"I'm still the kid who quit school, I'm still the kid who ran away from home three times, I still left the Air Force early...when I finally enacted these postures publicly and was applauded for it, the cycle was completed and I could turn around and shake hands with myself and proceed to my adulthood."

George Carlin is an American artist trying hard to keep growing. Eternity came breathing down his back four months ago in the form of a heart attack. Now, after three nights of sold-out adulation and guffaw at Long Island's Westbury Music Fair, he leans forward from his French Colonial chair in Manhattan's chic Pierre Hotel--he is surrounded by the stuff of decadence--and talks in his familiar streetguy talk, as he must have talked to the neighborhood kids in White Harlem 25 years ago, airing not so much as a hint of malcontent or overindulgence.

With 16 years of professional stand-up comedy behind him and a movie career ahead of him, George Carlin is living testimony to his own potential in the field of "self-expression."

Just the night before the fans at Westbury covered his entrance and exit with crazy screams and beer-throated hysteria, threw him boxes of Mallomars and batches of promising hash brownies--ready approbation that makes Carlin feel that he has ripened, not aged, in the dynamic business of making people laugh.

"I turned 40 just a year ago, and numbers don't always mean things, but they're symbolic, you know? I just feel more whole now, more integrated with myself, less torn apart than I felt in the '60s I have a lot of myself back."

He doesn't wear the waist-long hair he dragged through those Nixon war upheaval years, and his tie dye shirts are fading in the closet, but Carlin still feels a little bit of the rebel in him. Carlin swore out at the world through his albums when they first started selling (he has now cut six); but in 1978, almost everyone has heard his "Seven Words" and his more innocuous skits on the Johnny Carson show.

"Dated? For me, dated is when the stuff doesn't make people laugh anymore. If you identify the comedy with those times, then it's dated for you. But people still think 'Filthy Words' is funny.

"But frankly, I feel dated because I've continued to do that material for so long that I feel a bit of a prisoner.

At this point in his life, Carlin must face the problem of growth. For an artist to continue art, he must develop ceaselessly and elude decadence. But as he gets older and most of his self expression becomes already expressed, Carlin's importance as a teller of irony pales. He kicks inadvertantly at the posh golden carpeting under his feet at the Pierre.

"I'm still the kid who quit school, I'm still the kid who ran away from home three times, I still left the Air Force early 'cause we didn't get along, and I still had all of these problems adjusting to the way they had laid it out. So when I finally enacted these rebellious postures publicly and was applauded for it, the cycle was completed and I could turn around and shake hands with myself and proceed to my adulthood."

George Carlin's adulthood forces him to engage in some introspection--sorting out his show material (he now leaves only 12 minutes at the end of each show for old material) and some attempts at film. The road to his adulthood, often fraught with rebellion and inner turmoil, mothered the self-expression and irony audiences have come to love Carlin for. Carlin has always been able to articulate, and to ironize, the sort of conflicts that have become more and more central to youth of America since the '60s: conflicts about sex and decadence and love and identity.

"I had what you'd call a delayed or extended adolescence, in that I did not act out these rebellious adolescent postures I had inside of me until 1970. They were symbols to me but they were running parallel to my creative sense, I wasn't being in any way untruthful to myself so I was able to allow myself to accept the trapping of that role--things I wanted--I wanted my symbols to make me different. That's what those clothes and that hair was all about then. It was a further way of separating yourself from your parents--or your metaphorical parents--and in my case my metaphorical parent was society.

In 1962 Carlin was a suit-and tie stand up comedian with straight punch-line jokes playing "straight middle-class saloon jobs". That was the year he split up with partner Jack Burns and became a solo act; since then his comedy has gradually changed. "By '69 I had a beard and an open collar and a vest," he says. "I had already become half of the person I was going to be."

But it wasn't until 1970 and 1971 that Carlin's art came to be known as devoutly counterculture, rebellious, and at times irreverent.

"I was only really happy when I quit the whole fuckin' night club thing and the Vegas thing came down and I left, and I said to Brenda, I'm going to go to a couple of coffee houses and see if I'm right about where my head is really at. So I decided to check out the campuses. I had to hear myself up there, and the first night I did, I knew I was right.