George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Life's Work of a Class Clown

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 13, 2018

When George Carlin died of heart failure on June 22, 2008 (after a lifetime punctuated by heart attacks and related cardiac issues), he had spent over fifty years building a unique comic legacy. He had sold millions of books and albums, collected a shelf-load of awards and was scheduled to receive the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which he didn't survive to collect in person. He had become a beloved and respected figure despite the fact that much of his work was a relentless attack on "the establishment" in all of its manifestations, right, left and center. Carlin was a true iconoclast. No cow was too sacred to be slaughtered, and no third rail too shocking to be firmly grasped. Show Carlin a line he shouldn't cross, and he'd proudly stride across it with a defiant pronouncement that was equally profane, articulate—and funny.

Unlike notable comic contemporaries like Richard Pryor and Robin Williams, Carlin resisted the lure of the film industry, although he routinely popped up in small roles, often no more than cameos like the hitchhiker in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The occasional more substantial performance like Eddie, the gay next door neighbor in The Prince of Tides, made it clear that Carlin could have enjoyed a fruitful career as a character actor. But his main canvas remained the stage, where he could achieve the full expression of his gifts with nothing except a microphone, a rubbery face and a voice that could shift from words to sound effects and back again without missing a beat. In movies, actors never control the final product, even when they're directing, because too many other people are involved. But on stage Carlin had the final say. He wrote and performed his own material, and the room was his kingdom, whether it was an intimate club or a huge auditorium. On stage Carlin had complete freedom to illuminate life's absurdities and test the limits of everything. Perhaps his most famous routine was the intensely litigated "Seven Dirty Words", but in retrospect and in the context of the comedian's lifetime of provocation, that one was tame by comparison.

With the support of the Carlin Estate, MPI Media has assembled a ten-disc collection of the comic's work spanning the length of his career and including all fourteen of his HBO comedy specials, from On Location: George Carlin at USC in 1977 through It's Bad for Ya, taped in 2008 just a few months before his death. The material is mostly standard-definition video, which is why nine of the ten discs are DVDs. But the tenth disc is a Blu-ray derived from HBO's HD tapes of the last two specials. This review is limited to that disc, but I will list the entire contents below, because, questions of format aside, this Commemorative Collection is an extraordinary assemblage of material constituting a fitting tribute to Carlin's genius.

The two HBO specials contained on disc 10 of the Commemorative Collection are 1080p presentations of Life Is Worth Losing from 2005, recorded live at New York's Beacon Theater, and It's Bad for Ya from 2008, recorded live at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California. Both specials offer Carlin in his final incarnation as a resigned but still angry Jeremiah, both angered and amused by the foibles and failings of humanity and all too eager to list, label and satirize them. His observations on the present are scathing, his vision of the future apocalyptic, and his tone unapologetic. "Somebody's gotta think of these things", he tells the audience at one point. "Apparently I've been appointed."

As always in Carlin's routines, there's a gimlet-eyed intelligence behind the silliness and a razor-sharp focus on language and its peculiarities. Life Is Worth Losing opens with a breathless parody of contemporary corporate jargon, techno-speak and pop culture cliches. It's a monologue of incomparable craftsmanship delivered at a dizzying pace:

I'm a modern man. A man for the millenium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified, multicultural, postmodern deconstructionist—politically, anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I've been uplinked and downloaded, I've been inputted and outsourced. I know the upside of downsizing. I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife, a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond. I'm new wave but I'm old school, and my inner child is outward bound. I'm a hot-wired, heat-seaking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and biodegradable. I interface with my database and my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time I'm radioactive.

And that's just the beginning.

I remember watching these specials when HBO first broadcast them, and they had an oddly elegiac undertone even then, as if Carlin felt the end approaching (he certainly must have expected it, given his medical history). But the advancing years didn't make the former "Class Clown" any more charitable in his estimation of his fellow humans or any less energetic in his denunciation of their failings. Carlin refused to go gentle into that good night. Throughout the many phases of his long career, "gentle" was one thing he didn't do. Right to the end, he kept letting us have it, square in the kisser—and audiences loved him for it.

The following is an itemized list of the Commemorative Collection's DVD contents. (Note that they include SD versions of the two specials on the Blu-ray.) In other circumstances, these would be listed in the "Extras" section below, but I have limited that to the extras on the Blu-ray. The DVDs contain too much of the meat of this collection to be relegated to "Extras".

A booklet insert with a foreword by Patton Oswalt provides a more detailed description of the collection's contents, but it is not organized by disc.

• Disc 1 (DVD)
• On Location with George Carlin (1977)
• George Carlin: Again! (1978)


• Disc 2 (DVD)
• Carlin at Carnegie (1982)
• Carlin on Campus (1984)
• Playin' with Your Head (1986)


• Disc 3 (DVD)
• What Am I Doing in New Jersey? (1988)
• Doin' It Again (1990)
• Jammin' in New York (1992)


• Disc 4 (DVD)
• Back in Town (1996)
• George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy (1997)
• You Are All Diseased (1999)


• Disc 5 (DVD)
• Complaints & Grievances (2001)
• Life Is Worth Losing (2005)
• It's Bad for Ya (2008)


• Disc 6 (Bonus DVD)
• Carlin on CBS Talent Scouts (1963)
• Carlin on The Hollywood Palace (October 8, 1966)
• Carlin on The Hollywood Palace (December 10, 1966)
• Carlin on The Jackie Gleason Show (January 25, 1969)
• The Real George Carlin (1973)
• APT 2C: An HBO pilot filmed in 1984.
• George Carlin's Personal Favorites: A compilation shown on HBO in 1997.


