Re: George Carlin dead
(07-01) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles -- He was the comedian who actually said the
seven words you can never say on television, but close friends and family
members remembered George Carlin as a man who, when he was offstage, had
only a kind word for everyone he met.
At a private memorial service attended Sunday by 150 people - "That was as
small as we could keep it," chuckled Carlin's daughter, Kelly Carlin
McCall - her father was memorialized by comedians Bill Maher, Garry
Shandling and others as someone who had no enemies, in part because he was
nice to everyone he spoke to.
"What everyone said tonight is if you spent time with my father, whether
it was five seconds or five hours, he was kind, attentive, very connected
to you, compassionate," Carlin's daughter said.
Shandling, who told of being a teenage college student when he sought out
Carlin nearly 40 years ago. "My dad read his material and encouraged him
to continue on, which was a life-changing moment in Garry's life," McCall
told the Associated Press after the service.
Overall, Carlin's daughter said, the service was a happy event, one
presided over in part by her father himself, who spoke from a montage of
video clips assembled from his 51-year career.
Carlin, who died June 22 of heart failure, recorded nearly two dozen
albums, 14 HBO comedy specials, wrote three best-selling books and
appeared in numerous movies and TV shows.
"It was a very, very light event, as he wanted it," McCall said of the
two-hour service. "He wanted a lot of laughter. I'd say 90 percent of it
was laughing and just remembering what he brought to us in his funny way."
Although his standup routines were often filled with four-letter words -
so many that early in his career Carlin was sometimes jailed - his dead-on
ability to highlight the absurdities of everyday life, and to do so in
such comical voices and faces, made his humor come across as anything but
harsh.
And although famous for four-letter words, Carlin, 71, did not always use
them. He was also Mr. Conductor on the children's show "Shining Time
Station," Fillmore the hippie van in the 2006 children's movie "Cars," and
the guest host of the first "Saturday Night Live" episode ever broadcast.
That 1975 show was replayed by NBC on Saturday night in his honor.
Speakers at the funeral included Carlin's older brother, Patrick, his
partner, Sally Wade, and his former standup partner, Jack Burns. Carlin's
wife, Brenda Hosbrook Carlin, died in 1997.
Carlin and Burns had met in 1960, and although they worked as a comedy duo
only briefly, they remained lifelong friends.
In an earlier interview, Burns recalled Carlin calling him several times a
year to remind him of such things as the anniversary of the day they met,
the day they did their first show together and, in one less-than-joyful
incident, the day they were jailed for armed robbery in Texas in a case of
mistaken identity.
That's just the sentimentalist he was, said McCall, who is Carlin's only
child.
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Copyright 2008 SF Chronicle
