"I was just comfortable with street people," he says. "Musicians, college kids, and everyone who made a point of identifying with these clothes and symbols--and I don't apologize for that."

So Carlin was never a teenager on stage until 1970, and he had lots of repressed conflicts to tell about. Carlin grew up in Morningside Heights in New York City during the repressive '50s. His was a working class Irish-Catholic neighborhood ("We were a National League neighborhood," he adds), and Carlin's archetypal second-generation Irish street-guy was roaming the trashy streets at night mad, contriving ways to defy who ever crossed his path. Unlike many of his friends, Carlin went to a "progressive Catholic school" and was spared such stimuli as corporal punishment and uniforms. He looks back on his "class clown" days and sees ironies that were never apparant to him at that age.

"We used to play at Columbia University (right next-door to Carlin's neighborhood). We could go anywhere in Columbia in the underground passageways from 116th St. to 121st St. We had been in all the classrooms and laboratories, we had vandalized and stolen, we had also gone there with some respect sometimes, and watched classes and slide presentations'

Carlin clearly believes his contact with Columbia's students and bohemians during the smoldering '50s shaped both his humor and intellect. "There were all kinds of ruffian elements in our neighborhood, and then we had the college kids, intellectuals...'faggots'. I can't believe that whole spirit of erudition just passed through our existence. I'm sure it was a force on our lives--it can be measured some day when we have the right instrument."

His parents and grandparents were fascinated with words and poetics, and seemed to foster that same affinity in their family. "I'm sure there's cellular truth to this, too," Carlin interjects, "but my mother's father was an original New York cop, and he had written out long-hand all of Shakespeare's written works--he quizzed my mother at the dinner table. And my mother was always careful to let us know how we could free ourselves through expression."

His mother bought him a tape recorder when George was in the eighth grade and he started recording short comical skits--"news, sports, all the stuff that established my comedy"--and visions of radio and music and disc-jockey slick distracted Carlin from his studies. He eventually quit school.

"Junior high was a pain in the ass. They had me doing solid geometry, or algebra, and third-year Latin was not pleasurable. See, I had no father. My father died when I was young so I had no iron discipline as a teenager, and when I became a teenager, my mother became a pushover.

"You know, I was getting taller than her, and one day I let her know, 'Hey Ma I'm quitting school,' and oh boy what trouble--- I wanted to do something different than that goddam algebra."

Carlin always enjoyed breaking rules, crossing race and ethnic lines, mimicking Blacks and Italians and Jews. He's listed his "Seven Words" in auditoriums for ears all over America, and has completed a very astute study of the unspoken street culture that parents try desperately to shelter their kids from. Carlin sees his comedy and rebellion as his self-expression, his way of freeing himself from his emotions and feelings--a liberation. It started, he says, "when I was a kid and I ran away from home and told all the institutions to go and fuck themselves. I was smoking pot from the time I was 13, in 1950, when pot was considered to be a real evil, in the same class as heroin."

And for every "parental" restraint he defiled, Carlin found he was opening up his mind to the world, understanding other perspectives on life. Drugs had opened his "doors of perception," he says, and "they had an influence I wouldn't deny.

"Our little Irish group was discovering this hash, and we were into very sophisticated strings of long, comic invention because we were into this grass. And because our environment didn't sanction it, we were totally isolated with our experience and it was even more exciting creatively than it is now."

The stuff of George Carlin's comedy is words. He makes them sound nice as he says them, but more importantly, his comedy reveals words for what they are--artificial symbols for items and concepts that exist in reality. Like fantasies, words are creations of the human mind; if there were no human minds, there would be no words.

With his stark, honest irony, Carlin has shown countless audiences how silly and obsolete America's taboos and social inventions really are, especially in the age of the city. "Cultures have to have some things they consider unthinkable, and in ancient times, health or survival reasons entered into this," he says. But it would be really nice to channel some of the things going on today that are really unspeakable--like severe deprivation--and make them the focus of our attention."

So much for the critics who say Carlin's comedy is kid stuff. Despite living in the luminous shadow of Lenny Bruce, pioneer of modern irony and consciousness, Carlin has steadily dug out his niche as a performing artist.

"Lenny was more af a crusader, I'm in a safer era for what I'm doing as well. Lenny was making a point for its own sake, and his humor was the vehicle for that. I am a humorist, and this exploration of words is my vehicle for arriving at my irony.