Kelly Carlin, daughter of the late comedian George Carlin, is mystified that Donald Trump followers and right-wingers have tried to claim her dad as one of their own.
“Before he died in 2008, and Hillary was running, my dad was like, ‘You know, it’ll be good. Hillary [Clinton] will get in there and she’ll get some people some jobs.’ I mean, of course he leaned that direction. My dad was a lifelong New Yorker and lifelong New Yorkers hate Donald Trump,” she says with a laugh on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal podcast. “It just always shocks me when these Trumpers wanna claim him.”
Kelly came on the show with comedian and director Judd Apatow to talk to hosts Andy Levy and Molly Jong-Fast about her dad and about Apatow’s upcoming George Carlin documentary on HBO, which Apatow says “terrified” him at first.
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“I listened to his albums when I was a little kid, and I feel like he broke things down in such a specific way and looked at the world as such a critical thinker that it installs the software in your mind of how to write jokes and how to think and how to look at things. And I really didn't wanna screw up a documentary about his life,” says Apatow.
Andy has seen the documentary and assures him he didn’t.
“It just felt honest. It just felt like this was George Carlin,” he says.
“I always think that what he was trying to tell people was that financial interests want the country to be fighting. That’s how they steal all the money,” adds Apatow. “And I also think that he thought that the system was rigged, that dark money controls who is elected. All of these issues that are prominent these days, whether it’s abortion, gay rights, or trans rights, it’s Republicans trying to get people worked up so they can stay in power. When Elon Musk says ‘I'm a Republican’ he’s not worried about people having abortions, he’s not anti-gay rights, he only cares about his money.”
“We called [his comedy] dark or angry, but he clearly saw where the ship was sailing,” Kelly says of her dad’s political commentary. That’s where her belief that he would not side with Republicans comes in.
“The far right would like to say that they're the minority now, but [George Carlin] would roll his eyes, because we know where all the wealth and the power is. That was the core, the deepest, deepest core of my father’s moral center from day one of his life,” adds Kelly.
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