George Carlin died three weeks ago and it’s taken me that long to figure out how to write about him. There just weren’t words. Initially it was embarrassment – revulsion at just how amateur every joke or opinion I’ve offered appears after watching his routines. That as Jerry Seinfeld eloquently noted, whatever joke anyone’s been telling for the last thirty years, Carlin told it first. And better.
But there was more to it than that. Carlin was “post-commentary.” Not in some cheap silly fashion, as artists are “post-modern” or candidates claim to be “post-politics.” The universal truth and clarity of Carlin’s observations placed them as close to “beyond dissection” as any entertainer’s work could ever be. Media’s cheap and most of it’s full of shit. We can parse and qualify the points of ninety percent of the mouths we hear on television, radio or the internet. Not Carlin. There were no two meanings to anything he said, and whether you liked it or not you knew in the end, He Was Right.
I won’t embroider that point here. Better to let Carlin explain himself. Watch these video clips from his last HBO special, It’s Bad For Ya.
The bullshit that binds us
God bless America
Your imaginary rights
Start at minute 4:00 of the first clip and move through the following two. If those fifteen or so minutes don’t savage all the delusions and absurdities at the heart of our aggregate national idiocy, you’re not living in reality.
George Carlin was far more than a comedian. He was one of our great individualists, in the air of Mencken and Twain.1 He didn’t believe in faiths, factions or parties. I think he believed in people, in the inherent decency of humans alone, one on one, uncorrupted by the forced affiliations that drive us to so much groupthink – to zealotry, bubbles, wars and superstition… To the ludicrous insistence some omniscient hand has the wheel. That or in a tough moment like the present some elected official or policy can “make it all better” – as if a McCain, Obama, universal health care or “social justice” tax reform might save us from the bogeymen we read about in the business pages.
I never met George Carlin and I don’t know anyone who knew him. But I do know his work, and the thrust of his message is particularly important in year like this, facing an election like this and its endless marketing tentacles. If there was a way to honor a person like Carlin, someone who gave us so many laughs and so much spot-on social criticism, it’d be to stop, if just for a day, and tune out all the assholes telling us what to believe. To consider what we each want to do, what we think and what makes sense to every one of us as individuals. Turn off the Sean Hannities, Keith Olbermanns and Bill O’Reillys. Click off Townhall, HuffingtonPost and DailyKos. Tune out the Limbaughs and Frankens and Savages and in the words of another eminent voice silenced this year, “stand athwart” the idiot wind of the chattering class and the interests that feed them advertising dollars. Say “Thanks, but I’ll think for myself instead.” If you do that – if we all do that instead of buying into the misrepresentations and spin – we’ll have voted correctly this November, whoever gets elected.
Carlin wouldn’t have voted at all, of course, and that’s fine, too. If you examine the candidates’ platforms and conclude it doesn’t make any rational sense to cast a ballot, by all means, stay home on Election Day. Just so long as you make your own decision, based on actual facts. That’s all that matters. And that’s all Carlin ever asked us to do. If he had any message or mantra it was aptly plagiarized from Benjamin Franklin – “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”2 It can’t be repeated enough… Think for yourself.
George Carlin was Right. We’re not at our best when we’re caught up in a fervor for aimless “revolution” or pumped full of bullshit by the mouthpieces of K Street and Madison Avenue. We’re at our best when we observe, consider and apply our judgment rationally. So thanks, George, for pressing us toward that end, as futile as it might be.3 And Godspeed, even if you didn’t believe in her.
———-
1 Fittingly, Carlin will posthumously receive the The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor this fall.
2 Often attributed to Lou Reed, who reversed the quote in “Last Great American Whale” (“Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear”). New York, 1987.
3 In a country where one third of the people refuse to believe in evolution, it’s hard to image “thinking for yourself” ever becoming the majority norm.
I was “attacked” by Creationists downtown a couple nights ago, and judging by the facts they offered to why the Earth was 6000 years old, I can see how rationality is really lacking for “thinking for yourself” in this country.
PL: As to Creationism or Intelligent Design, as much as I love Ben Stein and respect anyone’s right to offer his views to the public, Intelligent Design is not on par with Evolution. Not even close.
