George Carlin: I would see Danny Kaye.  And, especially in the group of movies around 1947, when I was ten.  And I can see now, if I look back at things that were popular in 1947, that was my critical year, that was tenth—the year of my tenth birthday.  That was the year that songs were on the hit parade I’ve looked back that I know inspired me.  “Mañana.”  May have been a little bit later, fifth grade, eleven years old, so that’s the next year.  I sang “Mañana” at school.  Danny Kaye, in 1947 I believe was ‘Kid from Brooklyn,’ was one of the one’s where he does song and—songs and dance and that incredible verbal facility for fast talking and complicated lyrics.  And I would see at the end of the movie, when the credits would roll, that the lyrics and so forth the songs were by Sylvia Fine.  I didn’t know she was his wife.  And I would write to MGM, to Sylvia Fine, and ask for the words to some of these things. [sings a fast melody]  And I forget them now.  I know them when I see the movies again, but I don’t recall them now.  And I never got an answer, of course.  And it was a mystery to me.  But I—I liked him and wanted to emulate him.  And I never used really the words ‘hero’ or—or any of that kind of stuff.  But he was kind of an ideal to shoot for.  He did things I wanted to do: he made funny faces, he made funny voices, and he was incredibly facile in verbally.  So—I think I used that right—so, I wanted to be like Danny Kaye.  And I called that being an actor at the time, that time of my life that meant ‘actor.’  The word ‘comedian’ didn’t—hadn’t really gelled yet in my mind firmly.

George Carlin: Well, I had always—I was a disc jockey.  I was in Shreveport Louisana, I had—I was out of the Air Force living with a roommate in an apartment building.  He worked at one radio station, I worked at another.  And he came home one night and said, “Man, I heard about this guy Lenny Bruce, you know.”  And I was a big fan of comedy and I knew that was my next step, “I’ll get out of radio, I’ll be a comic.”  And I liked—let’s see, that would have been nineteen fift—hold on for me a second here.  That would have been 1958 or nine.  So some of that ferment was, was begun, had begun and I was—I guess I knew some, about some of it.  But he said “Lenny Bruce,” and I didn’t know anything about Lenny Bruce.  And he got the album, “Interviews of Our Time,” on Fantasy Records, it was a combination—Henry Jacobs did the album and Lenny was on it, in a few performance pieces.  And then there were these other things like an interview with Sheldom Stein, which is a mock-academic who talks about the connection between the wandering Jew and Bahama Mama, which is the mother myth of the Bahamian ind—you know, just wonderful stuff.  But the whole album wasn’t a Lenny Bruce album, but it kinda was.

And I heard things he did.  And then came the “Sick” album.  “The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce,” I think that was second.  And we got that.  And what it did for me was this; it let me know that [pause] there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in a self-expression.