Memoir 'Last Words' is pure George Carlin

You could consider George Carlin's Last Words, a 20-some-years-in-the-making memoir he called a "sortabiography," as the comic genius's answer to Michael Jackson's This Is It.

Told in his own voice and based mainly on taped interviews with humorist and co-author Tony Hendra, this posthumous work by the cranky provocateur who dared us to laugh and think at the same time is as much a moving tribute as it is a taste of what could have been.

Carlin had planned to turn the first few lively chapters, about his colorful childhood spent among fellow hooligans in a rough Irish Catholic neighborhood in New York nicknamed "White Harlem," into a Broadway show.

Not going to happen.

But instead of ignoring the subject's odd quirks, as the Jackson concert film does, Carlin's book unflinchingly wallows in his personal flaws and failures even as he tracks the evolution of his verbally propelled humor and rise from wiseguy DJ to lionized social commentator.

The wiry fellow whose idol was comedy's most infamous martyr, Lenny Bruce, might have spent much of his career assuming the guise of a counter-cultural rebel with greasy ponytail, dirty jeans and filthier mouth. But at his core, Carlin was that most American of clichs: a survivor who succeeded by dint of sheer hard work.

After three heart attacks, numerous close-call surgeries, a 36-year marriage that redefines the word "rocky" and a world-class struggle with addictions, he continued to hone his art both on the road and in his popular HBO live-concert specials right up until his death last year at age 71. Even healthy, sober comics rarely stay relevant that long.

This look back is too honest, too personal and, in some ways, too sad, given that its writer had so much more to say to us, to be as funny as any of Carlin's classic routines. Nor does it provide much true psychological insight on why he was an anal-retentive, authority-hating loner who shunned religion, disliked kids and risked losing his brilliant mind with every guzzle of beer, snort of cocaine or puff of pot.

His master manipulator of a mother and his drunken, abusive father, however, who split when he was a baby but not before scarring the psyche of his beloved older brother, Patrick, would be a good place to start.

Yet Mother Mary, as Carlin calls her, gave him the greatest gift of all: a reverence for language. He remembers how she once told him and his brother about being forced to share a bus seat with a mountain-sized German man or "Hun," as she so impolitely described him.

"He was taking up far too much room," she said. "So I took out my hatpin and showed it to him and said: 'Condense yourself!' "

A satisfying punchline just like Last Words.