George Carlin was prophet hiding in plain sight. He assumed the
guise of an entertainer because, like most soothsayers in their own
time, he preached a doctrine that was feared and misunderstood. In
classical theater it was not the brave hero, wise matriarch, or
revered elder but the Fool,
the jester, the harmless comedian
who illuminated the audience with moral instruction and disseminated
Truth, carefully disguising his lessons behind cantrips and motley
and bombastic lingo. Humor made the medicine go down easier, and
meditations on the human experience were best swallowed with a merry
song and a bit of capering. Or in Carlin's case, some fart jokes.
Carlin, of course, never pretended
he wasn't preaching. He would have balked at the word – or any
similar one so nearly associated with organized religion – but
nightly on stage, in city after city, show after show for over 40
years, that is indeed what he did: he preached. Ethics. Morals.
Values. Lies. Theology. Hypocrisy. Baseball versus football. His
was a vast palette, a hundred-fold dabs of smudgy rhetorical paint
mixed into a acid-tongued slurry of sacred and profane. He left
behind not a single canvas but a tapestry of original comedy that
changed the way we think, how we talk, and, yes, what we can and
can't say on TV.
Carlin made an impression on me from
the beginning. I was 11, I think, as bookish then as I am now,
already a lover of words and a burgeoning cynic. I'd heard my share
of stand-up, mostly from borrowed cassettes or scratchy VHS tapes on
loan from relatives. Though I was too young to appreciate Delirious
in time for its 1983 debut, when
I chanced upon it a handful of years later I reveled in its
hedonistic energy and the flood of forbidden profanity booming from
Eddie Murphy like mortar rounds of raw sewage. Though my sister and
cousins did their teenage best to keep my virgin ears pure (they were
in for it, should I deign to repeat anything I
heard that night), the damage had been done. Foulness was funny.
But it wasn't until I happened upon a bootleg copy of Carlin's Doin'
It Again that the other half of
the equation became clear: foulness is funny, but alone it was flat,
one-note, and ultimately forgettable. But combined with wit,
straight talk, and a keen eye for human behavior, foulness could also
be brilliant, insightful, and, most importantly, a window into
uncomfortable truths. The nascent philosopher in me awoke. Truth
wasn't merely foul; it was icky...but even as a pre-teen I knew Truth was real
and it felt wrong that it should ever be ignored. By sandwiching it
between rants about airline safety announcements and bad drivers,
this scowling ex-hippie in the black t-shirt and ponytail presented Truth in a way that simply could NOT be ignored. Here was a man who
could split your sides with a joke about laminating your own
testicles one minute then ruminate for the next ten about Little
Things We All Share, a hilarious bit that highlighted the beautiful
sameness of the human
experience irrespective of race, gender, or social status. In less
than two hours I was a Carlin convert; I have remained so my entire
life.
Carlin deepened my appreciation of the English language in ways no
style guide or college professor ever could. Words were a hobby of his, and language and its reflections of human foibles a
hallmark of his act for decades. Even his most recognizable routine
of all time, 'A Place for Your Stuff', deconstructed the trappings of
modern life using just one repeated word – “stuff” – as a
lever. But for me the game-changer was his inspired bit about
euphemisms and dishonest language. Using a slick set of blistering
(and frighteningly commonplace) examples, Carlin exposed the
weakening of English through the pervasion of soft, cowardly, and
conniving words and phrases that manipulate ugly truths and turn them
into sugary falsehoods; language that “takes the life out of life.”
'Fired' was now 'management curtailed redundancies in the
human resource sector' . 'Homeless people' used to live
in 'slums'; now the 'economically disadvantaged occupied
sub-standard housing in the inner cities'. Governments used to
be called out for lying but now they merely engage in
disinformation. Meteorologists loved to talk about shower
activity because it sounded more important than showers. And
his most potent example by far: shellshock was enervated war
after war for a hundred years, first to battle fatigue, then
operational exhaustion, and finally post-traumatic stress
disorder. People, Carlin knew, were bullshitting themselves into
believing that if you changed the name of something you
somehow changed the thing itself, and always in a manner that made
life less scary but also altogether less true. And it wasn't
getting better. He foresaw church shootings before the first
recorded one occurred, and posited that the perpetrator would be
called a 'disgruntled worshipper'. He knew then, and
saw where we were going. In an age when Brian Williams
justified blatant lies about his own battlefield experiences by
claiming he “mis-remembered” them, the bit rings truer now than
ever before. That our current president daily engages in falsehoods
that would cow Loki himself makes the case for Carlin as a true seer
plainer than I ever could.
As one who writes for a living, not a day passes I don't rail against
double-speak and weak, duplicitous vernacular in a manner I hope
would make George proud. I don't try to copy him. I'd never
presume. But his influence has fundamentally affected the way I
approach my job. I face my corporate-speaking colleagues like a rock
in a storm, weathering their suit-and-tie lingo with a Carlin-esque
smirk, then riposte the way he taught me: by advocating simple,
honest, direct language. It has made me a more assertive contributor
in meetings and more fearless in my work in general, and I like to
think I've carved out a niche all my own as 'that guy', the guy who
speaks and writes in a straight line. My co-workers don't know what
to make of me half the time, and every sidelong glance or clueless
gawp I earn from them makes me think that George is smiling
somewhere.
