At around 5 p.m. last night, as George Carlin was drawing his last breath in Santa Monica, I was having a debate with a co-worker about the future of the human race. Her contention was technology will save us. My argument was we're pretty well doomed.
I blame George Carlin for that.
Without getting long winded, I've heard every word Carlin said over the air on HBO. I read his books, studied his CDs, saw him live and recited him in front of my grandmother about this time last year. "Back in Town" is the single finest stand up performance I've ever heard (I've said that for years). He was the only artist I know who was rewarded for being uncompromising. I mourn him.
The thing most people who knew Carlin and his seven dirty words (tee hee, dirty) was that he was a fatalist. He believed institutions wrecked us and made fun of them as they gave others comfort. Religion was a target, government and home was a target. One of my favorite quotes to define the man had to do with Harley Davidson once represented "burning schools, raping women and killing policemen, all necessary functions by the way." Yet he didn't hate the teachers in the schools, the women being raped or the men inside the uniforms getting shot. It was the way the world is.
As he said so many times, he was a fan of entropy, of how things ended, which is decidedly unfunny unless you adopt the guise of a pissy old man. But it was the creative young man that seemed to stick in people's minds, the man who challenged authority in a cool "un PC way" that so many people admired. The rebel. Carlin was not a rebel. Carlin was not the "soul voice of reason crying into the wilderness." He enjoyed the heat from the riot and was able to crack a good joke about it.
The end of "Back in Town" sums the man up. He believed in "The Big Electron" but ceded no idea into how anything worked. The planet, he said, is not in danger because it will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. But we're here. For a little while. Entropy dictates systems break down and we will break down but not now. It's not a life affirming "carpe diem" thing. Like everything he did, it was just the way the world is. We're here. Someday we won't be. And he's right.
From a comedy standpoint Carlin changed two things - He pioneered the idea of a special program for comics (along with a few others) in the format we now know as the "HBO Special" and he was an absolute master of momentum, rhythm and, of course, language. If you don't believe, check out his bit on football versus baseball, or the language section from "Back in Town" or his oft copied bit on airlines or basically anything he did since 1989. It takes amazing craft to package his ideas to a mass audience.
But I loved his inane human qualities. I loved his two albums right after his wife died, where he hated everything and spewed bile to a level that left some fans scratching their heads. I loved how he started his shows with something to knock you on your ass. I loved that he gave up on us. He looked around, he saw what was happening, and with all the hope gone, all he could do was laugh at how we still clung to what we thought was important. "Come on Dave, let's go look at the bodies!" Indeed.
If there's one aspect to his death that stings me right now, it's how we'll not have his voice as we go through our times anymore. With Bill Hicks, another comedian who has long since kicked it, I find myself thinking what he would say on certain subject - how he would perceive and tear apart. I have a feeling over the next few months I'll read a lot of things and wonder how GC would have felt. I'm doing that now, as he would have hated his own death. All the bullshit obits like this one. All the analysis from people who didn't know about him...like this one.
One last thought. GC was misquoted more than most. I remember reading a quote attributed to him that said "life isn't about how many breaths we take but about the moments that take our breath away." Don't believe that shit. Don't ever remember GC as someone who loved life or who wished you well with some sort of dime store sentiment. He looked at us and decided to go another direction, not out of hate but out of rationality. That was GC.
And I mourn him.
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