I don’t think court rulings reflect actual truth in a lot of cases because advocates game an imperfect system, many of the decision makers are biased and have political affiliations to protect and juries are often swayed by “performance” masquerading as expert testimony. However, I don’t think that criticism applies to the Federal Bench, and District Court Judge John E. Jones’ perfectly reasoned and excellently written decision in the “Intelligent Design” trial, Kitzmiller v. Dover, is the best repudiation of the “ID” McTheory : http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/04cv2688-111.pdf
People will argue that Creationism and ID deserve the same consideration as Evolution because so many have believed in them for so long and “faith” is somehow genetically wired into our DNA. I won’t bother explaining the A380 sized hole in that “reasoning.” You know it. When people offer that argument, offer them a copy of William A. Henry III’s “In Defense of Elitism.” All ideas are not equal on their face by sheer dint of utterance.
Ha… I just used “dint.” What a pedantic ass. Buy that book. It’s good.
As hard as it is to admit, this post nearly drove me to tears. George Carlin was everything you and anyone else says he was, and more. He was my idol, as he was to any and all disillusioned individuals in this wretched world. His death (he’d have hated the word “passing”), however innitially shocking, was no surprise; even in “It’s Bad For Ya,” he looked like age was wearing on him. Like Lenny Bruce before him, he was a man who fit so perfectly within his time and place. He will be sorely missed, and dearly remembered. Rest in Peace, but never in obscurity. Thank you, too, PL, for once again clarifying what many of us have never had the eloquence to express.
Thanks for the tribute, really well written. And your message is spot on as well. Thanks to the influences of people like George Carlin, yourself, Nassim Taleb and Richard Feynman, I’ve been trying to better myself by really thinking for myself. I’ve almost completely stopped following the news and my life is better for it.
RIP George, you will be missed.
I had never heard Carlin’s material before, but I’ll definitely need to check him out. Are you an Ayn Rand fan, to me at least this post hits at a lot of the same values she stressed.
PL: Ayn Rand’s absurd. I agree with her on the free market in theory, the same way I agree with Milton Friedman (who was 10X smarter and more coherent saying most of the same things). But she’s an absolutist, which places her in the extremist camp, with the likes of MoveOn, Grover Norquist and all the other ludicrous unrealistic sorts at the poles of the argument between liberalism and conservatism.
We need freedom in the markets, as much as we can possibly have. But we also need to recognize that there must be some minimal safety nets and regulation to avoid the sort of behaviors encouraged by short term thinking in the past two bubbles.
that’s gotta be the most sincere, heartfelt post you’ve written. that last message can’t be reiterated enough.
PL: People compare the stuff I write to lots of other writers. The voice came from, or at least started with, Carlin. He was the first and only teacher I heard when I was young who made sense to me. I was at that age where they were handing us all the rules we had to follow… The ones they can’t explain… The ones that seem well-intentioned, but kind of silly – more geared toward perpetuating old systems than bringing people to their fullest potential. Anyway, I heard Carlin and he crystallized every one of my suspicions and question so strongly and concisely all I could think was, “Yes.” And the motherfucker was funny. He wasn’t some angry throwback hippie. He was truly fucking hysterical, and a real student of language, who used it like not other comedian before or after. And if you doubt me on that, perhaps Bill Safire can convince you otherwise:
George Carlin on Words
The Lexicographic Irregulars have lost a valued colleague. George Carlin, who died two weeks ago at 71, was a social satirist in comedian’s clothing with a great feel for language, both fair and foul. A decade ago, he called my attention to “a sin of omission I have encountered . . . the dropping of the words is concerned from the phrase “as far as [whoever] is concerned.” And late last year, he set this column straight on the metaphoric origin of nose open. When at age 17 he brought it up with “a black fellow airman from Chicago,” he said: “I was told it referred to a boxer getting his opponent’s nose to bleed. At such a moment, the nose-opener has gained control.”
The comedic linguist was attuned to the complicating shifts of nomenclature: he observed that the shell shock of World War I became the combat fatigue of World War II, then was called operational exhaustion in the Korean conflict and post-traumatic-stress disorder in Vietnam. Unlike many famous comics, he scrupulously refrained from taking credit for other’s lines: he disclaimed coinage to me of a memorable play on words: “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?”
