I'm Ben Sawyer.

I'm Bob Crawford.

And this is the road to now.

I got to say, I'm pretty excited about this episode.

Bob worked this out without me having to suddenly tell him that this is definitely what I wanted to record.

He was like, do you want to record an episode with Mike Montfiglio on the George Carlin documentary?

And I was like, well, I may have already just randomly written Mike on Twitter and been like, I am the most excited about this of anything that's coming out. It's giving me hope in the world. So yes. So our guest today, not only do we have co-director of this great new HBO documentary, Michael Bonfiglio. We also have in here a historian of comedy, Cliff Nesteroff.

Guys, welcome to The Roads Now. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. So, Mike, I guess the simplest

question that I was thinking about watching the documentary was, why George Carlin and why now?

How did this come on your radar? Well, I was brought into it by

Judd Apatow, who was approached by HBO, who, you know, George had a great relationship with HBO

over the years. He did 14 specials. He kind of was one of the pioneers of the comedy special and

the HBO comedy special.

So HBO was a natural home for it.

But prior to that, there's a producer named Teddy Leifer from the UK who basically spent a couple of years badgering Kelly Carlin and Jerry Hamza, who was Georgia's manager, into making a documentary.

And so then they finally agreed.

And then HBO called Judd and Judd called me and we were off to the races.

But the larger question of why now, you know, it's kind of amazing how frequently George Carlin enters the

public discourse, particularly on social media.

Every, you know, while we were making the film before, you know, just every couple of weeks,

George Carlin would be trending and it would be a different bit, usually stuff from the 90s,

but throughout his career, and people saying something along the lines of,

...