“Fuck. George Carlin dead at 71.”

June 23rd, 2008

That’s the headline at Common Dreams. My sentiments exactly.

I know there are serious things afoot, pull and tug on the Congressional scene, rifts and splits in the Progressive base and more change, change, change that doesn’t fit the picture we had in our mind … but more on that later.

Today a little tribute to a curmudgeon and genius, an old street fighter and bard of his times — and a loss that is at least softened by a lifetime on tape that will help us remember what real guts looked like.

I’ve heard a number of people say Carlin was their hero, and it’s worthwhile examining why that is — George, bless him, made political incorrectness simple, understandable and acceptable … why? Because it was laughable to begin with …. and Carlin blew away the smoke to find the quickest path to the laughs, pulling the trigger on the pomp and prudery that promoted it. You’ll find the transcript to “7 Dirty Words” last.

George Carlin has gone on to whatever’s next … and I hope he likes it better there than he did here. As for me, I’ve selected the image of him as the Bishop in “Dogma,” holding up his Buddy Christ icon and talking shit, to remember today … and if that next place has a sense of humor, he’ll be welcomed with laughter and and a standing ovation.

Yet for those of us left behind, destined to no longer have an irreverent but relevant reflection from time to time to keep us cheered, there’s only one response: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

Jude

George Carlin Mourned as a Counterculture Hero
AP via CommonDreams
Monday, June 23, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin’s jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the “Seven Words” - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the “Saturday Night Live” debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long” - and appearing some 130 times on “The Tonight Show.”

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

“Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?”

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, “George was fairly conservative when I met him,” said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early ’60s.

“We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away,” Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. “It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction.”

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

“Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot,” his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”

Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn’t work for him, and they broke up by 1962.

“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,” Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya.”

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends” and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit “Cars.”

Carlin’s first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.++

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
LA Times FunnyPages
Jun 23 2008

One of my favourite comedians has passed away at age 71. Carlin was best known for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” which appeared on 1972’s “Class Clown” album. He will surely be missed and at least we have 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, television shows and movie appearances to remember him by.

My favourite Carlin quotes:

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It’s just stale bread to begin with.

I’ll be watching random George Carlin youtube videos all day long. ++

George Carlin
Carlin speaks up about what’s wrong with Mickey Mouse, baby boomers, private property, and political activism.
Ricky Young, MotherJones
March 01, 1997

George Carlin wanted to be Danny Kaye when he grew up. Instead, his straight-arrow career was hijacked by the counterculture, and he became the angry voice of a generation. Today, he laments that generation’s loss of idealism, but he does so driving a BMW and luxuriating in his private flotation tank, which he calls “Our Lady of Good Salt.” After decades of misanthropic stand-up, Carlin promises that a newfound grace infuses his book Brain Droppings, which Hyperion is publishing this spring. “There’s a surprising amount of innocence and sweetness in it,” he says. And even though he excoriated Mickey Mouse when the “imaginary rodent’s” 65th birthday became a news item, the comedian wants you to celebrate when he turns 60 in May.

Q: Let me read you something from your own act: “I hope Mickey dies. I do. I hope he goddamn dies. I hope he gets ahold of some tainted cheese…”

A: “…and dies lonely and forgotten behind the baseboard of a soiled bathroom in a poor neighborhood with his hand in Goofy’s pants.”

Q: What did Mickey Mouse ever do to you?

A: That’s not how these things generate themselves. What Mickey Mouse did to me was to represent something — in this case, meaningless shit on the news, the way they fill our minds with all this stuff to distract us from the real tragedy. He’s a symbolic figure.

Q: This spring marks your 20th year on HBO, your 40th year in show business, and your 60th year on the planet. What makes your birthday different from Mickey Mouse’s?

A: I hope they don’t ever use my birthday as a news item. That would be one distinction. I would also hope to tell people I’m 60 because it’s a nice human fact for a guy like me to make it all the way to 60.

Q: Do you exercise?

