George Carlin: Bullshit Detector

Nobody questions things in this country anymore ... people are too fat and happy; people are way too fucking prosperous for their own good. Everyone’s got a cell phone that’ll make pancakes and rub their balls now.  —George Carlin, It’s Bad For Ya!

I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand why my dad—a devout Catholic and social conservative—loves George Carlin so much. My best guess is that, beyond all the controversy, my dad saw the same things I did when I watched Carlin onstage working his comedic magic: a disarmingly keen insight about the often-twisted, unjust and common-sense-deficient world in which we live; a profound, finely honed gift for language, oration and argument; and, most of all, a burning, unapologetic honesty—an air of righteous indignation that failed to spare anyone who was full of bullshit, or sleepwalking through life unaware of said bullshit.

As one of my co-workers said this morning, Carlin was one of the Great American Truth Tellers—like Mark Twain, Woody Guthrie or Muhammad Ali. Even when it jeopardized his career, he always chose to cross the line; to risk everything to shake his audience out of complacency and into contemplation, in the process getting a fuckload of laughs and becoming the living embodiment of the Socratic ideal “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

“One of the tasks of a certain kind of comedian,” Carlin told me last year during our Paste interview, “... is to find out what bothers [people]—where their soft spots are, their hot buttons, and press them. I love doing that. That’s part of the rebellious ‘fuck you people’ thing that’s somewhere in me: ‘You think that’s sacred? Fuck you. Your kids? This parenting shit? I love getting in there with a big gouger and just gouging out their insides and having them sit there, and having half the people enjoy it and the other half rethinking for a moment.”

Yesterday, Carlin’s years of cocaine use finally caught up with him, and he died of heart failure (on the Sabbath, no less). If it were someone else, perhaps I would’ve said “passed away,” but it doesn’t feel right to fall back on such niceties, especially when Carlin was so fond of reminding us how absolutely ridiculous that kind of sugar-coated language is. So I’ll just say that the man is dead. Soon, his friends—just as Carlin joked on his last tour—will be able to smile as they scratch his name from their address book: “It gives you a good feeling ... a feeling of power, of superiority, to have outlasted another old friend. 

“But you can’t do it too soon ... you can’t come running home from the funeral and get the book out—you can’t do that. ... You have to let a little time go by. I have a rule of thumb—six weeks. If you’re a friend of mine, and you’re in my book and you die, I leave you alone for an extra six weeks. Six extra weeks in the book, on the house, it’s on me. But after that, ‘hey, facts are facts—fuck you, you’re dead! Out you fucking go!’”