"Lenny ideally should have peaked intellectually and physically during 1967. Lenny was right for my period of growing up, and he influenced a lot of people, including myself. I loved the candor. I loved the facility for laying it out just as he saw it. I think art requires honesty and a few risks."

George Carlin has never tried to change the world; he just likes to run up on that stage and gesticulate and sweat and express, and the gales of laughter--sometimes even hysterical and mad laughter--make him feel good. "My purpose is self-expression, and when they applaud or laugh, it's their way of saying, 'Hey man, we like your self-expression," he says.

"The rest is gravy. If someone comes up to you and says that your irony made them change their values in life--well, that's a tremendous, rare feeling."

George Carlin likes to "get his strokes" at his work, and he's been fortunate and deserving. He's absolutely correct when he says he was working in "a safer era," but perhaps it is too safe for his own good.

Unwittingly summarizing his own situation, Carlin talks about his teenage drug experience: "The trouble with drugs is that they are self-limiting. They open certain doors of perception which you already have--the drug doesn't add anything which isn't already there. Even with LSD and mescaline, you reach a point where it just doesn't do as much for you anymore."

But words, as defined entities, are self-limiting; now Carlin has come to a plateau in his life where new and fresh words and ironies are getting harder to find. He is literally fighting to free himself from his own words, and he'll try to do it through film.

"I'm very interested in having a movie career-writing, and being in them, some combination of arts and skills. The first one is called "The Illustrated George Carlin" and there'll be a lot of concert footage with some cartooning and little vignettes. As far as I know no comedian has made a film with his own concert footage."

Carlin harbors no intentions of decaying, of joining the Show Biz Kids in Hollywood by the swimming pool and the shapely bods. The wiry Irish class clown and streetcorner toker from White Harlem still enjoys visiting his mother in the old neighborhood, and seems to gain perspective on his life as he ages. Soon his funny beard will turn gray--and age and eternity aside, it is painful to imagine that George Carlin will become a prisoner of his own words.

"Repression is always around the corner in America, it's always in the air, but I feel free..." He catches his words just as they leave his mouth and with the sense of humor and perspective that may be his saving grace, adds, "Well, you know what they say--'We are made to feel free by exercising a series of meaningless choices." He sighs. "And I seem to be thriving.