A: I use a treadmill because I’ve had three heart attacks. My father died at 57. His first symptom of heart trouble was a trip to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

Q: Do you have any of the appliances or equipment that you make fun of in your comedy routines: camcorders, pasta makers…?

A: I have no pasta maker. I probably have a device at home that would take pictures of moving images and would pass for a camcorder, but I don’t know where it is.

Q: What rating will your upcoming HBO special get?

A: Under the new rating system? I don’t know all the terminology of that system yet.

Q: Somewhere around an NC-17?

A: Or NC-35, even.

Q: Has censorship gotten stronger or weaker during your years in the business?

A: I think the trend to control speech — and therefore thought — continues. Because of the freer flow of information now, there’s more on the side of free thought.

Q: You have called baby boomers whiny, sarcastic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, cold, bloodless people…

A: …This is rhetoric. Rhetoric paints with a broad brush. I try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way, so it’s usually overdone.

Q: But aren’t boomers the main audience for HBO?

A: Baby boomers helped me a great deal in my career. They launched me. They were there for me to sing my song to. And I’m not saying I’m better than anyone, but I think they turned that anti-authority baby boom mentality into their own enemy. Now I identify very closely with their children.

Q: What went wrong?

A: The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god — that there’s a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn’t want you to do and you’ll burn for a long time if you do them — and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That’s the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on the stage. I feel betrayed by the people I’m part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures.

Q: Is there anyone or anything you like?

A: I love individuals. I think people are terrific as I meet and get to know them. I like imagination. I like the freedom that this society manages to parcel out to us in the midst of the rest of what they do to you. I also like thinking about the fact that the atoms in me are the same atoms that are in all the rest of the universe, and that every one of those atoms came from the middle of a star. In other words, it’s only me out there.

We use up words like “spiritual” so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago “spiritual” had a distinct meaning. But now there’s a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus — is “bogosity” a word? It should be — a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it “how I fit.”

Q: Speaking of how you fit, where do you fit on the political spectrum?

A: If the center line is really there, and I were anywhere, I would come down on the left of center.

Q: Right there with Bill Clinton.

A: I like Bill, by the way. If there were only one cherry pie in the world, and Bill Clinton owned it, I might get a piece of it. If Bush or Reagan owned it, you’d have to kill them to get a piece of pie. That’s my feeling about Bill. And Bill’s a good bullshitter. America likes a good bullshitter. That’s one of the reasons he was re-elected. Honesty has no place in politics. It would throw everything off.

Q: You don’t vote now. When was the last time you voted?

A: Maybe 1980.

Q: Carter?

A: That probably would have been it. And that would have been one of the few lines I voted on. I’m on the left because I think there’s a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don’t think much of political activism. It’s so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I’ve said that about environmentalists — I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction.

Q: But you have no particular love for the planet. You’ve wished disasters upon it.

A: When you look at it from that one picture, the one from space, it’s really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

Q: You must love the blowing up of buildings for entertainment in Las Vegas.

A: Yes, I do. I saw the Dunes blow up in person.

Q: How is Vegas different from a concert hall for a performance?

A: In Las Vegas, people are there for other reasons, and you are a sideline, an attraction, an “also.” So you don’t get all hard-core fans. Secondly, when you have tables and drinks and a seating arrangement, people are on their guard a little more. They will not reveal as much about themselves in those settings as they will in the darkness of a theater facing front.

Laughter reveals a lot about you. It’s voting in a way. So I’d say I skim off about 10 percent of the venom or 10 percent of the attack stuff on things people hold dear.

Q: Does Mickey Mouse get skimmed off?

A: No, just religion and overt attacks on people’s political affiliations. I don’t use the word “Republican,” for example, though I say a lot about conservatives. There’s something about the word “conservative” that gives people a little more freedom to join you if they want.

Q: It’s self-censorship.

A: Well, editing. It’s accommodating the reality of the world.

Q: Do you really care if they “balance the stupid fucking budget”?

