Trivia NYC/DSO Media

There are a million obituaries and recollections of George Carlin going around today, all of them heartfelt and richly deserved. He was a hell of a thinker, and a gleeful optimist who covered his idealism under a thickly-applied layer of murk. He was incredibly prolific, as cunning a lunguist as you’ll ever see on a stage, smarter than you or me, bold in the ways we all would do well to be bold, and deeply committed to and passionate about his life’s work. He outlived Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, his two contemporaries who were the closest thing he had to true peers (I’d include Lily Tomlin in that list, but she got out of the game a quarter century ago), and a lot of what I think of as acceptable or unacceptable in society I cribbed at an impressionable age directly from listening to his records over and over and over (and over and over) again.

I crib his punchlines when I can’t think of my own every day. There are people who think I’m funny because I’ve said things Carlin said first, and I know I’m not alone on that. In fact, I suspect I’m in the majority.

Carlin’s books always left me cold, but that might only be because by the time he started writing them, he’d started becoming an old crank, and I hadn’t gotten there yet. When I do, I fully expect that those books will signify the same way his stand-up does for the adolescent in me.

Did I love the man? Hell, no. There’s a line between being the smartest jackass in the room and being the only smart person in the room, thus giving you license to be a jackass. George didn’t always know where that line was.

But his influence transcended comedy, and if the archetype of the Standup Philosopher is to persist (and where the fuck is anyone we know getting our philosophy from these days, if not from comedy?), then Carlin was a fuckin’ prophet. His influence runs long and wide, and his echoes can be heard in every working American comic with any chops at all. Will we miss him? Shit, yes. But he left behind a considerable body of work, and he ain’t exactly going to fade into a couple of pages of a book on a shelf someplace.

So, for George: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker & tits, and I hope to hell Joe Pesci is taking care of you in the next world.

Update: I just love this quote:

“The best afterlife for me would be to be able to sit comfortably and watch the world on a kind of heavenly CNN,” he said. “To be able to have my remote and say, ‘Okay, there’s an uprising in Spain. Let’s watch that. Or to watch China finally take over the fucking world. Because there’s a billion of those motherfuckers and they’re going to eat our lunch. I would love to get the thousand-year view on the decline of the European birthrate or the “Muslimization” of Europe that’s talking place; the explosion of Latin American culture in the western part of the United States.’ Just sit back and watch. India and Pakistan, both, have nuclear weapons and they fuckin’ hate each other. I’m telling you, somebody is going to fuck somebody’s sister and an atom bomb is going to fly. And I say fine. You know? I just like the show. This world is a big theater in the round, as far as I’m concerned, and I’d just love watching it spin itself into oblivion. Tune in and watch the human adventure. It’s a cursed, doomed species but it’s just interesting as hell. That’s what I want heaven to be. And if it’s not like that, then fuck it. I’ll just kill myself.”

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