Comedy Legend George Carlin Dead at 71
George Carlin passed away yesterday at 71 from heart failure. With over 40 years as a solo stand-up comedian, Carlin became an icon, best known for, amongst many routines, his 7 words you can’t say on TV.
I am sure this video, if not a similar one, to it will be played on computers all over the world today (and yesterday):
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.’”
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23. June 2008 at :
I hope he’s started his list of complaints and grievances about the upstairs already, those people need a reality check:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o
Carlin, you’ll be missed by me most of all.
24. June 2008 at :
I’ll never forget the first time I heard George Carlin.
It was the summer of 1990. I was 12 and attending a week long church camp outside Glen Rose, Texas.
Camp was pretty normal by camp standards. I was raised Methodist, which as far as I could figure by that young age, taught the key to heaven was a long line of well wishers and a pot luck dish. That is to say, we spent more time shootin’ and swimin’ than we spent beating Bibles.
We attended camp with like-aged youths from a number of different congregations. To foster a spirit of discovery, the camp counselors mixed us up and spit us into different cabins of about a dozen or so youths. The cabins then competed against each other in such contest as “ugliest cabin counselor,” and “best boondoggle.” Well, you get the idea.
The competition brought us close together, and every night we’d stay up way past lights out to trade dirty jokes, funny stories and the life lessons one has picked up by the age of 12 that you’d never admit back home. (“Ok, don’t tell my friends, but I actually like this girl in my class.”)
At the time, I didn’t know who George Carlin was. Apparently he was Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but I couldn’t remember Rufus being all that funny. (Ted, now that was funny). But someone had snuck out this Carlin tape from his older brother’s room, and well, we had to listen to it. At first, it didn’t really appeal to me. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to a guy talk. I mean, aren’t cassettes for music? And a guy I’d never heard of? I don’t know, it didn’t sound like fun to me.
But as the history of 12-year old mob rule has played out over the years, I was powerless to stop myself once play had been pushed on the boombox which was ubiquitous in every room. So began the playback of his “Playin’ with Your Head” tape that hot and humid Texas night. How do I know this was the tape? Because these are the kinds of things malleable young minds have indelibly stamped into them. Some of the best jokes I tell to this day are jokes I first heard on that trip.
The memories I have from that tape are ones of laughter and learning about a new kind of humor. I’d later learn this is referred to as “blue.” It wasn’t obscene to us, most likely because we didn’t know the difference between obscenity and non-obscenity. Who was I to know why, when he referred to a dike, he wasn’t talking about a levy?
But the reason it sticks in my mind, over, say, the first time I head 2 Live Crew’s tape, or watched Eddie Murphy “Raw,” was because of what happened when inevitably we got too loud and got busted.
In to the cabin came our counselor who wanted to know what we were listening to that was so funny. One of the kids, with presumably the most hair on his chest by that time, wasn’t afraid to say it: We were listening to a George Carlin tape.
For sure, I thought we’d had it. I mean, did he HEAR what this guy on the tape was saying? He used words like “fuck” and “shit” and this was church camp!
But instead our cabin counselor just kind of got a look in his eye; a kind of look-I-know-what-you’re-doing twinkle. Rather than yell, or threaten, he just kind of smirked, told us to keep it down and walked away. We got away with it! Or, as is more likely the case, we were allowed to grow up just a little that night.
So, it was in a church camp, in the middle of the Bible belt, that I learned there is a difference between obscenity and perception. Is someone really being obscene if you are just laughing at dirty words? Where do we draw the line? To this day, I don’t have the answer, but I’ll always remember Carlin as the one who first raised the question.