Shorty before his death last year, come­dian George Car­lin gave what was to become his last wide-ranging inter­view—with Jay Dixit, senior edi­tor of Psy­chol­ogy Today.

Car­lin dis­cusses many things in this inter­view; from detail­ing his method for com­ing up with mate­r­ial to his use of tech­nol­ogy and this on the advan­tages of being an older comedian:

A 20-year-old has a lim­ited amount of data they’ve expe­ri­enced, either see­ing or lis­ten­ing to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer stor­age area; the matrix inside is more tex­tured, and has more con­tours to it. So, obser­va­tions made by a 20-year-old are com­pared against a data set that is incom­plete. Obser­va­tions made by a 60-year-old are com­pared against a much richer data set. And the obser­va­tions have more res­o­nance, they’re richer.

[…] Now at this age, I have a net­work of knowl­edge and data and obser­va­tions and feel­ings and val­ues and eval­u­a­tions in me that do things auto­mat­i­cally. And then when I sit down to con­sciously write, that’s when I bring the crafts­man­ship. That’s when I pull every­thing together and say, how can I best express that? And then as you write, you find more, ’cause the mind is look­ing for fur­ther con­nec­tions. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writ­ing is the really won­der­ful part. A lot of this is dis­cov­ery. A lot of things are lying around wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered and that’s our job; to just notice them and bring them to life.

Thanks, Andy