George Carlin Abandoned Dark Comedy Special After 9/11

Joe Rogan couldn’t believe it when he heard about George Carlin’s rant. “He must have woken up the morning of September 11th and gone, ‘Did I manifest this?’

He was reacting to a story Anthony Jeselnik told on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast a few years back. While Jeselnik got some crucial details wrong, the essentials were right. On September 9 and 10, 2001, Carlin performed shows at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, featuring material for an upcoming HBO special scheduled for November. The tentative title: I Kinda Like It When A Lot of People Die.

Carlin had an extended bit at the end of the show about his love for “big, fatal disasters with lots of dead people.” Granted, Carlin was mostly talking about natural disasters, but the morbidly black humor would have been just as ugly in the wake of 9/11. “You know what’s the best thing I can hear on television? ‘We interrupt this program…,’” he joked. “You know the worst thing I can hear? ‘No one was hurt.’ I’m always rooting for a really high death toll.”

You think those jokes were eerily prescient? That same set featured punchlines about Osama bin Laden and an exploding airplane. On the latter count, Carlin may have told the world’s most unsettling fart joke: “These planes get flying so fast that all the most vicious, lethal, volatile, flammable, unstable farts get pushed toward the back of the airplane, where they begin to build up pressure. And they build, and they build, and they build until they reach critical fart density — C.F.D. — and they continue to build throughout the flight, until finally some kid turns on a Game Boy and boom! The whole back end of the plane blows off. And you know who gets blamed? Osama bin Laden. Terrorists get blamed for these explosions that are nothing more than cabbage-fart detonations.”

You can understand why HBO didn’t want to air those particular gags two months after the actual terrorist attacks. The material was too dark even for Carlin, who abandoned the closing bit behind I Kinda Like It When A Lot of People Die, wrote a bunch of new jokes, and instead recorded a different special in November, Complaints and Grievances. 

Carlin did briefly address 9/11 in that special, an elephant in the room he believed he had to acknowledge early to get it out of the way. “Otherwise,” he said sarcastically, “the terrorists win.” It was still Carlin in eff-you mode, noting that current circumstances forced people to cozy up to “people you don’t like, people you don’t trust, people you don’t respect.” In his case, that was the United States government.

Jeselnik told Rogan that Carlin had filmed the special in Vegas, but the tapes were destroyed. Nope and nope. There was no film crew present, but Carlin did make an audio recording of his September 9th and 10th sets. The cassettes were later discovered by his daughter, Kelly, years after George’s death in 2008. Fifteen years after 9/11, she released I Kinda Like It When A Lot of People Die, the last of Carlin’s career. 

Comedian Lewis Black, no stranger to dark comedy, wrote the liner notes for the posthumous album. “It’s George Carlin opening a few more doors for us to walk through with him.”