Foray into family life
Kelly Carlin recalls the highs and lows of being the late comedian’s daughter in her one-woman show
Kelly Carlin steps out of dad’s shadow in one-woman show.
George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin, sat in the audience of her dad’s 1999HBO special, “You Are All Diseased,” and listened to the irony behind his hilarious, scorched-earth rebuke about coddling parents: “These baby boomers, these soft, fruity baby boomers, are raising an entire generation of soft, fruity kids who aren’t even allowed to have hazardous toys for Christ’s sakes. Hazardous toys, s---. Whatever happened to natural selection? Survival of the fittest? The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn’t get to growup and have kids of his own.”
The younger Carlin laughed, perhaps for a different reason than the rest of the audience: In reality, her father, a comedy iconoclast constantly on the road, and her mother, a recovering alcoholic, were the opposite of coddling.
“Dadwas a guy who watched the zeitgeist and went, ‘This is what’s pissing me off this year,’ ” Carlin, reached by phone in Los Angeles, recalls. “But he never wanted to impose his idea of what I should be onto me, even if Iwas a kid in desperate need of structure and more guidance.”
For all the cerebral humor that he blasted on HBO, comedy albums and countless TV interviews, puncturing the hypocrisies of religion and deconstructing language, Carlin rarely delved into his own dirt. The Carlin homestead brimmed with domestic spats and pervasive drug use, Carlin reveals in her recent memoir, “A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George,” and in her same-titled one-woman show, visiting the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts March 31-April 2.
Her show, as in her 318-page book, is a mash note to a provocative comedy legend and devoted family man as much as it is a desire to remove herself fromthe shadowof his celebrity. Describing the 90-minute production as a “play” and a “condensed version of the book” spanning 1960— the year George met his wife, Brenda— through her father’s death in 2008, Carlin says the show will include family photos and clips from his standup specials and appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”
“I love giving to fans the 360-degree view of George Carlin, his entire humanity, and with that comes parts where he is vulnerable,” Carlin, 52, says. “But I also lay open my vulnerability and brokenness, too.”
But the memoir, as in the show, she says, is hardly a tell-all of acrimony in the Carlin family. Much of it follows Kelly’s own drug addictions, abusive relationships and depression, but also her recovery and admiration for her father’s legacy. After George Carlin’s death, she says, a circle of comedians became her “surrogate family.” The most vocal and inspirational: Garry Shandling, who died March 24.
“Garry dropped out of college and went to L.A. to become a comedian because of my dad’s advice,” Carlin says. “And hewas there for me. He mentored me. Hewas very empathic, a deep, insightful man.”
“A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George” runs Thursday through Saturday, April 2, atKravis Center for the PerformingArts, 701Okeechobee Blvd., inWest Palm Beach. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 1:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets start at $39. Call 561-832-7469 or go toKravis.org.