George Carlin acted the way he told jokes, except that on screen the joke was belief rather than doubt. He played men who trusted the nonsense they were selling, played them dead straight, and was nearly always gone before the film had found a second use for him.
Fi1m perspective
The best of him on film is a churchman unveiling a statue. In Dogma (1999), Cardinal Glick presents a Christ who winks and gives a thumbs up, and Carlin defends it to the press with the calm of a man who has never doubted a marketing plan. The stand-up spent forty years disbelieving everything anyone in a robe or a suit told him. The actor found his one good trick by turning that round: he played the man in the robe, and gave him total, untroubled faith.
Acting was always the second job. He came to it in the mid-1970s, with Car Wash (1976), then Outrageous Fortune (1987), then Rufus in the Bill & Ted films (1989, 1991), the time-travelling mentor who introduced him to an audience too young for his routines. The Prince of Tides (1991) gave him a straight drama; Dogma gave him Kevin Smith, who used him three times and understood what he was for; Jersey Girl (2004) gave him one of his more substantial later parts, and Cars (2006) gave him a voice. The parts were small and often close to cameos, and he did not seem to mind. He had another stage.
The Glick scene made us laugh harder than anything else Smith wrote in that film, and the reason is that Carlin does not wink. The satire is all in the casting: a man famous for mocking the church, in the vestments, sincerely modernising Our Lord. Anyone else would have let us see the comedian under the costume. He lets the cardinal be a cardinal and the joke does the rest.
The Prince of Tides is the odd one out and the one he seemed to care about most. As Eddie Detreville, the neighbour who lightens a heavy film, he is comic relief in Barbra Streisand's earnest melodrama, and he told the New York Times in 1992: "Something happened in me. I had a sense of acceptance, that I belonged, that I had something to offer." Our own review found room for Nick Nolte and none for him, which is honest about the size of the part rather than the quality of the work. It is a decent turn in a soft film, and it is over quickly.
So the recommendation is narrow. See Dogma for the cardinal, and see it knowing the film around him is a 130-minute errand that keeps stopping for lectures. The rest of his screen career is a man visiting other people's films for a scene or two, welcome every time and never asked to stay. Smith worked out that the funniest thing you could do with George Carlin was put him in charge of something. Nobody else thought to.
Biography
George Denis Patrick Carlin (12 May 1937 – 22 June 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, actor and author. He began his career in the 1950s and became known for observational and satirical routines on language, religion and politics.
Carlin appeared in films including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) as Rufus, Dogma (1999) as Cardinal Glick, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Jersey Girl (2004). He also provided voice work for The Simpsons and Cars (2006).
He hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and released fourteen HBO stand-up specials. Carlin received five Grammy Awards for comedy albums and was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2008.
