Why George Carlin Never Wanted to Be Compared to Lenny Bruce

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George Carlin was discovered by Lenny Bruce.

That comedy nugget is technically true, but of course, there’s more to it than that. Bruce actually jump-started the comedy team of Burns and Carlin, Carlin’s partnership with his radio co-host Jack Burns. “Our manager Murray Becker knew Lenny from the Navy, and I used to do an impression of Lenny in the act. So he brought Lenny in to see the impression but hoping Lenny would like (the rest of the act),” Carlin told WFMU’s Kliph Nesteroff. “Lenny called GAC the next day, that was a big agency in that day, like William Morris. The president of GAC signed us the next day. We got a telegram. They want to sign us based on Lenny Bruce’s reaction. And that started us, and that started my own career.”

But while The New York Times called Carlin “an heir of Lenny Bruce” in Carlin’s obituary — and Bruce himself called Carlin one of his spiritual successors — it was a comparison that made the comic uncomfortable. “Lenny told that to a lot of people,” Carlin told Playboy. “But he never said it to me, and I didn’t hear it until years later. Which is probably fortunate. It’s difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too.”

While Bruce may not have personally anointed Carlin, he surely heard the comparisons. The two comics seemed karmically linked — Carlin was in the crowd the night Bruce was famously arrested at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago. When Carlin refused to show police officers his ID, he was thrown in the back of the same paddy wagon as Bruce. 

The ferocity with which both comics fought for unfettered speech would have connected the two comics even if they’d never met. But “those comparisons are unfair to both of us,” Carlin said in his Playboy interview. “Look, I was a fan of Lenny’s. He made me laugh, sure, but more often he made me say, ‘Fuckin’ A; why didn’t I think of that?’ He opened up channels in my head. His genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry.”

Forgive us if that description doesn’t sound like Carlin himself, but the comic wasn’t having it. “I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right,” he said. “But I’m not in a league with Lenny, certainly not in terms of social commentary. So when people give me this bullshit, ‘Well, I guess you’re sort of, uh, imitating Lenny Bruce,’ I just say, ‘Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear it.’ I want to be known for what I do best.”