A: I don’t care much about the outcome. I’d like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don’t think that’s in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That’ll never happen because they’ve got all the guns now. At least they’ve got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.

Q: You sound like one of the Freemen.

A: I’ve said to myself — I don’t think I’ve said it to anyone else — that but for the racism and religious orientation of these militiamen, I very much like the spirit involved there. Those are two points that would stop me. Boy, do they hate “Jews and niggers” — that’s the way they say it, right? And they very much think Jesus has got a pretty good thing coming up soon. The end times, the tribulation…what’s the other word?

Q: Apocalypse?

A: The apocalypse, that’s even better, but there’s another one. The rapture! That sounds like fun.

Q: Are you lonely?

A: There is a core of loneliness. It’s partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn’t metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards.

So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself — I lived through the radio and through my imagination.

One of the interesting things about “outsidership” is that underneath it there’s a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to — the species, Western capital culture — was a little more respectable.

My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

Q: Do you work in there?

A: No, that would defeat the whole idea.

Q: What was the bigger deal out of Dayton, the Bosnian peace accord or you meeting your wife, Brenda?

A: Ah, Brenda over Bosnia every time. These folks are wonderful, these peace people. The whole process of patching up these places that have thousand-year-old wounds….

Q: How have you and Brenda stuck together for more than 30 years?

A: There’s a lot of luck involved. Brenda and I got lucky the very first time and didn’t have to go through several spouses to do it. It’s a kind of complementary way of filling each other out and making each individual more complete. The key for us has always been to put the twosome ahead of either individual whenever that was an issue. That helps. And then, I don’t know, star-crossed something — it’s just magic.

Q: Fate? You believe in that?

A: I’m a believer that things happen. Fate is what happens. ++

Ricky Young is a reporter at the Orange County Register.

What the Media Did for Russert, the People Should Do for George Carlin
Kevin Gosztola, OpEdNews

I wouldn’t just call myself a fan of George Carlin. I never attended any of his comedy concerts, but I did watch his HBO specials on YouTube many times and often remembered what he had said when talking about society with others. I considered him to be a thinker, not just a comedian.

There’s a scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1 where Mel Brooks’ character walks up to a window to get welfare and declares his job to be that of a stand-up philosopher.

George Carlin was more than a stand-up comedian. He was a stand-up philosopher.

Carlin broke down societal norms, customs, euphemisms, and human behavior methodically and meticulously.

In his last HBO comedy concert, “It’s Bad for Ya”, he tackled religion perfectly picking apart all the actions we think people must do because of religion.

“Life is Worth Losing” was a masterfully done comedy concert. While I enjoyed the earlier portion of the HBO special, I will never forget the “all suicide channel”, Carlin’s idea for a reality television show that would make tons of money because people, especially Americans, would enjoy watching people commit suicide. They would even line up to be on the channel.

I liked the more cynical George Carlin perhaps because this Bush administration has made me more cynical. I still have my ideas but life under King George makes your mind an easy target for the unmatched candor, cynicism, and wit of a genius like Carlin.

From his book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? to the HBO specials to Carlin as the first host of Saturday Night Live to Carlin’s 7 words and to Carlin dissecting airplane announcements and talking about Persian Gulf warfare, George Carlin will be sorely missed, not just by me but by others who followed his career and by those who will come across him in the future.

I’m reading Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America by Richard Zoglin. Carlin was part of a counterculture revolution in comedy that changed the way comedy treated society and this revolution happened not just because of Carlin but because people like Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Albert Brooks, and Andy Kaufman created comedy with no boundaries that allowed every comedian to be smart, wild, and wise.

Of the seven comedians who started the comedy revolution, Carlin is the only one who continued on without feeling the need to make it big in something other than stand-up.

It is fitting that George Carlin is the 11th person to be awarded the Mark Twain American Humor award because he really stood up to the bullshit in the way that Mark Twain did during his life.

All I can say is the bullshit finally got to him.

