Art Imitates A Strange Life - George Carlin's

For a comedian who first made his mark doing hippie schtick, George Carlin is an old-fashioned sentimentalist. How much so? For the Manhattan-bar locale of "The George Carlin Show" on Fox, he chose not a made-up name, but the real one from a bar of his past.

"The Moylan Tavern," Carlin, 56, remembers somberly. "It was where I saw Oswald shot. It was where I headed during the blackout. The Moylan," he says, "is where I came of age." A piece of New York history, it was a venerable Irish bar on upper Broadway from Prohibition's repeal to the 1970s. The founders, Frank and Winnie McDonagh, eventually sold it to one Jimmy Donahue, whose legacy lives in the name of the sitcom's bartender: Jack Donahue.

And while the studio set doesn't physically re-create the Moylan, Carlin says, it does copy another famed upper-Broadway bar, "Cannon's - where my father used to drink."

If all that's not sentimental enough, the name of Carlin's own character - a beat New York cabbie, a bitter and less burnt-out version of Reverend Jim from "Taxi" - is O'Grady. "That was my grandmother's maiden name," Carlin says. "They'd dropped the `O' in the ocean on the way here, and became just Grady; I added it back for sentiment."

Carlin - the grizzled stand-up star, the time-traveling Rufus of the "Bill & Ted" movies and the current Mr. Conductor on the PBS children's series "Shining Time Station" - seems, indeed, much less the aging hippie than one would suspect from his act. The better encapsulation might be to call him, with affection, an aging beatnik - much like his character on the show.

His George O'Grady is a hard-case softie, an angry and vocal nonconformist who nonetheless adopts a dog in the premiere - naming him Miles, after jazz great Miles Davis. The guy is a Kerouac-era beat who, to his horror, lived through the explosive '60s, the insipid '70s and the morally bankrupt '80s. And the real-life George can sound very much like the fictional one.

"I quit high school after one year," Carlin relates, "because I didn't need what they were doing to me. I quit my religion even before that, and all this American okey-doke, this American myth that everyone tries to lay on you. That's what this character on the show is about - he's anti-authoritarian, an outsider, at odds with the world, outspoken, opinionated, a loner. He's what I would've been," Carlin believes, "had I stayed in the neighborhood."

Which doesn't mean he disliked growing up in Manhattan's Morningside Heights, near Columbia University. "I loved it," he says sincerely. "That whole Upper West Side - some of the best-integrated, and for that reason most interesting, neighborhoods in the world. But," he says, "we all have multiple possibilities, and one of mine would've been to stay and be the same person as far as my verbal skills are concerned, yet with no ambition to get into entertainment - just a guy who goes from job to job in a slightly descending arc because of his inability to mesh with structure and order."

Carlin meshed. After leaving school, he joined the Air Force and became a part-time disc jockey at radio station KJOE in Shreveport, La. "The Air Force," he says, "was happy to have me doing something downtown that shed a good light on airmen, as opposed to spreading social diseases and knocking up women. My thinking was, if I became a DJ, I could become a comedian; if I could become a comedian, I could become an actor."

After stints in Boston and Fort Worth, Texas, Carlin teamed with another would-be comic, radio newscaster Jack Burns (later of the comedy duo Burns & Schreiber) and worked for two years as Burns & Carlin. After they broke up in 1962, Carlin went on to solo success with such characters as the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, and such routines as "the seven words you can't say" on radio or TV (at least until cable and "NYPD Blue").

Yet while the comedy career generally thrived, acting proved more sporadic. Carlin guested on some first-season episodes of "That Girl" as agent George Lester, and did good work in a handful of films including "Outrageous Fortune" (1987), "The Prince of Tides" (1991) and the two "Bill & Ted" movies.

"The latter '70s and early '80s for me were periods of retreating and recovering from things like an IRS debt of $3 million, two heart attacks, a car accident, a career in a little bit of drift," he reflects. "My wife got over her alcohol and drug addiction; I put my own habits aside one by one."

Carlin and wife Brenda have been married 32 years; they have a daughter, Kelly, 30. And family concerns are the reason, he says, for finally doing a sitcom after resisting for years.

"I owe it to myself and my wife to try to hit a home run and give us real security," he says, "so I don't have to go out on the road 120 days a year out of necessity."