Thursday, June 21, 2018

George Carlin: A Ten-Year Reminiscence

Doin' It Again - the one that started it for me
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.”