He didn’t die of heart failure. He died from bullshit. ++

Sh*t: The Great One Is Gone
Richard Volaar, OpEdNews
June 23, 2008

The…dog…did it.

Death sucks.

St. John’s Hospital…the bringer of such good news as gerbils up the behind of Richard Gere…apparently didn’t take Carlin’s chest pains as seriously as they needed to.

I have to say that I didn’t much care for Carlin of late: the increasing cynicism and “dry drunk” behavior generally left me feeling, well, dry. On the other hand, while I had long since outgrown the old “fart jokes,” they pulled me through puberty and made my own battles with depression much more bearable. For that, George, I thank you.

Without a doubt, Carlin impacted us all in ways we’ll only now become familiar with.

I hope, given all the cocaine that inevitably weakened Carlin’s heart, he at least made, “the double yellow line.”

The dry drunk behavior Carlin exhibited in recent years is indicative of an addict who can not reconcile the need for a loving and personal “higher power” in a world made crazy by people who don’t even recognize that this is a problem for us all.

Nevertheless, his last great contribution, “Who Owns You,” was an important contribution to our social conscience and discourse. I grit my teeth at the hopeless, powerless, despairing place that his insights come from; however, they are nevertheless, “true dat.”

The only way OUT is IN. The only way IN, is OUT. I pray that George is pleasantly and happily surprised that god as he understands him actually likes fart jokes, freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and people brave enough to be angry at those who can not see, much less appreciate, the simple truth plainly expressed. ++

How George Carlin Changed Comedy
RICHARD ZOGLIN, TIME Mag
Monday, Jun. 23, 2008

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

When he broke into TV in the mid-1960s, on shows like Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan, Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early ’60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a “hippy dippy weatherman.” But as he watched the protest marches of the late ’60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.

So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America’s uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren’t ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own “skinny ass”). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.

But by the early ’70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce — whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent — Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truthteller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society’s outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the “drug problem” extends to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the injustice of Muhammad Ali’s banishment from boxing for avoiding the draft — a man whose job was beating people up losing his livelihood because he wouldn’t kill people: “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up, but I don’t want to kill ‘em.’ And the government said, ‘Well, if you won’t kill people, we won’t let you beat ‘em up.’”

Most famously, he talked about the “seven words you can never say on television,” foisting the verboten few into his audience’s face with the glee of a classroom cut-up and the scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating of the “dirty” words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the creation of the “family hour” on network television), his intention was not just to shock; it was to question our irrational fear of language “There are no bad words,” said Carlin. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords.”

Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin’s favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence,” and pointed out the social uses of euphemism: “When did ‘toilet paper’ become bathroom tissue’? When did house trailers become ‘mobile homes’?” He reminisced about his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all the taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be all-powerful, mused Carlin, since “everything he ever makes … dies.”

In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing bestselling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM, spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential series of “On Location” comedy concerts, Carlin was among its most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the network, the last just a few months ago.

Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-’70s that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in 1978, the start of heart problems that eventually killed him) and his career as well. “I really wasn’t being as creative,” Carlin admitted years later. “I lost years. I could have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind of like doing hurdles.”

But in the early ’80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore “observational” humor and an aphoristic style. Then, in the ’90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material, railing against everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late ’60s, Carlin could be as perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever:

“I’ve been uplinked and downloaded. I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond…”

Carlin’s material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for mass suicide and ecological disaster. “I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,” he said a couple of years ago. “Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don’t think it’s fixable.”

But Carlin’s career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the “observational” comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing — not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life — was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture. It has never left. ++

Richard Zoglin’s book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.

George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words
Justin R. Erenkrantz

The big seven words you weren’t allowed to broadcast were: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

Here is the original Carlin comedy routine that caused the Fracas.

“I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.

