George Carlin

It's a major bummer that George Carlin died this past Sunday at the age of 71, way too soon. It also calls into question just how he should be honored--none of this "heaven must be a funnier place" nonsense, because Carlin didn't believe in heaven. He jokingly said he was a member of the Frisbeetarianism religion, which meant that after you die your soul is like a Frisbee that lands on the roof, never to be retrieved.

I've been a fan of his close to forty years. I suppose my first memory of him was when he used to guest on the Flip Wilson Show. I must have shown a liking for him, because I got one of his albums as a gift when I was about ten or eleven years old. It was a clean album (one of his few) called Take-Offs and Put-Ons, that mostly consisted of his spoofs of top-40 radio, newscasts, and TV game shows and commercials (as well as his classic routine on the Indian Sargent).

It was a few years later, about 1977 or so, when I became fully aware of how brilliant a satirist he was in one of his HBO shows. He did a long show--it must have been two hours, which is a long time for one man to stand in front of an audience and make them laugh. I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever heard. The heart of the routine was his adding three words to the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television--fart, turd and twat. Fart occupied most of his time ("Kids love 'em. They're shit without the mess"). He also did a hysterical bit about cats and dogs, especially memorable business about a dog licking his own balls ("If I could do that, I'd never leave the house").

He was my choice for greatest stand-up comic of all time. There are some who will argue Richard Pryor, and I can't disagree strenuously. Carlin didn't have Pryor's ability to elevate the performance to something other-wordly. Instead, Carlin was a more analytical comedian, a man who loved language and hated many, many things. He was best known for the Seven Words, which even became a Supreme Court case, but at the heart of that routine was his eloquent statement that there is no such thing as "bad words." He thought that was lunacy. (Also, he was mystified why cocksucker became an epithet for a bad man, when really it described a good woman).

His roots were in conventional comedy, with his newscast spoofs, most notably Al Sleet, the hippie-dippy weatherman, and I was even shocked to see an old clip of him doing a JFK impression during the early sixties. But he cast that aside and did observational humor, albeit with an edge that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld wouldn't touch. As the years went on, his worldview grew darker and darker, railing against the stupidity of mankind, whether it was religion, politics, or men wearing baseball caps backwards. Towards the end, he seemed to be in some kind of despair, believing that life wasn't precious at all and that the sooner man destroyed himself the better. This might have stemmed from his wife's death from cancer about ten years ago, but as he put it, scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist.

There's so much to remember, though. His routine on the differences between baseball and football. His remembrances of growing up Catholic in New York, or a line I find myself quoting often about pets: "Unless you're an octogenarian buying a turtle, when you buy a pet you're bringing home a tragedy in a box."

Farewell, George, you will be missed.