I say “somewhere” because he assuredly did not believe in Heaven,
though he used it as a set piece in many, many of his routines, and
Hell, too, naturally. He resented the idea that our dead relatives
are 'smiling down on us' and answering our prayers (“I'm sorry, but
I have to believe we have better things to do after we die than run
the Heavenly branch of the Make a Wish Foundation”). Many people
cited Carlin as the man who turned them away from organized religion.
I tend to think of it more like he managed to put to words many of
the thoughts I'd bandied about for years but could never quite
articulate, and so gave my angst re: theology a voice. I related to
George as the classic 'recovering Catholic', having had The Doctrine
drilled into me at a young age (though admittedly nothing close to
the severity he experienced in an Irish-American enclave
of Manhattan circa 1945) before jettisoning much of it at an older
age. Like him, I observed how the history of human bloodletting and
savagery seemed indelibly intertwined with the rise of
institutionalized faiths and that more people had been murdered in
the name of God than for any other cause. It never made sense to me,
nor did so many so-called 'Christians' regularly engaging in bigotry
and exclusion, to say nothing of their cognitive dissonance pledging
themselves to mortal godheads miles removed from anything Christ-like
(looking at you, Joel Osteen). The sex abuse stories racking through
the news like shark's teeth didn't help, and infinitely, infinitely
worse the follow-up stories about Church leaders covering up the
crimes. Then came Religion is Bullshit, when I
realized my frustrations stemmed largely from an inability or
unwillingness – including my own – to talk straight, not about
“Bible-thumpers” or pedophiles or born-agains, but about the
fundamentally absurd tenets of faith itself. Those things that
simply have to be taken on faith, because if you take so much
as three minutes to think rationally about it...well, you start
laughing. Exactly what Carlin intended.
“Think about it: religion has actually convinced people...that
there's an invisible man living in the sky! And He has a list
of exactly ten things He does not want you to do! And if you
do any of these things, He has a special place full of fire
and torment and smoke and torture and suffering that He is going to
send you to burn and scream and choke and suffer and cry forever and
ever for all eternity until the end of time!
…
But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money! He's all
knowing, all loving, all seeing, and all-powerful but he just can't
figure out money! He always seems to need a little more.”
I suppose some of my more arch-Catholic friends would accuse me of
letting Carlin needlessly carry a chip on my shoulder, but in the 20+
years since I first heard him put to words those scattered thoughts
of mine, I still haven't been able to say it better than he did.
George captured that underlying vileness I had always felt
around orthodoxy and the terrible unease I felt whenever I found
myself in a room where large groups chanted in unison. I suppose
it's the same reason I didn't last an hour at my first ever Boy
Scouts meeting. Carlin didn't make me a free thinker, but he surely
made me realize I wasn't wrong for being that way.
I caught a rerun of It's Bad For Ya on some hotel HBO one
night on a week-long excursion to Oregon wine country. I'd seen
George here and there in movies and TV appearances since his
crotchety golden age of the mid-90s – his brief appearance in Kevin
Smith's Dogma as a Catholic cardinal unveiling the grinning
'Buddy Christ' statue was a gut-busting career highlight (“Christ
didn't come to Earth to give us the willies!”) and his cameo in
Scary Movie 2 savaging the incomprehensible 'Architect'
character from The Matrix was also hilarious. But Bad For
Ya was the first time Carlin had ever seemed old to me.
He'd done some time in rehab, having relapsed into substance abuse
after a long period of sobriety. Clean again, he was slow in his
movements, eschewing his comfortable cross-stage stride for a slower,
more static pose, he used index cards to keep his place, and the
hour-plus onstage seemed to tire him. His bits were more
curmudgeonly, his japes a bit more cutting...or perhaps it was us
who had changed in his absence and we had fallen victim to that
softening against which he had railed so powerfully. But oh
Lord, the fire in his belly hadn't dimmed in the slightest. His
extended polemic about fat Americans remains one of his most viewed
routines on YouTube, and many were the points he made that I had
pondered myself (on seeing an enormously overweight couple, “Jesus,
do these two people fuck? It does not seem structurally
possible that those two could achieve penetration. Maybe they're in
the Circe du Solei thing.”)
I mourned when Carlin died, quietly thanked the Universe for taking
him before he had become completely infirm, and, yes, felt a little
guilty for thinking it. He had the rather rare distinction among
prophets of living to a ripe age and going out on a high note. But
like those who came before him, his words have lingered and endured
and evolved to accrue new meaning in this age, an even more cynical
age that has already shifted under our feet so much since he left us.
There will never be another like him, and I thank the Universe for sharing him with us for seventy-one years.
“Take care of yourselves, and take care of someone else.”