But, there are some two-way words. There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? ‘And the cock crowed three times.'’Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It’s in the bible.’ There are some Two-way words, like it’s okay for Curt Gowdy [mis-spelled in original transcription. -ed.] to say ‘Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.’ But he can’t say, ‘I think he hurt his balls on that play Tony, don’t you? He’s holding them. He must have hurt them by God.’ And the other two-way word that goes with that one is prick. It’s okay if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don’t finger your prick. No, no.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves

“Fuck. George Carlin dead at 71.”

June 23rd, 2008

That’s the headline at Common Dreams. My sentiments exactly.

I know there are serious things afoot, pull and tug on the Congressional scene, rifts and splits in the Progressive base and more change, change, change that doesn’t fit the picture we had in our mind … but more on that later.

Today a little tribute to a curmudgeon and genius, an old street fighter and bard of his times — and a loss that is at least softened by a lifetime on tape that will help us remember what real guts looked like.

I’ve heard a number of people say Carlin was their hero, and it’s worthwhile examining why that is — George, bless him, made political incorrectness simple, understandable and acceptable … why? Because it was laughable to begin with …. and Carlin blew away the smoke to find the quickest path to the laughs, pulling the trigger on the pomp and prudery that promoted it. You’ll find the transcript to “7 Dirty Words” last.

George Carlin has gone on to whatever’s next … and I hope he likes it better there than he did here. As for me, I’ve selected the image of him as the Bishop in “Dogma,” holding up his Buddy Christ icon and talking shit, to remember today … and if that next place has a sense of humor, he’ll be welcomed with laughter and and a standing ovation.

Yet for those of us left behind, destined to no longer have an irreverent but relevant reflection from time to time to keep us cheered, there’s only one response: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

Jude

George Carlin Mourned as a Counterculture Hero
AP via CommonDreams
Monday, June 23, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin’s jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the “Seven Words” - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the “Saturday Night Live” debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long” - and appearing some 130 times on “The Tonight Show.”

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

“Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?”

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, “George was fairly conservative when I met him,” said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early ’60s.

“We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away,” Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. “It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction.”

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

“Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot,” his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”

Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn’t work for him, and they broke up by 1962.

“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,” Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya.”

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends” and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit “Cars.”

Carlin’s first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.++

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
LA Times FunnyPages
Jun 23 2008

One of my favourite comedians has passed away at age 71. Carlin was best known for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” which appeared on 1972’s “Class Clown” album. He will surely be missed and at least we have 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, television shows and movie appearances to remember him by.

My favourite Carlin quotes:

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It’s just stale bread to begin with.

I’ll be watching random George Carlin youtube videos all day long. ++

George Carlin
Carlin speaks up about what’s wrong with Mickey Mouse, baby boomers, private property, and political activism.
Ricky Young, MotherJones
March 01, 1997

George Carlin wanted to be Danny Kaye when he grew up. Instead, his straight-arrow career was hijacked by the counterculture, and he became the angry voice of a generation. Today, he laments that generation’s loss of idealism, but he does so driving a BMW and luxuriating in his private flotation tank, which he calls “Our Lady of Good Salt.” After decades of misanthropic stand-up, Carlin promises that a newfound grace infuses his book Brain Droppings, which Hyperion is publishing this spring. “There’s a surprising amount of innocence and sweetness in it,” he says. And even though he excoriated Mickey Mouse when the “imaginary rodent’s” 65th birthday became a news item, the comedian wants you to celebrate when he turns 60 in May.

Q: Let me read you something from your own act: “I hope Mickey dies. I do. I hope he goddamn dies. I hope he gets ahold of some tainted cheese…”

A: “…and dies lonely and forgotten behind the baseboard of a soiled bathroom in a poor neighborhood with his hand in Goofy’s pants.”

Q: What did Mickey Mouse ever do to you?

A: That’s not how these things generate themselves. What Mickey Mouse did to me was to represent something — in this case, meaningless shit on the news, the way they fill our minds with all this stuff to distract us from the real tragedy. He’s a symbolic figure.

Q: This spring marks your 20th year on HBO, your 40th year in show business, and your 60th year on the planet. What makes your birthday different from Mickey Mouse’s?

