When George Carlin died in 2008, Kelly Carlin, his only child, lost a father, but gained a family—of comedians, all of them admirers of her dad. Now she, in part through their reverence for him and encouragement of her, has found the way to what her father would call her “true self.” Her first book, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George, a memoir published September 15, chronicles her journey.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Kelly gets it and she’s way ahead of you: “A privileged, spoiled young woman who . . . never achieved anything without her daddy . . . a Hollywood cliché,” she describes herself in the book at one low point.
Kelly accepts her role as “a receptacle for the love people have for my dad” but has also found her creative voice, in a process that roughly parallels George Carlin’s own creative evolution from the mainstream comic loved by Middle America for such routines as Carlin as “the hippy-dippy weatherman” to long-haired counterculture contrarian, speaker of the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Today, Carlin hosts Sirius XM’s The Kelly Carlin Show and appears on the network’s Carlin’s Corner channel, devoted to George; she also has a podcast on Kevin Smith’s Smodcast network, Waking from the American Dream, a more freewheeling spiritual discussion. “The podcast is where I found my voice,” she said.
A Carlin Home Companion is, to quote one of her father’s best routines, a place for her stuff. “It’s about a family, a father-daughter relationship, but ultimately the story is about me finding my way,” she said. It may not be common knowledge that George Carlin had a daughter. Unlike, say, Robin Williams, Ray Romano, or Louis CK, he did not draw on his experiences as a parent in his comedy. He reserved his views on contemporary parenthood for his scorched-earth “fuck the children” rant in his You Are All Diseased.
Specific references to Kelly were rare. He mentions “my little girl” on his Grammy-winning 1972 FM & AM album in the routine, “Shoot.” And once, on The Tonight Show, he mentioned to host Jay Leno how proud he was after she earned her master’s degree in psychology. “I nearly fell out of bed,” Kelly recalled in a phone interview.
So this is not a “Georgie Dearest” kind of book. “When the MacKenzie Phillips memoir [which revealed the actress’s incestuous relationship with her musician father, John] came out, I thought if that’s the bar to get published, I’m doomed,” Kelly said.
Guiding the way were comedians who contacted her after George died of heart failure at the age of 71. Up until that time, she did not know many. Her father, she said, “didn’t socialize with anyone in Hollywood. In the late 60s and the early 70s, I think my mother threw (him) maybe four or five birthday parties. I’m sure he socialized in the clubs, but my dad was very much a loner. He worked all the time. If he was home, he was writing. All of his best friends were from the neighborhood where he grew up.”
One of the comedians who reached out to her was Lewis Black, who invited her and her husband and writing partner, Bob McCall, aboard a comedy cruise along with other stand-ups. He asked if she would be willing to share some of her family stories as part of the entertainment. For a free seven-day cruise in the Caribbean, Kelly was on board.
“I didn’t really prepare,” she said. “I brought some best-of DVDs of my dad and I had a list of stories. I threw it all together the morning of. I went up there and I completely winged it. Seventy-five minutes later, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”
Audience members told her she had the makings of something she could perform, but Kelly was conflicted about the prospect of taking this embryonic show on the road. “People will think I’m riding on his coattails,” she recalled of her resistance. “What I always say about my show is they come for the George, but they stay for the Kelly.”
The book, unlike her one-woman show, which shares the title of her memoir and which she has performed over the past four years, is a more expansive director’s cut of Kelly’s life. She candidly details her mother’s substance abuse and her own aimlessness and bouts with drugs, as well as a tumultuous first marriage to an abusive husband.
“More than anything for me, I really felt like I had a great survivor’s story,” she said. “When you’re the kid of someone everyone knows; when you’re sitting backstage and people are chanting your dad’s name, there is something about the importance of telling my story out loud. I feel like my business is finished with this book. I really feel so done with my origin story.”
As for her father, whose “seven words” recently inspired its own Cards Against Humanity edition, Kelly said, “He will be relevant for a long time. My dad used to say that when you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show; when you’re born in America, you get a front row seat. And some of us get to sit and take notes and talk about the freak show.”
Which is one of the things she misses most; what her father would have made of current events: the upcoming presidential race, Black Lives Matter, the rise in gun violence. “He died June 22, 2008,” she said. “Sarah Palin hadn’t gotten in the [presidential] race yet. When she got in the race, I thought, How dare he leave us? We need to know how to deal with this.”
