Stream It Or Skip It: ‘George Carlin’s American Dream’ On HBO Max, A Docuseries About Perhaps The Greatest American Stand-Up Comedian

Most comedians would tell you that the best comedians of all time were George Carlin and Richard Pryor. The order of their ranking might change, but Carlin and Pryor usually rank 1-2 among comedians as the GOATs. In a two-part, four-hour docuseries, directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio recount Carlin’s life and career, which included 14 HBO comedy specials and more than 130 appearances on The Tonight Show. And they could do so with the benefit of having Carlin tell most of his life story in his own words, even though he died in 2008.

GEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICAN DREAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Behind the scenes shooting a promo for one of his HBO specials, we’re watching Carlin in black-and-white as he preps a bit for the camera. “OK, I know how to start. I want to start this,” he says, as the camera cuts to close-up of him rubbing his hands together, then out to show the clapperboard signify we’re rolling, and Carlin’s face fidgets briefly before launching into a riff on how Americans made up the idea of rights, as we cut back and forth to the documentary’s opening credits, and a montage of TV hosts introducing Carlin.
The Gist: Yes, we’re going full meta for this four-hour retrospective on the late great stand-up comedian. Sure, some actual living great comedians, relatives of Carlin’s, and associates pop up to offer their insights and stories, too, but the directors mostly allow Carlin to tell his life story in his own words, along with plenty of clips from his prodigious output of specials and albums.
We follow him back to his childhood block in Morningside Heights (or as he used to jokingly call it, “White Harlem”), where his mom took George and his older brother to flee from their violent drunken father, and where despite having a Catholic church on the block, or perhaps because of it, young George felt betrayed by religion. He dropped out of school, joined the U.S. Air Force and didn’t fit in there, either. But his turn as a radio DJ clicked, and he figured that might be his path to become the next Danny Kaye.
We see his early duo act with his radio station co-worker Jack Burns, and learn how the legendary Lenny Bruce got them an early break.
We see how Carlin, going solo in 1963, found his career taking off a couple of years later when he began doing an “Indian Sarge” character on TV, how that forced him to write new jokes, and prompted him to move with his wife and toddler daughter to Los Angeles, taking gigs on variety shows such as Kraft Summer Music Hall (where the other resident comedian was a young Richard Pryor!). When the cultural shifts happened in the late ’60s, Carlin realized he’d gotten himself stuck in the middle. “I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were 40, and they were at war with their kids who were 20.” Like Pryor before him, Carlin eventually chose to side with the hip, young crowd, and got fired for saying “shit” onstage while in the middle of a lucrative Las Vegas contract where he was earning $12,500 each week in 1970. Carlin started doing acid, marijuana and lots and lots of cocaine. Wife Brenda, meanwhile, had become an alcoholic.

Of course, we spend more than a few minutes on Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” which he’d regale audiences with onstage before and after he recorded the bit on his Class Clown album. He’d get arrested in 1972 during Milwaukee’s Summerfest. The FCC took one of the radio stations that aired Carlin’s bit to court and won a 5-4 decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978, which later established guidelines for indecent language reserved for late-night broadcasts.
But the drugs and alcohol threatened not only to destroy his marriage but also both George and Brenda.
And by 1980, critics and other comedians began to turn on Carlin for his onstage performances, too, saying he had become obsolete or unhip, as he went back to making appearances on variety TV series such as Tony Orlando and Dawn, and we watch as Rick Moranis mocks Carlin’s choices for material in multiple parodies on SCTV. We see how newer, younger stars such as Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman were eclipsing Carlin in popularity by the end of the 1970s.

What Documentaries Will It Remind You Of?: Apatow previously directed the HBO docuseries, The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, and Apatow and Bonfiglio also put together the HBO doc, May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers.
Our Take: We may now feel overwhelmed or at least accustomed to an excess of stand-up comedy thanks to Netflix, other streaming platforms and social media. But Carlin, when he was alive, stood in a league of his own. Most other headlining comedians toured with the same hour for years in the clubs, and hardly any of them could sell theaters, let alone arenas.
Also considering Carlin died in 2008, before podcasting took off, it’s equally amazing and fortunate that he was so willing to share his story at length, and that he also kept so many audio and video recordings himself. Even to college kids such as Apatow, or as we learned in this doc, then high-schooler Paul Reiser’s older sister, interviewed in their family’s apartment. But after all, he was a broadcaster at heart.
And despite gaining a reputation as an angry or bitter comic in his later years, Carlin also had a big heart. A troubled one, thanks to genetics and his drug abuse, but still. In the second half of the doc, Carlin admitted (to a young Roseanne) that when you scratch under the surface of a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist. Or as he said in the opening minutes of the doc: “What they think is anger, is a real contempt for the choices that my fellow humans have made. I just feel betrayed by the bullshit in America that’s all around us.” How many more Americans feel that way in 2022, do you figure?
Because he never stopped trying to improve as a stand-up, his competitors and critics served as fuel and fodder for him to dig deeper into both his psyche and his writing. Go watch his specials from 1992 to 2008 and you’ll find him making much bigger, bolder points about humanity that still resonate and make us laugh decades later. No wonder, that even though comedians and fans often say they wish Carlin could’ve weighed in on current events, and even though he died in 2008 before Twitter took off, his old bits and opinions stand the test of time. The directors even added montages toward the end of part two of news events since his death, with Carlin’s observations serving as narration, to drive home the point.
So if there’s anything I’d quibble with, it’s the filmmakers liberally using news bulletins throughout the doc to remind us of Watergate, Vietnam and political assassinations, as if Carlin’s own material about those events wasn’t enough to ground the chronology of documenting his own life and career.
Sex and Skin: None
Parting Shot: After commenting on the criticism of his act in 1980, Carlin says it inspired him to get better at his craft, as we see a montage of handwritten scribbled notes with joke ideas and thoughts, culminating in the note: “FUCK ALL OF THEM.”

Sleeper Star: In terms of Carlin’s career, the real behind-the-scenes star might just have been the late, great TV comedy star Flip Wilson, who started the Little David Records label so comedians could remain uncensored, and who released and promoted Carlin’s “FM & AM,” “Occupation: Foole” and the seminal “Class Clown.”
But for the doc, it’s undoubtedly Patrick Carlin, George’s older brother, who provides bolts of unpredictable energy when retelling stories about their childhood, howling at memories at one point, cussing and griping at another about how George talked Patrick into going on The Ed Sullivan Show with him for a sketch in 1968, but not before they both smoked a bunch of dope first. “But that’s the kind of balls this guy had. He’d bring a f—ing Pontiac salesman up to do The Ed Sullivan Show with ya.” Patrick died last month, at 90 years old.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It feels like an homage as well as a clarion call for any comedians working today to pay attention and perhaps learn something from a dearly departed master, lest they slip into irrelevance themselves. It’ll also convince any comedy fan to immediately start clicking around HBO Max to watch one of his classic comedy specials in full.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.