George Carlin is just as relevant today as he was years ago

Never mind he died in 2008.

“It’s really shocking how many subjects he has the best routine about and the best insight into,” says director Judd Apatow. “Whenever anything happens in the news, people start putting clips up on the internet.”

Part of the answer lies in Carlin himself – he was a great saver. Notebooks, Post-it notes, tape recordings and videos captured hundreds of his observations. Then, too, he was not one to reveal a lot about himself.

“People really felt very close to him,” says Kelly Carlin, his daughter. “Except for ‘Class Clown,’ he never spoke about his personal life on stage. He never spoke about me or my mom, even on late-night shows.” His humor was observational.

“He always fought for the underdog and tried to lift up anyone else who was oppressed by the system,” Carlin says. “He really believed in letting people say what they had to say, their truth, while at the same time not making people who are suffering because of oppression have more suffering.”

In the HBO documentary, “George Carlin’s American Dream,” Apatow and co-director Michael Bonfiglio, look at the man who guarded his personal life.

“We found 23 hours of him telling his life story, on audio,” Apatow says. “We were really lucky to get that type of insight directly from him.”

In the tapes, he talks about his career shifts, his approach, his passions.

Carlin started out as a fairly mainstream comedian, then morphed into a counterculture observer. “He had a lot of struggles,” Apatow says. “He had issues with addiction and he had heart problems and he was trying to be good father and a good husband during the ‘70s when things were pretty out of control. (The documentary) is a story of someone who’s trying to keep their comedy evolving while trying to be a good person.”

While George Carlin loved watching his daughter do impressions, he didn’t want her to go into his line of work.

“He knew how horrible audiences could be,” Kelly Carlin says. “But I never had that particular urge. My biggest joy was being able to make my dad laugh. So long as I had an audience of one, I was fine.”

To craft the two-part documentary, researchers combed his archives. “There was just an incredible, crushing amount of material,” Bonfiglio says. “Our editor, Joe Beshenkovsky, did an extraordinary job of sifting through all of it. The film itself is about his evolution in a lot of ways.”

Kelly Carlin says her father was very aware of those shifts.

What never changed: His stance on political correctness.

“He never believed that less speech is good for a society,” Carlin says. “Less speech doesn’t protect people. He had a pretty strident First Amendment, absolutist stance on that. But, at the same time, he never believed in punching down. He always fought for the underdog and tried to lift the underdog up.”

Today, Apatow says, comedians have more storytelling tools at their disposal. They augment tours with podcasts and establish an intimate relationship with the audience. “This generation is much more personal. It’s very different,” he says.

George Carlin’s routines hold up, Apatow says, because it wasn’t specific to the times. “Like, I can’t believe he was talking about Big Pharma in 1970.”

When Apatow, Bonfiglio and others went through those mountains of material, they discovered a man who loved language “and really worked harder than any comedian in the history of comedy at writing and crafting,” Apatow says. “There’s a funny moment where he’s talking to the crowd. He’s trying out his material and he says, ‘This set isn’t for you, it’s for me.’ He was really about presenting it, almost like a play by the end of it.”

“George Carlin’s American Dream” airs on HBO.