Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Born in New York City in 1937, George Dennis Patrick Carlin was one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time.  He appeared on The Tonight Show more than 130 times, starred in an unprecedented thirteen HBO Specials, hosted the first Saturday Night Live, and penned three New York Times bestselling books. Of the twenty-three solo albums recorded by Mr. Carlin, eleven were Grammy nominated and he took home the coveted statue five times, including a 2001 Grammy win for Best Spoken Comedy Album for his reading of his bestseller Brain Droppings. In 2002, Carlin was awarded the Freedom of Speech Award by the First Amendment Center in cooperation with the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, and he was the named eleventh recipient of The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in June of 2008. George Carlin passed away at age seventy-one on June 22, 2008 in Santa Monica, California.

Tony Hendra was once described by The Independent of London as “one of the most brilliant comic talents of the post-war period.” He began his comedic career with Graham Chapman of Monty Python, appeared six times on the Ed Sullivan Show, was one of the original editors of National Lampoon, edited the classic parody Not The New York Times, starred in This Is Spinal Tap, and co-created and co-produced the long-running British satirical series Spitting Image for which he was nominated for a British Academy Award. He has written or edited dozens of books, most of them satirical, with the exception of two New York Times bestsellers: Brotherhood (2001) and Father Joe (2004). He is a senior member of the Board of the nation-wide story-telling community, The Moth.

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Last Words

Free Press

Sliding headfirst down a vagina with no clothes on and landing in the freshly shaven crotch of a screaming woman did not seem to be part of God?s plan for me. At least not at first. I?m not one of those people who can boast of having been a sparkle in his mother?s eye. A cinder comes closer.

I was conceived in a damp, sand-flecked room of Curley?s Hotel in Rockaway Beach, New York. August 1936. A headline in that Saturday?s New York Post said ?Hot, sticky, rainy weekend begins. High humidity and temperatures in the 90s send millions to the beaches.? At the Paramount Theater in Times Square, Bing Crosby and Frances Farmer starred in Rhythm on the Range. Meanwhile at Curley?s Hotel on Beach 116th Street, Mary and Patrick Carlin starred in yet another doomed Catholic remake of Rhythm in the Sack.

For several generations Rockaway Beach had been a favorite weekend retreat for New York?s alcohol-crazed Irish youth in search of sex and sun. Popular ethnic slurs to the contrary, the Irish do enjoy sex?at least the last ten seconds or so. But we must admit that Irish foreplay consists of little more than ?You awake?? Or the more caring, sensitive ?Brace yourself, Agnes!?

Not that my conception was the tale of two young lovers, carried away by passion and strong wine. By the time my father?s eager, whiskey-fueled sperm forced its way into my mother?s egg-of-the-month club, she was forty and he was forty-eight?certainly old enough to be carrying rubbers. The odds against my future existence were even longer: this particular weekend was a single isolated sex-fest during a marital separation that had lasted more than a year. In fact the preceding six years of my parents? marriage had consisted entirely of long separations, punctuated by sudden brief reconciliations and occasional sex-fests.

The separations were long because my father had trouble metabolizing alcohol. He drank, he got drunk, he hit people.

My mother told me that my father hit her only once. (My older brother, Patrick, can?t say the same.) His first marriage ended disastrously when his first wife died of a heart attack not long after one of his beatings. My mother?s theory was that while my father had been very free with his hands where his first family and Patrick were concerned, he didn?t abuse her, because she had four brothers and her dad was a policeman.

Their reconciliations were sudden because my father had a terrific line of bullshit. And because my mother really loved him. The two of them were crazy about one another. According to those who knew them they were one of the great pairings of all time. So while I sprang from something good and positive, by the time I showed up I was a distinct inconvenience. This marriage had gone south long before. As in Tierra del Fuego.

Getting conceived had been hard enough. Staying conceived literally required a miracle. My next brush with nonexistence came two months after the sweaty sex-weekend in Rockaway Beach.

During the five years between the birth of my brother and my tiny embryo glomming on to a few square millimeters of her uterine wall, my mother had made several visits to a certain Dr. Sunshine in Gramercy square. Never for an abortion, mind you. Holy Mary Mother of God, no! The procedure in question was called a D&C: dilation and curettage?literally ?open wide and scrape.? A wonderfully delicate euphemism for quasi-Catholics with a little money. Really high-tone too. Gramercy Square was the place to get opened wide and scraped. No back-alley abortions on my father?s salary.

Legend has it that my mother was seated in Dr. Sunshine?s waiting room with my father who, being a family man, was reading the sports pages, apparently just fine with my being less than a hundred feet from Storm Drain #3. The good doctor?s instruments were sterile and standing by. The old dilator-and-curettager had selected a nice new pair of rubber gloves and was whistling cheerfully as he pulled them on preparatory to my eviction.

Then it happened. My mother had a vision. Sometimes when you?re trying to be born, that religious shit can come in handy. Not a full-blown vision, like Jesus? face being formed by pubic hairs in the bottom of the shower. But real enough to save my embryonic ass. My mother claimed she saw the face of her dear, dead mother?who?d died six months earlier?in a painting on the waiting-room wall. She took this as a certain sign of maternal disapproval from beyond the grave. (Catholics go for that sort of thing.) She jumped up and left the abortionist?s office, with me still safely in the oven. On the street below she delivered these momentous words to my father: ?Pat?I?m going to have this baby.?

And so I was saved from an act frowned on by the Church through an experience smiled on by the Church. It?s a wonder I?m not more devout. In fact you might be surprised that I support a woman?s right to an abortion. But I do. Absolutely. So long as it?s not my abortion.

My father?s response to this dramatic development is unrecorded. No doubt it included something about finding a place nearby that had qualified for a liquor license. After all, this was a man who, riding home from the hospital where my brother had just had a tonsillectomy, said: ?Know how many beers I could?ve bought with what it cost to take your damn tonsils out??

In October 1936, shortly after my aborted abortion, Mary and Pat decided to try and make a go of marriage again. So here they were, this time at 155th and Riverside, with another nice home, a maid and of course the same old problems. And I have to say that while my father?s drinking must have made a sizable contribution to the chaos, my mother was an extremely difficult person to live with. She was spoiled, self-centered, strong-willed and demanding; no matter who you were, she?d find out how to press your buttons, God bless her sainted memory.

Somehow though, while I waxed and multiplied within her, things sailed along smoothly enough for them to stay together. One day in May 1937 she decided to take a recreational stroll on the then new George Washington Bridge. The exertion brought on labor pains sooner than expected and a couple days later I came barreling down the birth canal, a nine-pound behemoth, requiring the use of forceps. My mother insisted care was taken not to grip my temples lest in her delightful words, it caused ?the creation of an idiot.? This was almost as important to her as the fact that the obstetrician was Dr. James A. Harrar, the ?Park Avenue doctor? who?d delivered the Lindbergh baby.

The day I was born was auspicious. It was the day King George VI of England was crowned and a commemorative stamp was issued with the king?s head on it?along with my birthdate, May 12th, 1937. How about that? A New York Irish kid named George rates a fucking stamp for his birthday! No wonder I?ve always been a devout monarchist. I was also born about a week after the Hindenburg disaster. I?ve often wondered whether I?m the reincarnation of some charbroiled Nazi CEO.

Lying there in New York Hospital, my first definitive act on this planet was to vomit. And vomit and vomit and vomit. For the first four weeks of my life I lived to projectile vomit. My mother later told me with great pride: ?They would feed you and you would shoot formula clear across the room. You couldn?t keep anything down.? And I still...