Talk:Carl Bird

Origin and provenance

Carl is a pastiche of various real and fictitious characters I have known and encountered throughout my life:

• My father, who is really the genesis of it all. He was a high school dropout at 17, and shortly thereafter was effectively a vagabond for roughly two years. He also spent his 30s playing in unsuccessful Chicago-area bar bands at night and doing manual labor during the day. Many stories of him were told in hushed tones by people in his home town in Tennessee, but all I could reliably gather was that he got involved in a driving shootout on one occasion, which ended in him driving close to the other car so the passenger could hit the other driver with a glass bottle. He also got in a bar fight and hit a dude with a lead weighted blackjack. Among other things, he is spoken of as an expert gambler and legendary pool hustler, and has steadfastly lived his life like he’s the main character in a Johnny Cash song. He also tried to give me a Hustler magazine T-shirt at age 13 (which my mother shut down) and had me wearing Marlboro gear to elementary school.
• My grandfather on my father’s side, whom I’ve never met because he died of alcoholism in the 1970s and allowed my father to play with loaded guns.
• The various colorful characters who came into and out of our lives as a result of my father's involvement in the Chicago-area music scene. (But hey, at least I got to meet Jim Peterik and Dave Bickler from Survivor!)
• “Big D”, a guy who played guitar with my father for many years. He always drove an amazing conversion van decked out with interior lights and a sweet stereo system.
• A drummer that my father jammed with on occasion. He was such an alcoholic, when he gave his phone number it was the phone number of a bar. Despite seeming effectively homeless, he owned a drum set and is one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever seen, and this includes people like John Bonham and Neil Peart.
• My uncle (on my father's side) who was chronically unemployed and addicted to pain pills for much of his life, and swindled me out of a few bucks as a kid on more than one occasion. His main source of income was collecting scrap and shade tree mechanic work. The only person I’ve ever known with a gunshot wound (which he never talked about) and who successfully stopped his truck from getting towed by pulling a .357 magnum on the tow truck driver.
• The various colorful characters in my father's home town, with names like Avery, Churd, Gooch, and Bumper.
• My uncle (on my mother's side) who served hard time for bank robbery and also stabbed a taxi driver while living in Iran.
• "Big Mike", the guy who sold my dad bootleg VHS pornography, who had a habit of drinking and driving which culminated in him crashing his car through a diner.
• The guy at the flea market with a ponytail who sold twelve year-old me any Bowie knife I wanted.
• My wife's uncle, who was in and out of jail for minor offenses his whole life (he found the shoes they gave him to be very comfortable), loved to race stock cars, and was perpetually looking for the next way he was going to get on disability or unemployment. He also lived in various RVs and at one point was dating his live-in nurse (who was treating him for mobility issues related to morbid obesity).
• My wife’s second cousin Rusty, who had a breathalyzer interlock on his pickup truck and was known to walk ten miles to town for beer.
• Uncle Rico from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, who lives in a van and is always working on a side hustle.
• Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Despite the fever dream-like qualities of this show, Carl is one of the few human characters who is a prototypical "loser": unemployed, balding, wears sweat pants and flip flops, speaks with a New Jersey accent, and has a penchant for late 70s hard rock bands such as Foreigner and Foghat.
• Randy "The Ram" Robinson from the 2008 movie The Wrestler, a man who is thoroughly stuck in the 1980s (to the point where he doesn't seem to understand that technology newer than the NES exists) and can't find stable employment or even anywhere he's welcome outside of wrestling, gets locked out of his trailer for non-payment of rent, and drives a sweet van that looks like it may have been lived it at points.

Why Big Bird?

Carl passed out after huffing a can of R-134a

That is a question with a simple answer: random luck.

I have a friend who around 2008-2012 had a tendency to bring me loads of junk to look through and keep what I wanted. One day, he had a crate of items, one of which was a toy Big Bird from the 1980s that looked like it had been on the floor of some guy's van for the past decade. I commented, "that looks like Big Bird's older, meaner cousin with a prison record!" We made some quick modifications:

• A name change to Carl (directly inspired by Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
• Turning one eye inwards to give the appearance of lazy eye
• Sharpie'd on prison tattoos
• A dollar store gold chain
• Surgery to remove the malfunctioning pull string voice box (retconned as an operation to remove his kidney, which he sold to repay gambling debts)

And Carl was born!

Why a New York accent?

If I'm from the Midwest, and most of Carl's action takes place there, why does he have a gruff New York accent? Simple: because it's funnier. Carl is ostensibly from the same place where Sesame Street is filmed, which is near NYC. It's meant to evoke images of a rough-around-the-edges low-brow character with limited education.