hosts kept the conversation in the intellectual realm and steered clear of my big questions:

Isn't making an AI version of a deceased person whose family is still walking the earth a totally shitty thing to do? Isn't there enough shittiness in the world right now? Didn't George Carlin do enough for us? As usual, my last question in situations like this is, "Who raised you?!" 

Nobody who was defending Dudesy seemed to want to wade into that discussion. It was more fun to debate whether the material was funny or if the voice was good enough or if this was a good substitute for George Carlin or how all of this was inevitable anyway so your complaints are meaningless. Most disturbing to me is the fact that none of the defenders seem to have any interest in his daughter’s feelings on the subject. That’s where you lose me, because that’s where we are about to lose the entire country. We are currently experiencing a huge empathy deficit in this country. 

When I first heard Dudesy’s impression I felt a little ill just thinking about how it would make Kelly feel. She is the inheritor of his legacy and she carries the flame everyday. In the Carlin documentary, you learn that while her dad was alive she was responsible for parenting him at times (even when she was very young), because he and her mom had their own demons. It would be understandable if, after his passing, she just said, “I’ve done enough. I have to have my own life without him.” But she didn’t. She proudly took on his legend and helps to keep it alive. Kelly eventually filed a lawsuit against Dudesy, including the hosts. She could have simply done the “cease and desist” thing, like Tom Brady did when Dudesy made an A. I. Tom Brady comedy special. (Oof!) But Kelly knew that a lawsuit would help establish legal precedent about the rights of the rest of us when it comes to unauthorized A. I. versions of ourselves. She was thinking about all of us in showbiz, especially. See, a big part of last year’s SAG-AFTRA and writers’ strikes was about what Hollywood is and isn't allowed to do with A. I. While George Carlin is “a comic’s comic,” Kelly Carlin is the daughter of a comic who wants the best for all comics.

As the news of the lawsuit was hitting, Sasso and Kultgen started backpedaling. Sasso’s spokesperson is now claiming that the entire thing that had been promoted as an “A. I. George Carlin comedy special” was written by Kultgen. They also pulled the special off of Dudesy’s YouTube channel. But instead of the Dudesy defenders admitting shame at that point, many said some version of “HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FAKE??? DIDN’T YOU SEE WILL ON BLAH BLAH PODCAST WHERE HE BASICALLY ADMITTED THAT DUDESY WAS FAKE??? DON’T YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING???” And thus the goalposts were moved even further away from my big questions.

Is using someone else’s intellectual property and likeness without their (or their family’s) permission a shitty thing to do? And is A. I. just going to be another excuse for people to do whatever they want, however they want? And if that is the case then aren’t we doomed as a society? Because if niceness becomes a thing of the past, then don’t we lose the thing that makes us one of the more evolved species? I say “one of” because even wild animals understand the importance of how good manners help us all get along.

Photo by Jarosław Głogowski on Unsplash

And obviously, I’m not against impressionists or actors taking on roles where they are playing real people. And if Kelly Carlin wanted someone (or some program) to write and perform a new hour of her dad’s material then that is her choice. But I would also like her choice to include her right to stop someone (or something) from doing that. In a country where empathy is increasingly seen as a weakness and where people are more often interested in their opponents' loss than their own success, this feels like a test case for what is to come in 2024 and the future of America.

I think Kelly Carlin may have said it best:

​​Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there.

She has a way with words. Must be in the genes.

You’re With Me!

Here are some updates from our corner of the internet:

• In last week’s pop quiz, an impressive 57% of you knew that the photo of me in a hard hat came from United Shades of America S4:E8 Toxic America, which we filmed in Philadelphia and Chester, PA. 27% of you thought it was S2:E7 Appalachian Coal Country.

• Another impressive thing happened last week. You FULLY FUNDED Mrs. Thorne’s library fundraiser on Donors Choose. That made me feel great. Let’s see if we can tackle a big one this week. Ms. Atkins is trying to build a STEM lab for her students and she needs our help.

• I’m a cover model! Check out this week’s edition of East Bay Express for a story about my limited run of stand-up shows at Berkeley Rep.

  

  Photo: Aundre Larrow / CNN

I’ll report back next week on our progress.