A: I hope they don’t ever use my birthday as a news item. That would be one distinction. I would also hope to tell people I’m 60 because it’s a nice human fact for a guy like me to make it all the way to 60.

Q: Do you exercise?

A: I use a treadmill because I’ve had three heart attacks. My father died at 57. His first symptom of heart trouble was a trip to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

Q: Do you have any of the appliances or equipment that you make fun of in your comedy routines: camcorders, pasta makers…?

A: I have no pasta maker. I probably have a device at home that would take pictures of moving images and would pass for a camcorder, but I don’t know where it is.

Q: What rating will your upcoming HBO special get?

A: Under the new rating system? I don’t know all the terminology of that system yet.

Q: Somewhere around an NC-17?

A: Or NC-35, even.

Q: Has censorship gotten stronger or weaker during your years in the business?

A: I think the trend to control speech — and therefore thought — continues. Because of the freer flow of information now, there’s more on the side of free thought.

Q: You have called baby boomers whiny, sarcastic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, cold, bloodless people…

A: …This is rhetoric. Rhetoric paints with a broad brush. I try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way, so it’s usually overdone.

Q: But aren’t boomers the main audience for HBO?

A: Baby boomers helped me a great deal in my career. They launched me. They were there for me to sing my song to. And I’m not saying I’m better than anyone, but I think they turned that anti-authority baby boom mentality into their own enemy. Now I identify very closely with their children.

Q: What went wrong?

A: The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god — that there’s a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn’t want you to do and you’ll burn for a long time if you do them — and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That’s the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on the stage. I feel betrayed by the people I’m part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures.

Q: Is there anyone or anything you like?

A: I love individuals. I think people are terrific as I meet and get to know them. I like imagination. I like the freedom that this society manages to parcel out to us in the midst of the rest of what they do to you. I also like thinking about the fact that the atoms in me are the same atoms that are in all the rest of the universe, and that every one of those atoms came from the middle of a star. In other words, it’s only me out there.

We use up words like “spiritual” so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago “spiritual” had a distinct meaning. But now there’s a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus — is “bogosity” a word? It should be — a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it “how I fit.”

Q: Speaking of how you fit, where do you fit on the political spectrum?

A: If the center line is really there, and I were anywhere, I would come down on the left of center.

Q: Right there with Bill Clinton.

A: I like Bill, by the way. If there were only one cherry pie in the world, and Bill Clinton owned it, I might get a piece of it. If Bush or Reagan owned it, you’d have to kill them to get a piece of pie. That’s my feeling about Bill. And Bill’s a good bullshitter. America likes a good bullshitter. That’s one of the reasons he was re-elected. Honesty has no place in politics. It would throw everything off.

Q: You don’t vote now. When was the last time you voted?

A: Maybe 1980.

Q: Carter?

A: That probably would have been it. And that would have been one of the few lines I voted on. I’m on the left because I think there’s a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don’t think much of political activism. It’s so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I’ve said that about environmentalists — I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction.

Q: But you have no particular love for the planet. You’ve wished disasters upon it.

A: When you look at it from that one picture, the one from space, it’s really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

Q: You must love the blowing up of buildings for entertainment in Las Vegas.

A: Yes, I do. I saw the Dunes blow up in person.

Q: How is Vegas different from a concert hall for a performance?

A: In Las Vegas, people are there for other reasons, and you are a sideline, an attraction, an “also.” So you don’t get all hard-core fans. Secondly, when you have tables and drinks and a seating arrangement, people are on their guard a little more. They will not reveal as much about themselves in those settings as they will in the darkness of a theater facing front.

Laughter reveals a lot about you. It’s voting in a way. So I’d say I skim off about 10 percent of the venom or 10 percent of the attack stuff on things people hold dear.

Q: Does Mickey Mouse get skimmed off?

A: No, just religion and overt attacks on people’s political affiliations. I don’t use the word “Republican,” for example, though I say a lot about conservatives. There’s something about the word “conservative” that gives people a little more freedom to join you if they want.

