I should have written about George Carlin yesterday, but each time I tried, I was too sad to keep going.

So, history will record that George Carlin's last public performance turned out to be in Las Vegas on June 15, 2008, at the off-Strip casino Orleans. Vegas was a town he told me he hated, filled with audiences he loathed: "It is the most dispiriting, soul-deadening city on earth."  We agreed to disagree. After all, to Carlin, Vegas was the town that fired him again and again, whereas to me Vegas is the town that gave me the chance to speak to him at length and see him perform.

I had hoped to transcribe my interview with Carlin for you here, but that turned out to be impossible, totally impossible, because of his great gift for colorful language. In writing up the conversation, I realized that because there are so many more than seven words you can't write for the L.A. Times I would be doing the recently departed a huge disservice to obliterate and edit out his constant use of what we call obscenities. And Carlin was very exact about his words. He is the only comedian I have ever seen perform in Vegas using written notes. As he had told me and other interviewers, he had come to see himself as a writer who performed his own material rather than as a comic.

When I saw him do stand-up in 2007, his first run at the Orleans (pictured above), he was still able to offend some audience members enough that they walked out early in the show. Carlin expected, accepted and encouraged that in Vegas. He started off with hard material (I think a joke about kiddie porn when I saw him) to train his audiences here:

“Las Vegas provides something for me. In other places like Pittsburgh you can sell out two nights in nice-sized halls and you get the hard-core George Carlin fans, but then, to be crass, you need to give the market a rest for a couple of years. The same is true of Dallas and Portland and Seattle or wherever. But for a person who develops the material out there on the stage into these more-permanent forms like DVD, it is necessary for me to get the exercise on stage. So, Las Vegas provides an easy place to go to where the audience keeps changing. You don't tap it out. But the price I pay for that is the audiences are not the best in Vegas. In Pittsburgh, I get the hard-core fans who know what I am about. In Las Vegas often I get people who saw me on 'Leno' or got a coupon. It doesn't work easily. Each night [in Vegas] I have to find out how they are going to be and I have to train them."

I love the idea of training an audience. Vegas, of course, works better at pandering and fulfilling the needs of audiences. As a result, Carlin was fired in Vegas a lot over the decades: for using unacceptable language back in the day at the Frontier to getting dismissed a few years ago from the MGM Grand for being, in his words, "too dark." He thought that was very funny and typical of Vegas.

But the other side of Vegas is that Carlin never lacked for work here: There was always another resort willing to hire him. Of course, it was being fired in Vegas that really fueled Carlin's creativity. In fact, he had the epiphany of his career on a Vegas stage when he went from being a suit-wearing mainstream comic to the George Carlin that could still offend decades later: "The critical crossroads was being fired by Vegas. It was like getting the signal, 'Go ahead, George, take a leap.' "

And leap he did into a territory of comedy where he found a unique voice that will continue to entertain, challenge and stimulate generations of new fans. So, to all the entertainment directors in town, present and past, who fired George Carlin, thank you. You helped create one of the great comic talents of all time. I would thank each of you jerks (sorry, George, the best I could do!) by name, but unlike with George Carlin, history hasn't bothered to remember your names.

(Photo by Sarah Gerke)