“I’m always rooting for a really high death toll,” he says. What Carlin really likes, he tells the audience, are “big, fatal disasters with lots of dead people.” As in his best work, Carlin luxuriates in the cumulative effect of lists, running off his favorite forms of cataclysm, from the global to the absurdly specific: earthquakes, tornadoes, airplane crashes, “food poisoning at a church picnic,” “a runaway merry-go-round.” He launches into a wild, extended riff-one that he would later repurpose in his 2006 special, “Life Is Worth Losing”-about a broken water main in Los Angeles setting off a cascading series of increasingly gruesome disasters across the country and, later, the world, which ends in a surreal new universe in which what he calls “trillions of Uncle Daves,” stand-ins for all the angry white men in America who felt the system had been rigged against them, are finally happy. The album’s climax explores an idea that would have been no less incendiary in the months after 9/11. Terrorists get blamed for these explosions that are nothing more than cabbage-fart detonations.” As extravagantly silly as the bit is, it’s clear why Carlin decided to put it away. And you know who gets blamed? Osama bin Laden. “And they build, and they build, and they build until they reach critical fart density-C.F.D.-and they continue to build throughout the flight, until finally some kid turns on a Game Boy and boom! The whole back end of the plane blows off. “These planes get flying so fast that all the most vicious, lethal, volatile, flammable, unstable farts get pushed toward the back of the airplane, where they begin to build up pressure,” he said. In a fashion typical of the comedian, who always passed easily between the corporeal and the sublime, it started as a fart joke. The most striking thing about the show is that Carlin made a joke about Osama bin Laden and an exploding airplane. It is available now, under its original title, on Sirius XM, and out on CD and for download next week. Now, fifteen years after the attacks, and eight years after Carlin’s death, material from the two nights has been arranged in a new album by his daughter Kelly, his longtime manager and confidant Jerry Hamza, and an archivist named Logan Heftel. Those original September sets were lost-save for their place in the memory of the audiences in Vegas, who must have woken up to the news on 9/11 with an especially eerie feeling-until cassette recordings were discovered, a few years ago, in Carlin’s archives.

Photograph by Paul Drinkwater / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty In a previously unreleased album recorded on September 9 and 10, 2001, Carlin-shown above in April of that year-joked about Osama bin Laden, an exploding airplane, and his own fascination with disaster and death.

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