Q: It’s self-censorship.

A: Well, editing. It’s accommodating the reality of the world.

Q: Do you really care if they “balance the stupid fucking budget”?

A: I don’t care much about the outcome. I’d like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don’t think that’s in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That’ll never happen because they’ve got all the guns now. At least they’ve got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.

Q: You sound like one of the Freemen.

A: I’ve said to myself — I don’t think I’ve said it to anyone else — that but for the racism and religious orientation of these militiamen, I very much like the spirit involved there. Those are two points that would stop me. Boy, do they hate “Jews and niggers” — that’s the way they say it, right? And they very much think Jesus has got a pretty good thing coming up soon. The end times, the tribulation…what’s the other word?

Q: Apocalypse?

A: The apocalypse, that’s even better, but there’s another one. The rapture! That sounds like fun.

Q: Are you lonely?

A: There is a core of loneliness. It’s partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn’t metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards.

So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself — I lived through the radio and through my imagination.

One of the interesting things about “outsidership” is that underneath it there’s a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to — the species, Western capital culture — was a little more respectable.

My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

Q: Do you work in there?

A: No, that would defeat the whole idea.

Q: What was the bigger deal out of Dayton, the Bosnian peace accord or you meeting your wife, Brenda?

A: Ah, Brenda over Bosnia every time. These folks are wonderful, these peace people. The whole process of patching up these places that have thousand-year-old wounds….

Q: How have you and Brenda stuck together for more than 30 years?

A: There’s a lot of luck involved. Brenda and I got lucky the very first time and didn’t have to go through several spouses to do it. It’s a kind of complementary way of filling each other out and making each individual more complete. The key for us has always been to put the twosome ahead of either individual whenever that was an issue. That helps. And then, I don’t know, star-crossed something — it’s just magic.

Q: Fate? You believe in that?

A: I’m a believer that things happen. Fate is what happens. ++

Ricky Young is a reporter at the Orange County Register.

What the Media Did for Russert, the People Should Do for George Carlin
Kevin Gosztola, OpEdNews

I wouldn’t just call myself a fan of George Carlin. I never attended any of his comedy concerts, but I did watch his HBO specials on YouTube many times and often remembered what he had said when talking about society with others. I considered him to be a thinker, not just a comedian.

There’s a scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1 where Mel Brooks’ character walks up to a window to get welfare and declares his job to be that of a stand-up philosopher.

George Carlin was more than a stand-up comedian. He was a stand-up philosopher.

Carlin broke down societal norms, customs, euphemisms, and human behavior methodically and meticulously.

In his last HBO comedy concert, “It’s Bad for Ya”, he tackled religion perfectly picking apart all the actions we think people must do because of religion.

“Life is Worth Losing” was a masterfully done comedy concert. While I enjoyed the earlier portion of the HBO special, I will never forget the “all suicide channel”, Carlin’s idea for a reality television show that would make tons of money because people, especially Americans, would enjoy watching people commit suicide. They would even line up to be on the channel.

I liked the more cynical George Carlin perhaps because this Bush administration has made me more cynical. I still have my ideas but life under King George makes your mind an easy target for the unmatched candor, cynicism, and wit of a genius like Carlin.

From his book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? to the HBO specials to Carlin as the first host of Saturday Night Live to Carlin’s 7 words and to Carlin dissecting airplane announcements and talking about Persian Gulf warfare, George Carlin will be sorely missed, not just by me but by others who followed his career and by those who will come across him in the future.

I’m reading Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America by Richard Zoglin. Carlin was part of a counterculture revolution in comedy that changed the way comedy treated society and this revolution happened not just because of Carlin but because people like Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Albert Brooks, and Andy Kaufman created comedy with no boundaries that allowed every comedian to be smart, wild, and wise.

Of the seven comedians who started the comedy revolution, Carlin is the only one who continued on without feeling the need to make it big in something other than stand-up.

