Louis CK on how George Carlin inspired him
"He gave me the courage to throw everything away and start over again."
Back in 2010, Louis CK spoke at a tribute to George Carlin and explained how Carlin had inspired him.
Every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw it away? It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”
But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone, and then you’re just going into just weird shit, and eventually you get to your balls...
It’s a process that I watched him do my whole life, and I started to try to do it and I started to think, “What do I—because he says whatever he wants. What do I really want to say that I’m afraid to say?” At the time I was a father. I am still a father. But at the time—I had started out, I didn’t take off yet, the jury’s out, my oldest is eight. I can still split. So far I’m still there. I was having a hard time being a father, and I wanted to say it onstage. One night, just I thought, okay, “forget all the old jokes, I’m going to start again, “and I thought of the first thing, “I can’t have sex with my wife, because we have a baby, and our baby’s a fucking asshole,” it was just what I was feeling and I said it and the audience went “whoa” and I thought, “Oh, I’m somewhere new now.” And I said something like, “I never used to get babies in the garbage, but now I understand it,” and they did that, and I thought, I’d rather have that than the shit tepid laughter for my fifteen-year-old jokes, so I started going down this road and he was always the beacon for me, always, this guy, he always gave me the courage…
I’m very proud to do what George did. I know I’m supposed to close funny, but I just—I’m not good at doing stuff that isn’t my act, so I’m sorry. But he was a great man, and anything that ever happens to me that’s good is due to this guy and I can tell you because I do what he did, that it was really hard to say the shit that he did, and that it took a lot of courage, it was difficult.