George Carlin set a record that no one is likely to break: 14 HBO stand-up comedy specials, each at least an hour in length, and most performed live. Few comedians do that many, or would even try to -- he was HBO's in-house comedy sage, and the specials redefined both the pay-cable network and American comedy.
"To do 14, nobody did it," said comedian Lewis Black, the Comedy Central star whose angry-white-man act has drawn frequent comparisons to Carlin's onstage outrage.
Black noted Carlin's important trajectory in the pantheon of stand-up: As he put it, "there's Lenny Bruce, who basically created a road to the kind of comedy I do, the darker comedy . . . [and] it was Carlin and [Richard] Pryor who turned it into a highway."
But Carlin, for a major comedy star, also took a road less traveled. For his main link to a mass audience (beyond bestselling books) remained those pay-cable specials, even as they became less "special" as an entry point for comedy. Putting one together involves months of preparation, mental and physical (the comedian Louis C.K., for instance, works out with a boxing trainer when preparing a special).
One of the few who comes close to Carlin's record is Robert Klein, who has done eight specials, including the very first one, in 1975. Founded in 1972, HBO was mostly an acquisitions channel then, showing movies and making baby steps into original programming.
"He [Carlin] and Robert Klein, defined . . . a lot of what HBO is," said Nancy Geller, the network's longtime executive in charge of comedy specials. "He so much represented freedom of speech and being able to say things."
Klein happened to be in Norfolk, Neb., last weekend, the hometown of Johnny Carson, where he and Dick Cavett served as guest judges at something called the Great American Comedy Festival. Life on the road: Leaving Norfolk involved a two-hour limo ride to Omaha, followed by a 5 1/2 -hour delay getting back to New York due to thunderstorms; nine hours later, finally back home, Klein went to sleep.
He awoke to discover Carlin was dead.
"He transcended the generations; that was the amazing thing," Klein said Monday. "He was the universal American comedian. A counterculture Bob Hope, but not quite counterculture."
Klein recalled standing with Carlin before the grave site of Jerry Seinfeld's material -- an opening bit Seinfeld did in his 1998 HBO special "I'm Telling You for the Last Time." The idea was that Seinfeld, coming off his monumental sitcom success, was preparing to do the greatest hits of his 1980s stand-up act one more time. Then he would start afresh.
