“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” — George Carlin
Carlin took aim at America’s promise of prosperity in his 1997 book Brain Droppings. On page 83, the line appeared among his one-liners, addressed to readers rather than an interviewer.
Carlin grew up on West 121st Street in New York. His parents separated when he was 2 months old. His father lived until Carlin was 8, but Carlin said in his January 1982 Playboy interview, “I literally didn’t know him.”
His mother worked for an advertising executive and imagined her son in a Madison Avenue suit. He recalled resisting “her plans for my future.”
By September 1970, he’d spent 10 years building a mainstream entertainment career. At the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, his material about Vietnam and business ethics drove away half the room. That performance ended that phase of his career.
Financial trouble followed. In a September 25, 2007, Paste interview, Carlin recalled owing the IRS about $2 million by 1980, with another million added before it was over.
His manager, Jerry Hamza, helped him financially. Touring to pay the debt pushed him to develop his work.
In May 1997, Carlin’s wife of 36 years, Brenda, died in Santa Monica from liver-cancer complications. She was 57 and had worked as a line producer on his early HBO shows. That September, Carlin dated his growing emotional distance from the country to around 1989 to 1991, years before her death.
The book’s line later became the conclusion to a longer argument. On November 5, 2005, at New York’s Beacon Theatre, Carlin performed Life Is Worth Losing.
In the “Dumb Americans” routine, he described powerful owners seeking obedient workers who wouldn’t question their circumstances. He ended: “It’s called the American dream. Because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
During that show, following rehab for wine and Vicodin, Carlin also announced, “Hey, I got 341 days sober and next year’s my 50th anniversary in show business.”
In It’s Bad for Ya in 2008, he included the American Dream in “the official national bullshit story.” Carlin died of heart failure on June 22, 2008, aged 71. The words kept circulating, and a YouTube excerpt uploaded April 26, 2009, later reached about 6.2 million views.