After five decades in the comic biz - 50 years of cussing and cracking on anything anyone could possibly hold sacred - George Carlin is still pissed off.

Just don't call him a cynic.

Realist, yes.

Skeptic, sure.

Even "disappointed idealist."

"Cynic is a different word and I don't cop to it," he says.

The fast-talking New Yorker who force-fed us the classic "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," still logs over 80 to 90 shows a year.

There's no daily ritual at the ripe curmudgeonly age of 71: "Every day's an adlib."

Along the way, he discovered he's a writer and not just an entertainer. "And an artist is never finished," he says.

He rags on politics as "ephemeral" comic fodder and then later brings up Barack Obama without any prompting.

A few heart attacks later, he doesn't drink any more; doesn't miss gritting his teeth, high on cocaine on "Saturday Night Live" back in the '70s.

When Carlin settles in at the Wells Fargo Center Feb 29 and Mar. 1, it will go down as the first ever local performance broadcast live on TV around the world from the Wine Country.

And it marks his record 14th HBO special.

(Tip: Be on the look out for a few dozen standing-room-only tickets yet to be released).

Here's what he has to say about peace, love and understanding:

Q: Is a live broadcast scary anymore?

A: No, no, no. It's exciting. I still get a tingle. There's a kind of immediacy. This is it. I remember when I used to do Ed Sullivan, I got nervous because those people didn't know about me. They didn't care about me. They didn't give a s---t. With these (HBO) shows, I got all my own people in the audience. I know they've come to see me and they like what they do.

Q: Give me a sense of how nervous you'd get on Ed Sullivan - you'd hurl
backstage before the show?

A: No, but I just had that terrible knot, that terrible fear. I did 11 of them and after the first two or three, I had run out of material and I was basically writing for the Ed Sullivan show. It wasn't up to the standard that the other stuff was. I knew that and I also knew the audience didn't know who I was and didn't care. I was trying to be, at least a little bit, brash and different and hip. This was in my pre-beard days, my pre-long hair days. I knew at some level in my gut that I was out of place and I was doing the wrong thing.

Q: The theme this time around is - things that are bad for you?

A: "It's All Bulls--t and It's Bad for You" - but we don't put that in the titles because they don't wanna put that on a poster. It's about America and how full of s---t this country is.

Q: Any politics?

A: It's too ephemeral. It's too perishable. It comes and goes. I don't wanna write things I have to throw out a month later. You know what - most topical humor is very shallow and I'm not interested in it. I don't care for it and I don't listen to it.

Q: It's too easy?

A: They're sitting ducks. I like coming in the side door on this country - the side window. I like to take things that are going to be true 10-20 years from now and were true 10-20 years ago. And talk about how f----ed up we are. I like pointing out how badly we're doing. That's my job.

Q: How about religion?

A: Religion, government, big business. I talk about the culture I'm in, that I don't belong to that I don't have any part of. I'm officially outside of it. You know when you're born in the world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in the United States, you're given a front row seat. That's what I have and I sit there with my little notebook and I watch the freaks and I go home and talk about them.

Q: At what point did you realize you weren't a part of the club?

A: Like 20 years ago, in the '80s, I just realized I didn't identify in any way. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, said, "The fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it gelled for me. So I just gave myself a divorce from the species and a divorce from the culture and I have an emotionally detached vantage point out at a distant horizon where I watch it all without any stake in it.

You know what? I don't care what happens to this country. I don't care if it crashes and burns. I don't give a s--t, because it's not my job to give a s--t. My job is to live on this earth, be myself, look around, be nice to the people close to me and any one I encounter one on one. Be good, be nice, be kind.

Q: To realize this must have been an epiphany.

A: Absolutely. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a realist and a skeptic. Cynic is a different word and I don't cop to it. They say that if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. Now I will cop to that. I will admit that there is an adventure and a romance in this Obama story that plucks at a little bit of a string somewhere deep inside me, but I would never get on board to where I could
actually invest in it emotionally because I know what they're going to do to him. I know what's gonna happen to him.

Q: What?

A: He's gonna get assassinated. You know that's going to happen in this country. You think they're going to allow that s--t?

Q: We've seen it happen before.

A: It's what we do.

Q: We're good at it.

A: We're good at hiding it and no one wants to look underneath to see what it was all about.

Q: We're good at making people forget that it happened before.

A: Well they give you a new gizmo, a cell phone that'll make pancakes, and that takes your mind off everything. Americans have been bought off and silenced by gizmos and toys. That's one of the lines from this show.

Q: Has HBO ever tried to censor you?

A: Never said even a phrase to me. Never anything.

Q: Name one thing where you were pushing it pretty hard and you thought they might come back and say something.

A: I can't remember anything. I know I can say c---s and c---suckers, so that's no big deal. When I said all the stuff about, "There is no God and if there is a God, may he strike this audience dead. And then I said, "May he strike me dead - see he's afraid of me." I never thought they'd care about that.

Q: When you go live there's gotta be something you could say that would bury even HBO.

A: Well, I could probably excite a lot of people if I said something about - but this is between you and me, it doesn't belong in print....

(Hint: He already mentioned it in this interview, think politics).