40 Years of Comedy

If you queue up this hour expecting a traditional set, the format might throw you. Rather than a standard performance, the television broadcast is a hybrid project. The front half features a tight 27 minutes of stand-up where George Carlin targets advertising culture, pet ownership, and the everyday lies holding society together. Then, he trades the microphone for an armchair to sit down with a young Jon Stewart.

Filmed live at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado, for the 1997 US Comedy Arts Festival, the project serves as his tenth HBO release. The Stewart interview covers his upbringing and early days in the business, interspersed with archive clips from his previous decades on stage.

The year was a commercial peak for the working comic—his first hardcover book, Brain Droppings, was on its way to a forty-week run on the New York Times bestseller list. The Aspen performance picked up two CableACE awards and a pair of Emmy nominations, even if diehard fans often asterisk it in rankings due to the abbreviated stand-up set.