With Friends Like Imus and Tony Hendra, George Carlin Will Never Have Any 'Last Words'

Though he’s a progressive-minded Brit, Tony Hendra is also a United States citizen. As such, he plans to vote for Carl Paladino for Governor of New York. “It’s been a very dry period for us satirists the last couple of years,” he said, explaining his rationale.
 
On the whole, Hendra, one of the original editors of The National Lampoon, is stoked for a Republican comeback. “It’s gonna be great,” he said. “Can you imagine Senator Sharron Angle introducing legislation in the Senate, mandating all Hispanics, legal or illegal, have got to wear an armband with a yellow sombrero?”
 
Naturally, Imus is on board with whichever scenario “produces the most agony for the greatest number of people,” and therefore the most comic fodder.
 
Which is pretty much the philosophy of the late George Carlin, whose autobiography Last Words, co-written with Hendra, is out in paperback this week. “The bigger the disaster, the more he was happy,” Hendra said of Carlin.
 
The two began writing Last Words in the early 1990s, and Carlin was hesitant to ever call it an autobiography, feeling that only corrupt politicians and business a-holes wrote books like that. He was similarly put off by the term “memoir,” deciding it was “somewhere between ‘me’ and ‘moi,’” Hendra explained.
 
So they decided on “sorta-biography,” he said, though the writing process was frequently postponed. “We had a plan, which was the he would do this Broadway show…called ‘New York Boy,’” Hendra said. Alas, Carlin died before that happened, and before completing Last Words.
 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003NHR5VO?ie=UTF8&tag=imus09-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B003NHR5VOHendra met Carlin in the 1960s, when they were both “scrabbling around the Village, looking for work in much the same places.” They stayed close friends, and when Carlin began writing his autobiography at age 50, he turned the first 100 pages over to Hendra for review.
 
“They were the first six years of his life,” Hendra said. “I pointed out that when he was 60, in a couple of years, the book would be 1,000 pages long.”
 
From the outset, Carlin had no desire to tell the story of his life; instead, he wanted to tell the story of his art. “He wanted to tell the story of how he got from being this kind of brittle, blabbermouth comedian on 60s television shows to this really quite, I would say, almost a philosopher in some parts of his work,” Hendra said.
 
Like other comics of his generation, Carlin was more fixated on talking about the world around him than he was interested in talking about himself. “He was completely, completely compulsive,” Hendra said of Carlin’s work ethic. “He would get up in the morning, and get on his computer, writing or rewriting something, and he would be like that until three o’clock the next morning, when he went to bed. He just thought of nothing else but comedy.”
 
Though he died more than two years ago, Imus can’t bring himself to remove Carlin’s contact information from his phone. Ditto Tim Russert, another I-Fave long gone. “Other people, when the bastard dies, I can’t get it out fast enough,” Imus said. Shocking.
 
-Julie Kanfer