When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America,

you get a front row seat. It's hard to choose just one quote to begin our episode on George

Carlin. He simply had so many great quotes from a comedy career that spans several decades.

But that one may be at the heart of what George Carlin brought to American audiences,

a ticket to the freak show of America. The freak show had been happening every day around them

for their whole lives and they knew that on some level. But it took Carlin to really open their

eyes to it to give a voice to their feelings to clarify their thoughts and suspicions.

With his intelligent profane, silly and irreverent sensibility that poked fun at language,

wasn't about fart jokes and seriously interrogated the notion of who really had the power in America

and why George Carlin almost single handedly birthed a new kind of comedy. A kind of comedy that

said what it wanted, how it wanted to say it, a kind of comedy that wasn't afraid to use profanity

or to be offensive. In fact, being offensive became part of Carlin's brain and brand.

By the end of his career, his brand of comedy became one that made audiences think, not just laugh,

his jokes, observations and critiques. They had fucking weight. It wasn't just frivolous,

escape its surface comedy. And if a few people got up and left for the doors, well,

fuck those weak-minded cock suckers and cunts. Dirt departure was just proof that Carlin was hitting

the nerves he wanted to hit, that what he was doing was working. Carlin was the real deal,

the realist, but he didn't start out that way. He wasn't immediately an edgy, no-holds-barred,

comedy juggernaut, not right out of the comedic gates. Carlin walks along and bumpy entertainment

road before he become comfortable with his own true inner comedic sensibilities. He was born on

May 12, 1937, the son of two Irish Americans in a troubled marriage. Growing up in Morningside Heights,

Manhattan, Carlin wreaked havoc with his gang of friends, but also learned how to do impressions of

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