Bummer

So George Carlin passed away. If you follow stories on the web then you have probably already seen like nine tributes. I thought about just letting it go at that, but really this is someone I am personally going to miss, so I am going to say more.

First, one of the right wingish radio stations here in town is running a promo featuring George Carlin and out of respect for him I think they really ought to pull it. They run a snippet of his piece on plastic, you know the one that ends "the planet will be fine" and they tag it with "Not saving the planet for 50 years" or some such thing as if they are clever. Nice little dig at who they perceive to be lefty tree-huggers. The problem is that the whole line is "the PEOPLE are fucked, but the planet will be fine." Folks at WPGB, Carlin wasn't saying environmentalism is wrong, he was saying the rhetoric of environmentalism is pompous. You should pull that promo.

I first heard George Carlin in the basement on a battleship of an industrial cassette player my father had liberated from Niles West at some time (we were probably just storing it). Dad had "AM&FM" and I think "Occupation Foole" maybe "Class Clown" too. "Occupation Foole" has Filthy Words on it and really that's all it took, I was hooked.

I think the first TV spot I saw was on Johnny Carson. I would have been sitting on the floor in my parents' room avoiding going to bed. Carlin did Baseball and Football. "In football the objective is to penetrate enemy territory using short pinpoint strikes and long bombs..." His kind of analysis and language use probably has as much to do with who I am today as many of my early teachers.

First time I saw a full show was at my Aunt's house in New York, they had cable, we didn't. My mom and I watched "Carlin on Campus." Baseball and Football was back, and this time I also got to hear A Place for My Stuff. This one also finishes with the omnibus edition of Filthy Words where he opines how there are many more terms for male acts than for female ("making soup" and "yodelling in the gully"). I remember thinking maybe my mother wasn't the right person to watch this with. But maybe it was fine afterall.

I saw George Carlin live a bunch of times. I think the first was with a bunch of high school friends at a theatre on the Northwestern Campus. This was at the begining of the People I can Do Without period - if comics have periods. Buried in a closet someplace there is probably a t-shirt from that show that will not fit. The last time I saw him live was with my family at Bally's in Las Vegas, must have been 1999ish. I can remember thinking then how little he seemed to be enjoying performing. The life had gone out of it and he really just seemed mad, real bitter about everything. There must be a very fine line between ascerbic and angry that he'd walked his entire life. Recently I'd noticed that the act wasn't quite as pointy even thought the edge was still sharp. I guess he'd managed whatever was bugging him and had gotten back to the fun part.

So all day we've been hearing about the seven words you can't say on television, and I admit that's a swell routine but it isn't the one that usually lives closest to my mind. While I've been thinking about this piece one joke keeps coming back to me, it's about the perfect crime, something like "What if one guy picked up a guy and murdered another guy with him? To the police it would look like a tragic pedestrian accident." Recently the bit I find myself quoting the most is from the I Used to be an Irish Catholic thing where he talks about how none of the kids in his neighborhood got polio because "we swam in raw sewage - you know, to cool off." At the Bally's show he'd worked that into a rant about parents being child worshipers and germaphobes. There's probably a lot of good insight there.

Thankfully the latest generation of comics spent the last decade thanking George Carlin, so hopefully he left us knowing the impression he'd made. And more still thankfully we can all continue to enjoy his wit from recordings of his performances. I am sure I will ruin some kids language with one of those albums soon (Debi, maybe best not to leave your kids with me).

I wonder, just before he went, did he hear in his head: (ping) Two minute warning. Get your shit together!