by Would you settle for Bernie Mac, Redd Foxx, Dean Martin and Andy Kaufman?
The Hollywood Reporter reported tonight that a hologram of the late, great George Carlin would perform as a key piece of the soon-to-open National Comedy Center museum in Jamestown, N.Y., quoting the museum’s chief curator, The Comedians author Kliph Nesteroff.
Nesteroff told THR:
“The main gimmick to bring people to Jamestown — which you may imagine is not an easy thing to convince people to do — is the George Carlin hologram. So they’re building this fake comedy club in one corner and George will be onstage, performing like old times. The Carlin estate is partly sponsoring the museum, and the museum has just acquired Carlin’s archives — he’s the credibility here. People have tried to do comedy museums before and failed. When you hear “comedy museum” and you’re a comedian, your first thought isn’t, “Oh, that’s cool,” it’s “Oh, that sounds terrible.” But in the comedy community, there are very few who would say that weren’t influenced by George Carlin. It helps.”
That’s news to Kelly Carlin, who just donated her father’s collection to the center for its museum And who told me three weeks ago at the special event that no way would her father be performing as a hologram in the museum’s planned simulation of a comedy club. Maybe other holograms could do it. But not her dad’s.
“It’s just too creepy,” Kelly Carlin told me on May 10.
I asked her tonight if she’d changed her mind.
“I hadn’t,” Carlin replied. “The story is wrong.”
So don’t believe the umpteen websites that’ll be trumpeting the Carlin hologram “news” tonight and tomorrow.
The National Comedy Center did enter into a deal with Hologram USA last year, though, and the company’s active roster does include Bernie Mac, Dean Martin, Redd Foxx, and one Andy Kaufman. Dead or alive.
