I take some small comfort in the fact that George Carlin would most likely be laughing his ass off at all the heartfelt lamentation going on in the wake of his demise. The fact remains, however, that Carlin was - along with Steve Martin - the first stand-up comic I ever got into. One of the first shows I remember watching when we got HBO (that wasn't Beastmaster or one of those late night burlesque specials) was Carlin at Carnegie. Unlike Martin, Carlin's movie career was...spotty at best, but he was Mr. Conductor in Shining Time Station, which blows away anything Martin has done since the first Bush administration.
Like most of my friends, I had memorized much of Carlin's oeuvre as a kid, from "Baseball vs. Football" to the "69 assholes tied in a knot" chant. In later years he was often accused of being more hectoring than funny, but I really thought some of his strongest and most incisive material came during that period.
It's a lousy feeling when all those artists and entertainers you admired in your youth start dying off. Fortunately for me, there were only a handful that affected me significantly and changed the way I look at things. Unfortunately, Carlin was one of them.
Anyway, here are some of my personal highlights.
The Seven Dirty Words
Life is Worth Losing
The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people...white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on...good, honest, hard-working people continue - these are people of modest means - continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you, they don't care about you, at all[...]That's what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Maybe my favorite of his recent ones, You Are All Diseased:
Question #1: Did you pack your bags yourself? No. Carrot Top packed my bags. He and Martha Stewart and Florence Henderson came over to the house last night, fixed me a lovely lobster Newburg, gave me a full body massage with sacred oils from India, performed a four-way around the world, and then they packed my bags. Next question.
Go fuck yourself, George. And I mean that in the most reverent way imaginable.
I saw him live three times (and I won’t bore Pete by cluttering up the comments with my oft-repeated tale of the surreality of Time #2), and not only was it always a pleasure, but also a comforting reassurance that cynics aren’t born, they’re made.
I found this quote over at the Portal Of Evil (courtesy of someone called “Your Mother”), and it’s just about the best damned eulogy one could make: “See, George was the first person to teach me that if it smells like shit, it probably is shit.”
Give ‘em hell in The Afterlife, Mr. Carlin.