Class Clown to Class Corpse: George Carlin is Dead

Posted by ScuzzBuster

June 23, 2008

I don’t have nice days anymore. I generally don’t bother with them. However, when I woke up Monday morning and heard the news the George Carlin was dead, by God I was ready for a crappy day.

I generally don’t get too emotional about celebrity deaths. Shit happens, people die, and 9 times out of 10,even if it’s someone who entertained me on occasion, I just kind of think “oh well, that’s a bummer” and move on. I’m old enough that I’ve woken up plenty of times to a clock radio announcing the death of a celebrity or other public figure. But this morning, as I lay in bed and heard the words, I literally said out loud “Oh no.”

I was introduced to Mr. Carlin’s work when I was an impressionable kid just barely into double digits, much too young for his subversive, perverse routines. But the thing that immediately struck me was his keen sense of wonder and humor when examining the human condition.

“I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.”

It’s easy for people that never gave him much mind to dismiss his earlier work as observational humor, but he had so much more than the banal observations that most comedians of the day had to offer. He loved to honestly discuss topics from masturbation to religion. What elevated his material was the inherent truth in his observations that went much deeper than just bestowing his audiences with a chuckle because they could relate to it. He was the first person to really open my mind as a young man and introduce me to the genuine absurdity of every day life.

And his delivery… There have been many greats who have made their mark with incredible comic timing and entertaining presentation, but Carlin was hands down the master. Not just better than any of the others, but miles above everyone else. Even manic comedians like Sam Kinison and Robin Williams could not hold a candle to what Carlin could do with tone, inflection, and voices. He was a master of the spoken word unlike any of his generation.

“When someone is impatient and says, “I haven’t got all day,” I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?”

He truly loved words. Language was Carlin’s clay as well as a source of inspiration. His work with language was well beyond the clever observation regarding why a particular word, phrase or expression seemed silly or inappropriate, he could instantly sniff out the bullshit in the English language, analyze it with the meticulousness of a scientist and dissect it with maniacal skill. When he finished picking it apart, he could then turn the tables and mold that same language into a weapon to fight his battles and formulate thoughts and ideas on anything from a bowl of Rice Krispies to Abortion.

In the 1960s and 70s he was thought provoking and extremely funny, but as he began to get older his material changed considerably. He finally gained enough notoriety that with each passing year he learned that he basically had nothing to lose and he stopped pulling his punches. His work got slowly more religious and politically oriented. By the time he peaked in this “political” period around the mid 1990s, an evening listening to Carlin was much more cerebral.

He wasn’t “roll on the floor” funny at this point…mainly because his material was so razor sharp and cut so close to the truth most of the time it almost made you uneasy. I loved the man more than ever during this period, but was afraid that the bitter old atheist was going to sink even further into this extreme phase.

“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

I believe that at this point he began his second resurgence. He began to lighten up again, but he still kept a considerable amount of political and religious material in focusing more on the absurdity of religious beliefs. He no longer spun his acts entirely around it but it became a key theme throughout the rest of his career. In this phase and throughout the late 90s up to present he really proved that his sense of wonder of language and his powers of observation were still on top.

I credit a good deal of who I am today to George Carlin. Many of his beliefs became mine, not just because that they were his and I admired him, but because as I became older, more mature and educated, the truth in his work became increasingly clear. This is why his genius still puts me in awe today. He was spot on most of the time. His mastery of language and eagerness to share in his wonderment of it also was the earliest key component to me becoming not only a critical thinker, but someone who can occasionally put more than a few coherent sentences together on paper.

Even as I became some of the “people he can do without” as I got older, I remained starkly aware of my own hypocrisy as well as that around all of us.

I only got see Carlin live twice. The first concert in the late 80s was a point of contention between the two friends I saw him with because Carlin used notes for that show. For whatever reason, it didn’t bother me at all. He wasn’t reading his routines from them, but would refer back to them from time to time as he moved from bit to bit. I don’t know, it just didn’t matter to me at the time like it did to the people I was with. At that point, I was in awe of a God of comedy. I had literally pounded my mind with Carlin tapes for the previous 5 or 6 years and I was stoked.

I got to see him again in a few years later. No notes that time and he was again stellar. One of the few instances you get in your life to see a true “hero,” or maybe more appropriately described as my favorite sick and twisted role model. I stopped seeing Carlin as a comedian and much more of a philosopher the older I got.

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”

Carlin was famous for his regular specials on HBO. These specials started in the late 1970s and he became one of the first legendary comedians through the medium of television. He never quit doing the HBO specials and it is with some irony that his last, which premiered a few months ago, focused a lot on death and his observations regarding how people handle the death of others.

I recorded it on my DVR and have watched it twice since it premiered, but every time I’ve gone through to delete programs to clear space on the damn thing, I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of it, and now I’m pretty grateful for that. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get through a viewing of it without getting a bit of a lump in my throat.

Awesome fucking work, George. I can’t help but feel that the world is going to be a lot harder place to navigate without you to keep a real perspective on how upside down, absurd and just generally how wrapped up in ourselves we are.

What a sad day this is, indeed.

“I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it.”

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