• Disc 7 (Bonus DVD)
• Carlin at the Comedy Store (1999)
• Carlin's Best Stuff: A video compilation released in 1996.


• Disc 8 (Bonus DVD)
• George on George: An interview from 2003.
• Carlin at the Comedy & Magic Club (2006)
• George Carlin: Too Hip for the Room: See the description in the "Extras" section below.


• Disc 9 (Bonus CD): This audio compilation comes from a variety of sources. The first track is from an early home recording when Carlin was 20. Tracks 2-7 were recorded live at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas on September 9 and 10, 2001, as Carlin was developing his next HBO special. Track 10 was intended to be the show's ending, from which it would derive its title: I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the show was substantially rewritten and retitled Complaints and Grievances. Interviews with Carlin's long-time producer and director round out the collection.


• 1. Boston Rant 1957
• 2. Rats and Squealers
• 3. Cocaine
• 4. The Fecal Differential
• 5. Tired of Songs
• 6. The First Enema
• 7. Uncle Dave
• 8. Jerry Hamza Interview
• 9. Rocco Urbisci Interview
• 10. I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die

George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The image on HBO's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is what one would expect from live performances taped for television, which were probably recorded at 1080i and upconverted to 1080p. Much depends on the original stage lighting, which is especially bright on Life Is Worth Losing and slightly less so on It's Bad for Ya. The intensity of the stage lights in Life renders the black outfit that had become Carlin's standard onstage uniform a shade of gray, but this is inherent in the source and not a fault of the Blu-ray. (The lighting was probably designed to bring out the stage set of gray tombstones and fake white snow.) It's Bad for Ya has more noticeable detail, probably because there is more to see in the set that is designed to look like the comedian's study, with fully loaded bookshelves, a desk and a typewriter (an anachronistic touch, since Carlin had enthusiastically embraced writing on a computer, as he describes in Too Cool for the Room). The image is good enough to pick out audience members and their reactions in long shots, but director Rocco Urbisci doesn't bother with closeups of attendees. His focus remains on the performer.

MPI might have been tempted to squeeze these two hour-long programs onto a BD-25, but they've handled them properly by giving them a BD-50, with a good average bitrate of about 25 Mbps for a Life and a positively generous average of just over 32 Mbps on It's Bad for Ya.

(Note that these presentations are not identical to the versions released separately by MPI in 2008 and 2013. The previous version of It's Bad for Ya was 1080i encoded with VC-1, and the previous version of Life Is Worth Losing had lossy Dolby Digital sound.)

George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

HBO broadcast both of these specials in stereo surround, and the Blu-ray's lossless PCM 2.0 encoding reproduces the experience effectively when played back through a surround decoder. Carlin's performance remains front and center, while the audience reaction expands gently into the room. Live spoken performances rarely present much opportunity for showy sonic effects, but Life Is Worth Losing does have an interesting "bonus" effect during its closing titles, which are superimposed over time-lapse footage of rapidly moving clouds, while the sound of wind currents circulates back and forth through the surround array.

George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray contains extras that are available from the submenu for It's Bad for Ya. Both are repeats from the DVD "Bonus" discs.

• Too Hip for the Room (480i; 1.78:1; 30:45): This item also appears on DVD Disc 8. It's a half-hour selection from the Archive of American Television's three-hour interview with Carlin on December 17, 2007, while he was working on the routines that would become his last HBO special, It's Bad for Ya. The title is one of two suggested epitaphs that Carlin says he would want on his tombstone. (The other was "He was just here a minute ago.")



• Carlin on the Jackie Gleason Show, January 25, 1969 (480i; 1.33:1; 8:00): This is the comic with his early clean-cut look in a suit and tie. But listen closely to the jokes, and you can hear Carlin already occupying the outsider's territory that would soon become his permanent home.

In addition to the informative booklet mentioned in the "Feature" discussion, the George Carlin Commemorative Collection includes a full-size poster rendition of the cover art with its collage of the comedian's head shots from throughout his career.

Note that the extras score for this review refers solely to the Blu-ray. If the nine DVDs were treated as extras, the score would be a 5+++.

George Carlin Commemorative Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As should be obvious from this review, I'm a life-long Carlin fan. His extended collaboration with HBO was a rare gift to fans like me, because it allowed us to experience his ongoing exploration of human absurdity without having to score tickets to his sold-out stage performances. MPI's Commemorative Collection assembles all of that experience and extends it. In Too Hip for the Room, Carlin, then 70 years old, says that he's proud to have accomplished enough so that any history of comedy in the latter half of the 20th Century will have to include him. As these ten discs confirm, he accomplished far more than that. Highly recommended.