Mark Twain Prize

Tonight, direct from our nation's capital, it's the 11th annual Kennedy Center Mark.

Twain Prize for American Humor, celebrating the legacy of the great George.

Carlin, with Richard Belzer, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho, Ben E.

King, Denis Leary, Bill Maher, Joan Rivers, Garry Shandling, John Stewart, and Lily Tomlin.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bill Maher.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very much.

Good evening, donors, presenters, and other East Coast elites.

What a great day to be an American again.

We have a president who can speak English.

Oh, my God.

There's a subject and a predicate and a point.

We have a point.

Well, what can you say about George Carlin that hasn't already been argued before the Supreme Court?

We will attempt to do justice tonight to the king of raw truth in a setting that requires us to work clean.

Because you know, if George were up here talking right now, PBS would be cutting to that bullseye.

George Carlin is the old guy who sells the tote bags.

Now, here is what George Carlin said he wanted by way of a memorial.

He said, quote, it should be extremely informal.

And so here we all are in dark suits at the Kennedy Center with lots of people who love golf.

He also said he wanted some great R&B music and lots of laughs, and we're going to have that, too.

But just think of it.

The Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center.

What an honor to be associated with men like Twain and Kennedy, especially for Joan Rivers, who knew them both.

I kid, I kid.

Now, you know, today we think of Mark Twain as an author, but in his own

lifetime, he was best known as a public speaker like George Carlin.

They both gave speeches about hating all mankind to large and appreciative audiences.

In fact, you could divide Twain's and Carlin's work into this.

They were both made by the same three stages.

The early stage, some people suck.

The middle stage, most people suck.

And the late stage, you suck.

And like Twain, George also was an author who wrote four incredibly funny,

insightful books, all of which have been banned from the Wasilla Library.

Oh, I kid, Sarah Palin!

And I wish her luck on her season of Rock of Love.

But George.

Carlin was called America's Class Clown because he brought to the stage a gleeful sense of rebellion against authority.

Class Clowns are the kids who entertain us by acting out and ridiculing and generally

blowing the cover on the whole adult world.

This, of course, was before Riddler.

Here's the album Class Clown.

It made me so want to be him, and it still does.

And this one, here is the album FM & AM.

This is the album that showed me you can be born one thing but will yourself to

become something else, something you like better.

This album made a big impression on me as a 15-year-old teenager because side one,

and this is the first time I've ever done this, and this is the days when albums,

side one and side two, this album had so...

Oh.

That's been in there since 1973.

I'm so sorry.

Boy, they had a lot of seeds back then, didn't they?

Thank God they got rid of those.

But that was the old straight-laced skinny-tie Carlin suit, shorthanded.

Long hair.

And side two, FM, was the new hippie Carlin, T-shirt, long hair, the kind of

guy the fellow on side one wouldn't pick up hitchhiking, and much dirtier material.

And that theme, that you could reinvent yourself, inspired me to believe that I

could do things differently, that I could try something new, like sex with a partner.

You know, even at the end, in this last HBO special earlier this year,

I remember when I turned off the TV after watching, and I was like, damn,

he is still the rabbit.

And I don't know if anybody is ever going to catch him, not in the terms,

in the currency I value the most, utter honesty.

What a giant.

What a lion.

Thank you, George, for everything, even though I know you can't hear me.

And thank you.

You sound like a good group.

And ladies and gentlemen, I want now to give you something very special,

Jimmy Durante, giving you George Carlin.

Folks, it's great to see new comedians come along, because if there's one thing

the world can always use, you know it's a smile.

And this young fellow is one of the best.

Ladies and gentlemen, George Carlin.

Thank you very much.

I'm sure that you're aware of the fact that teenagers today are the most powerful group in the country.

First of all, there are more of them than ever before, and teenagers are so much

better organized today than they ever have been before.

Many of them are armed.

They even have their own radio stations, a coast-to-coast network of top 40 teenage

good guys swinging rum and stomping echo chambers.

The ones where all the disc jockeys sounded like, hi there it's meetin' six

and nine, hi there it's meetin' nine to 12, hi there it's meetin' 12 to 3, hi there it's meetin' 36.

It's all the same guy, he's in a jar right?

Anytime you turn on your transistor you just might hear something like the following.

Hi there kids, welcome to the Willie West Show here on Lelelelelele tehee Nuelelelelee No, au au au.

Wonderful wi no radio.

Beautiful wi no.

David.

