George Carlin’s Heart Fails

To people of a certain age, mostly males, there is a definite memory of sitting in a basement somewhere between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans listening to comedy albums on a stereo. Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers and Bob Newhart could make a boring afternoon sail by. And then, there were George Carlin’s records. Second only to Richard Pryor in changing stand-up as an art form, Mr. Carlin went from clean-cut 1950s humor, to 1960s and 1970s counter-culture laughing to 1980s and 1990s social criticism. He passed away yesterday all too soon at 71.

The most famous of his routines was “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which appeared on his 1972 “Class Clown” album. He did the bit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (then as now a hotbed of social rest) that year and found himself in jail for disturbing the peace (at a time when the US was using its airpower in Vietnam in the Linebacker II air campaign). After the bit was broadcast on WBAI in New York, the Supreme Court eventually ruled 5-4 that it was “indecent but not obscene,” giving the FCC some leeway in deciding what could be broadcast. Mr. Carlin noted, “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of.”

Had it been just one bit, Mr. Carlin would have also been a footnote in America entertainment history. Instead, he recorded 23 comedy albums, wrote three books (was there ever a wittier and more theologically insightful title than When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?), appeared in 14 HBO specials (still a record), and 16 films. For this, he earned five Emmy Nominations, and he won 4 Grammys for the best spoken word album of the year. He was to have received in November of this year the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, given by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Upon being told of the honor, he replied, “Thank you, Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people.”

In his later years, he tended to sound a bit grumpier than when he was young. However, that may have been merely a reflection of the Bush years. Mr. Carlin said in a National Public Radio interview a few years ago, “I’ve always been sort of anti-authoritarian and I really don’t like arbitrary rules and regulations that are essentially designed to get people in the habit of conforming.” What bothered him, one believes, was the willingness of a great many to go along with the nonsense handed to them. He once told Reuters, “I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas.”

What he did believe in was the entertainment value of life if one looked for it. He said, “The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I’m concerned, and I’d love to watch it spin itself into oblivion. Tune in and watch the human adventure.” Some might say “Rest in Peace,” but to Mr. Carlin, that would have been a curse rather than a blessing.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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