George Carlin and Billy Crystal were supposed to share the stage with each other for the first time in 1975, when Carlin hosted the debut episode of Saturday Night Live. Crystal was scheduled to perform during the inaugural broadcast, but his piece ran a little long and was cut. “It was one of the hardest nights in my young career,” Crystal told Hoda Kotb in 2024. “The thing about it was George Carlin was the host, and on my script, the page says, ‘George Carlin introduces Billy Crystal.’ His line was, ‘People wanna know where the young comics are coming from—Billy Crystal is coming from over there!’ Well, the page in the script says, ‘Monologue to come,’ and it’s a blank page. So it never came!”
Carlin returned to host SNL in 1984, and by then, Crystal had joined the show as a regular cast member. This time around, Carlin was determined to appear in sketches, rather than just do stand-up. He worked with Crystal twice that night, first in a talk show segment where Crystal hosted a panel of guests that included Carlin as a fireman, Martin Short as an albino lounge singer, and Christopher Guest as a ventriloquist named Señor Cosa.
Later on, Carlin and Crystal were paired up for a sketch in which Carlin played Crystal’s father. Carlin’s character is a veteran cop who wants his son, Bobby (Crystal), to follow in his footsteps, but Bobby doesn’t think he’s cut out for the job. After all, he explains, in the midterm exams, he finished 115th—out of 115. When Bobby accidentally shoots himself toward the end of the sketch, he tells his father, “Would you call the ambulance? It’s 811!” “It’s 911!” Carlin barks at him:
Reflecting on the show in his posthumous memoir, Last Words, Carlin felt that he’d done a really good job in the sketches. Martin Short even came up to him at the cast party afterward and told him he was “terrific.” Carlin then went over to Crystal and said, “So long, man. The sketch went nice, didn’t it?” Knowing Crystal was planning to leave SNL for the movies the following year, Carlin added, “Maybe we’ll get to do a movie together one day.”
Crystal’s reaction to the comment was anything but enthusiastic. “And he gave me this look as if I was some kind of a bug. Like, ‘Oh yeah? That certainly doesn’t work into my plans,’” Carlin remembered. Because of that, Carlin reveled in the fact that he landed a substantial role in a movie before Crystal did—in 1987’s Outrageous Fortune—and that he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame first. And although Carlin agreed to perform at a couple of the Comic Relief fundraisers Crystal co-hosted years later, he never forgot the lukewarm response he received from Crystal back in 1984.
“Still, for that one moment, f–k him,” Carlin wrote, in conclusion.
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