George Carlin

George Carlin, featured in the two-part HBO documentary 'George Carlin's American Dream.' (CNN) George Carlin rose to prominence as a ...

As noted, Carlin's mastery of the standup craft has resonated across decades, and continues to do so as news events prompt admirers to quote and recirculate his old routines. As Stephen Colbert notes, Carlin was in many respects the Beatles of comedy. "I wanted to be just like him, getting every word in the right spot," Jerry Seinfeld says.

This four-hour documentary series is more than just a love letter to a comedy icon.

Apatow and Bonifiglio land a number of comedy luminaries to speak on Carlin’s brilliance, including Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Patton Oswalt, Jerry Seinfeld, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart. The team behind this project are sharp interviewers and these comedy geniuses want to talk about Carlin. It’s remarkable how “George Carlin’s American Dream” digs into why Carlin was so smart and so talented and somehow avoids hagiography. Some of his best bits have the wordplay of poetry or philosophy, and it’s fascinating to see him develop this brand from out of those early variety show days all the way through his HBO masterpieces. Drugs opened his mind to the world and a true love for semantics would shape the next phase of his career. For the first hour or so of “George Carlin’s American Dream,” Apatow and Bonifiglio largely let Carlin speak for himself. What “George Carlin’s American Dream” really captures is how much its subject was willing to shift and change, never just to sell tickets but to figure out what mattered to him as an artist. The truth captured in HBO’s excellent “George Carlin’s American Dream” is that everyone can appreciate this man’s genius.

George Carlin's American Dream, which debuts Friday on HBO, shows how the comedian's persona sharpened over the years, from genial jokester to hardened ...

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“The way George Carlin looked at the world and broke it down taught so many of us how to be comedians,” said Judd Apatow. “He injected the software into our ...

“Any time when he was interviewed, whether it was the bigger interviews or even the small interviews with college kids, he would reveal something about his heart or his thinking or his intention,” she said. The late stand-up went viral earlier this month thanks to a widely shared routine about abortion from his 1996 HBO special “Back In Town.” “It’s extraordinary that his material actually created a new category of speech in our country,” said Bonfiglio. We are all humans here trying to figure out our way,” said Kelly Carlin, who co-executive produced the series. And it went from that to getting paid almost nothing in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village.” That was George Carlin’s signature “Class Clown.”