Yeah, welcome to the Willie West Show here on a wonderful Wednesday with your winter spinner, Weird Willie West.

Winging your way with 101 wild and woolly wedges of wax and crazy wagons to play on the way, Dio.

Right here on Wonderful Wino.

1750 on your dial just above the police calls, kid.

We got stacks and stacks of wax and wax.

We got the pick to click, the ones to watch, the oldies but goodies, the newies but gooies.

We got the top 700 records here on the land of Wonderful Wino.

Wonderful Wino.

Here is a bulletin, bulletin, bulletin.

Russia and the United States are at war.

Missiles have been fired by both sides.

Washington and Moscow are in flames.

Details in 25 minutes, kids, on Action Century News.

Here's another big one, kids, in the Wonderful World of Wino.

This one's number one and moving higher every week.

Let's give a listen.

Let's make some dedications first.

We'll send it out for Big Al, Red, Louie, Spike, Choo Choo, Spanish,

Anna, Dirty Mary, Nick, The Greek, Me, Donald, Junior, Pee Wee, Toots,

Poppo, Spot, Greasy, Creep, Woozy, Mush, Ralph and Brucie.

Ralph and Brucie.

Here it is, kids.

It's our pick to make you sick.

Jenny.

Wee.

Do, do, do.

Wee.

Wee.

Wee.

Jenny.

Okay, please welcome another huge George Carlin fan and a man who has earned legions Thank you very much.

It's an absolute honor to be here.

I, like everyone else, discovered Class Clown when I was around 11 years old.

And until my friends found it, I was the funniest kid.

When I first heard him, he got me with two words, cheese tits.

Cheese tits.

Who would have thought to put those two words together?

The man was clearly a genius.

And I didn't realize until many years later that everything else that I was

hearing on that album had another level of value.

That was the brilliance to me of what George could bring.

He would reel in 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds.

Great phrases.

He was like, cheese tits.

I just walked all the way, cheese tits, cheese tits.

And then later on, I discovered on the same album, there was a little bit about

Muhammad Ali that had a whole other level of understanding about our society.

Cheese tits was just bait.

I used to be this guy, or maybe this guy used to be me.

I don't know.

We were each other at one time.

It wasn't long ago.

I liked him.

He was really good.

He was funny.

And I had a lot of fun with him.

He did some nice things for me.

But it was like there was nothing behind him.

He was kind of just superficial, just the surface.

It was all characters.

I wasn't in there.

I found out I wasn't in my own act after a while.

And here I'd been doing it for five years.

It was all characters.

It was all other people that I remembered from my life and composites of people.

People like this lady here, Congolia Breckenridge, a marvelous contestant on a quiz show.

Pick a door.

Oh, let me see.

Monty, Monty.

Oh, how many, what are the doors?

One, two, and three.

Oh, wow.

What was that again?

One, two, and three.

Okay, three.

Wait, one.

No, hold on.

I didn't go yet.

Now that, if nothing else, is proof of the theory of evolution.

George Carlin's transformation was amazing.

And one of the reasons that I'm here today is I was fortunate enough to be asked to

host 40 years in comedy, A Night with George Carlin.

Now, the idea was that we were going to take this amazing comedian who'd been

doing comedy for 40 years and had two heart attacks, and we were going to send

him to Aspen, Colorado, the highest point in America where there's very little oxygen.

And then we were going to bring in a heavy smoker from New York to interview him.

So my job was to interview George, and I got the chance to get to know him a little bit beforehand.

I flew out to California to meet him and to sit down with him and to talk with him,

and I think that's where I learned the lesson about George Carlin and what he

meant to comedy and what he was like as an artist.

I didn't know what to expect.

I went over to his office on Brentwood, and I sort of had this idea that I was going to watch the master create.

You know, we were going to go there, and he'd be like, hey, man, let's go out to the desert.

I'm going to take some pictures.

I'm going to get in a peyote.

I'm going to get in a yurt, and he's going to come to me.

And I walked into his office, and it's just a computer and a desk.

And this incredibly anti-establishment mind punched in every day and sat and worked.

He cared enough about his comedy and about what he was doing that every day he punched the clock.

This was a blue-collar guy.

That was the main message that I took from him.

So when we went out to Aspen, I was so excited.

It was the Wheeler Opera House.

About four stories up was where the stage was.

So George and I both had our little oxygen tanks.

They gave us both oxygen tanks.

And so when I finally caught up to George on the fourth floor, he was just pacing