It is fitting that George Carlin is the 11th person to be awarded the Mark Twain American Humor award because he really stood up to the bullshit in the way that Mark Twain did during his life.

All I can say is the bullshit finally got to him.

He didn’t die of heart failure. He died from bullshit. ++

Sh*t: The Great One Is Gone
Richard Volaar, OpEdNews
June 23, 2008

The…dog…did it.

Death sucks.

St. John’s Hospital…the bringer of such good news as gerbils up the behind of Richard Gere…apparently didn’t take Carlin’s chest pains as seriously as they needed to.

I have to say that I didn’t much care for Carlin of late: the increasing cynicism and “dry drunk” behavior generally left me feeling, well, dry. On the other hand, while I had long since outgrown the old “fart jokes,” they pulled me through puberty and made my own battles with depression much more bearable. For that, George, I thank you.

Without a doubt, Carlin impacted us all in ways we’ll only now become familiar with.

I hope, given all the cocaine that inevitably weakened Carlin’s heart, he at least made, “the double yellow line.”

The dry drunk behavior Carlin exhibited in recent years is indicative of an addict who can not reconcile the need for a loving and personal “higher power” in a world made crazy by people who don’t even recognize that this is a problem for us all.

Nevertheless, his last great contribution, “Who Owns You,” was an important contribution to our social conscience and discourse. I grit my teeth at the hopeless, powerless, despairing place that his insights come from; however, they are nevertheless, “true dat.”

The only way OUT is IN. The only way IN, is OUT. I pray that George is pleasantly and happily surprised that god as he understands him actually likes fart jokes, freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and people brave enough to be angry at those who can not see, much less appreciate, the simple truth plainly expressed. ++

How George Carlin Changed Comedy
RICHARD ZOGLIN, TIME Mag
Monday, Jun. 23, 2008

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

When he broke into TV in the mid-1960s, on shows like Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan, Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early ’60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a “hippy dippy weatherman.” But as he watched the protest marches of the late ’60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.

So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America’s uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren’t ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own “skinny ass”). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.

But by the early ’70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce — whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent — Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truthteller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society’s outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the “drug problem” extends to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the injustice of Muhammad Ali’s banishment from boxing for avoiding the draft — a man whose job was beating people up losing his livelihood because he wouldn’t kill people: “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up, but I don’t want to kill ‘em.’ And the government said, ‘Well, if you won’t kill people, we won’t let you beat ‘em up.’”

Most famously, he talked about the “seven words you can never say on television,” foisting the verboten few into his audience’s face with the glee of a classroom cut-up and the scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating of the “dirty” words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the creation of the “family hour” on network television), his intention was not just to shock; it was to question our irrational fear of language “There are no bad words,” said Carlin. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords.”

Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin’s favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence,” and pointed out the social uses of euphemism: “When did ‘toilet paper’ become bathroom tissue’? When did house trailers become ‘mobile homes’?” He reminisced about his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all the taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be all-powerful, mused Carlin, since “everything he ever makes … dies.”

In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing bestselling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM, spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential series of “On Location” comedy concerts, Carlin was among its most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the network, the last just a few months ago.

Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-’70s that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in 1978, the start of heart problems that eventually killed him) and his career as well. “I really wasn’t being as creative,” Carlin admitted years later. “I lost years. I could have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind of like doing hurdles.”

But in the early ’80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore “observational” humor and an aphoristic style. Then, in the ’90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material, railing against everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late ’60s, Carlin could be as perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever:

“I’ve been uplinked and downloaded. I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond…”

Carlin’s material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for mass suicide and ecological disaster. “I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,” he said a couple of years ago. “Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don’t think it’s fixable.”

But Carlin’s career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the “observational” comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing — not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life — was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture. It has never left. ++

Richard Zoglin’s book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.

George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words
Justin R. Erenkrantz

The big seven words you weren’t allowed to broadcast were: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

Here is the original Carlin comedy routine that caused the Fracas.

“I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.