In his incessant use of “the seven words you can’t use on television,” he gave us more than a good taste of bad taste. His defense, however, could be in the lessening of offense-taking: Carlin may have reduced the power of odious obscenities and puerile profanity by devaluing their shock value, which was a perverse kind of linguistic service, as far as I’m concerned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06wwln-safire-t.html?ref=magazine
I just need to point out to K that saying “RIP George, you will be missed.” would probably have pissed George Carlin right the fuck off.
When I caught the news that Carlin had passed away (for some reason it was third-page news, behind whatever the hell Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are up to this week) I was genuinely upset, and went through a period of mourning. I’m aware that sounds puerile, but it’s true nonetheless. I wrote something of a eulogy for the cat, but there were things I wanted to say for which I couldn’t really find the words. Of course, PL comes through for me once again and voices what I might want to put into text if only I could. This is why you have a famous blog and I do not. But thanks for the tribute — I think you nailed exactly what made Carlin important to all of us.
When Anna Nicole Smith died, she got more coverage than Thompson, Vonnegut, and Carlin combined. As wretched as that is, guys like them couldn’t have done what they did had the world treated them any other way. He was subversive in a world that still needs more traitors.
I’ve been waiting for this post for weeks, and I’m glad to see you took the time to do it right, PL.
PL: The “traitors” line is nice. Well said.
If you don’t already have this http://www.amazon.com/Class-Clown-George-Carlin/dp/B00004X0OH/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1216083556&sr=8-2, buy it. It’s his best stuff.
PL: I like this one as much: http://www.amazon.com/Playin-Your-Head-George-Carlin/dp/B00005A8N0/ref=pd_sim_m_5
“Love and Regards” always cracks me up.
George Carlin has been a part of my life since I was a little boy. I went from watching him as the Conductor on Shining Time Station to watching him perform live in Las Vegas, and I was always completely captivated by him.
My favorite thing about George Carlin was the way he would take a broad topic (words you can’t say on t.v., the ten commandments), and break it down into smaller components for examination. Doing this enabled him to demonstrate just how silly things are if you take the time to view them at their most basic level. It’s one lesson I’ve tried to take with me, and it has served me well so far.
Carlin was truly one of the greats, and he will be missed. Recently, I sat down and watched a marathon of standup comedy. The experience made it readily apparent that nobody today, and likely nobody in the future, will even come close to Carlin’s level of comedic genius.
“I think he believed in people, in the inherent decency of humans alone, one on one, uncorrupted by the forced affiliations that drive us to so much groupthink…”
Well put. I remember an interview with Carlin in which he said, “I love human beings one on one. It’s when they get into groups — and start singing fight songs — that I get nervous.”
Watching “Carlin at Carnegie” on HBO was a seminal moment in my youth. It’s still hilarious today.
Very well written, as always.
I first saw George Carlin on the comedy channel at some ungodly hour in the mid 90s. Living in Australia I’d never heard of him before. My only source of his shows since then has come from downloading anything of his I could get my hands on via the internet. His social commentary and ability to say brilliant things in the guise of a joke was second to none. His words changed my way of thinking.
And now I hear that the brilliant man is dead, not via the farcical media, but three weeks after the fact on a completely unrelated site.
There’s a certain sad irony to it that I don’t think would have been lost on George. May his message live forever.
It’s nice to see all of you agreeing about the wonders of individual thought. I suppose the fighting song will come later. Maybe that’s what brought the USSR down, workers must have started thinking like Carlin.
*** Often attributed to Lou Reed, who reversed the quote in “Last Great American Whale” (“Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear”). New York, 1987.
I think Marvin Gaye may have come up with that reversal even before Lou Reed. Check out the last verse of Heard it Through the Grapevine.
PL: Excellent call. Man, Marvin was one badass motherfucker. So soulful and sweet, but some of his stuff, like “What’s Going On?” had such a sharp message behind it. “Grapevine” has such an ominous undercurrent.
The lyric:
People say believe half of what you see,
Son, and none of what you hear.
I can’t help bein’ confused
If it’s true please tell me dear?
Do you plan to let me go
For the other guy you loved before?
Don’t you know…