Carlin was the best of a kind

"I said to him, '. . . crippled children? You really feel that way?' " Klein recalled of his banter with Carlin at the grave site of Seinfeld's material. ". . . It's clear in his work that there was a darkness. It wasn't from disappointment in his career, which was unprecedented. He was enormously prolific, but he was a real show business guy. An autodidact to be sure, this guy knew a lot of stuff. He just never stopped thinking of things."

Just last week, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had announced Carlin would be honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the 11th such artist to be given that honor. Klein figured Carlin would have liked that.

Though few, it seems, knew him that well. "I never had a word about what he was going to wear. Ever," said Glenn Schwartz, his publicist of eight years, during the 1980s and '90s. "He always wore the same thing. A blue turtleneck and black pants. And I'm pretty sure he had seven outfits of the same thing."

Klein, like others, noted that the 1997 death of Carlin's wife, Brenda, had hit him hard. Maybe that's why the titles of his HBO specials got darker--"You Are All Diseased" (No. 11) and "Life Is Worth Losing" (No. 13).

"He was a gatherer," said Bill Maher (who's also done eight HBO specials). "So many of his bits were almost like lists. He would just list 18 perfect examples of words that didn't make sense. Or phrases that were contradictory. . . . He was meticulous that way. He was a real craftsman. It was almost like he was making a gondolier or a ship inside of a bottle."

Maher also credits Carlin with braving the stage to argue that religion is dumb, a favorite Maher topic on his HBO series "Real Time With Bill Maher," and the subject of his forthcoming movie, "Religulous."

"He's the guy who made me stand up and say, 'Wow, you can actually stand up and talk about this in the United States of America. You can actually say religion is dumb.' "

A 2005 Playboy interview with Carlin, conducted in Las Vegas when Carlin was preparing "Life Is Worth Losing," offered a window into the constantly musing and roiling and railing inner life of Carlin. He was, by then, 68 -- with three heart attacks to his credit and a stay at Promises, the fancy celebrity detox center in Malibu.

"Not one idea escapes him," noted journalist David Hochman. "He keeps small Post-its everywhere, and as soon as something -- a joke, a word, an absurdity -- comes to him, he'll jot it down and then enter it into one of his four Apple computers. He even has an iPod dedicated exclusively to his recorded thoughts."

At the time, his third book, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" was on the New York Times bestseller list. "Life Is Worth Losing" was in repertory, ahead of going live on HBO.

"Those little books, I [told him] I was reading 'Braindroppings,' " Klein noted. "I said, 'It has no beginning, middle or end.' He said, 'Yeah, it's for [the toilet].' "

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com