“Do you ever have chicken for lunch, and then for some reason have chicken for dinner, and then wonder if the two chickens knew each other?” That random thought, expressed by George Carlin, was one of the few moments from his show at the Taft Theatre Friday night printable in a family newspaper.

        The comedian, dressed in his trademark black, was working overwhelmingly in his trademark blue. A laundry list of the type of people who deserved to be killed for what Mr. Carlin sees as their fatal social flaws; carefully detailed descriptions of what he discovers when exploring his body — humor as such dominated the 90-minute set. Existential family-friendly chicken jokes were few and far between.

        Mr. Carlin told the sold-out house he's doing a live HBO show Nov. 17 from New York's Beacon Theatre. He called the Taft show a tune-up, and it showed. He returned to his notes several times in the first hour and dropped comments like “This is the part I'm working on” in the middle of jokes. Regardless, it didn't badly affect his rhythm, and all the new stuff drew big laughs.

        The New York-born comic addressed the fact he'll be returning to Manhattan for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks. In doing so, he mildly criticized Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby. He said the comics didn't once mention the attacks during their Oct. 8 benefit show at Carnegie Hall.

        “That's like having a big elephant in the room, and you don't mention it, when it's like, "Hey, it's a (expletive) elephant sitting on the couch,' ” he said.

        From there, he segued into his breakdown of the attacks' aftermath. In uncertain times as these, he said, in order to destroy a greater evil, we must align ourselves with unsavory characters who we'd normally consider our mortal enemies. Characters, he said, such as “the American government and Governor Bush.”

        There was a brief break from gross-out humor and over-the-top offensiveness. Mr. Carlin has done the Tonight Show 137 times, he said, which meant meeting the challenge of coming up with six minutes of clean material each time. He treated the audience to such a set, full of goofy one- and two-liners as off-the-wall as everything else.

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