Still, onstage in New York, he didn’t ignore 9/11 completely. By the time of his HBO special, that November, he had given up most of the death-obsessed bits in favor of a no less hilarious, though certainly safer, set based on the types of people who really pissed him off-rich guys in hot-air balloons, gun nuts, guys named Todd.
The appeal he is making to members of the crowd, as he is getting them to laugh, is to consider this almost reflexive fascination, and to deny even a germ of it in themselves.Ĭarlin’s sets in Vegas were not, of course, his response to September 11th. He explains the excitement he feels when watching fatal disasters as a visceral, animal response. But you’re wrong, because I think mass death is terrific, and I’m a really nice fucking guy.” Speaking in a menacing, devilish growl, Carlin gives voice to a dark part of us that eagerly, and at times almost giddily, consumes the wall-to-wall media coverage that certain kinds of mass-death events generate. Society has told you that nice people don’t take pleasure in mass death. “I know these things are normal and quite common. “I know some people think these kind of thoughts are ghoulish and demented and sick, but I know they’re not,” he says. Toward the end of the album, Carlin implicates the audience more clearly in his death obsession. “I’m always rooting for a really high death toll,” he says.
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What Carlin really likes, he tells the audience, are “big, fatal disasters with lots of dead people.” As in his best work, Carlin luxuriates in the cumulative effect of lists, running off his favorite forms of cataclysm, from the global to the absurdly specific: earthquakes, tornadoes, airplane crashes, “food poisoning at a church picnic,” “a runaway merry-go-round.” He launches into a wild, extended riff-one that he would later repurpose in his 2006 special, “Life Is Worth Losing”-about a broken water main in Los Angeles setting off a cascading series of increasingly gruesome disasters across the country and, later, the world, which ends in a surreal new universe in which what he calls “trillions of Uncle Daves,” stand-ins for all the angry white men in America who felt the system had been rigged against them, are finally happy. The album’s climax explores an idea that would have been no less incendiary in the months after 9/11. Terrorists get blamed for these explosions that are nothing more than cabbage-fart detonations.” As extravagantly silly as the bit is, it’s clear why Carlin decided to put it away. And you know who gets blamed? Osama bin Laden. “And they build, and they build, and they build until they reach critical fart density-C.F.D.-and they continue to build throughout the flight, until finally some kid turns on a Game Boy and boom! The whole back end of the plane blows off. “These planes get flying so fast that all the most vicious, lethal, volatile, flammable, unstable farts get pushed toward the back of the airplane, where they begin to build up pressure,” he said. In a fashion typical of the comedian, who always passed easily between the corporeal and the sublime, it started as a fart joke. The most striking thing about the show is that Carlin made a joke about Osama bin Laden and an exploding airplane.
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It is available now, under its original title, on Sirius XM, and out on CD and for download next week. Now, fifteen years after the attacks, and eight years after Carlin’s death, material from the two nights has been arranged in a new album by his daughter Kelly, his longtime manager and confidant Jerry Hamza, and an archivist named Logan Heftel. Those original September sets were lost-save for their place in the memory of the audiences in Vegas, who must have woken up to the news on 9/11 with an especially eerie feeling-until cassette recordings were discovered, a few years ago, in Carlin’s archives. Photograph by Paul Drinkwater / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty In a previously unreleased album recorded on September 9 and 10, 2001, Carlin-shown above in April of that year-joked about Osama bin Laden, an exploding airplane, and his own fascination with disaster and death.
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