FAREWELL GEORGE CARLIN

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

George Carlin mourned as counterculture hero

Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. Some People Are Stupid. Stuff. People I Can Do Without.

George Carlin, who died Sunday at 71, leaves behind not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive language.

The counterculture hero's jokes also targeted things such as misplaced shame, religious hypocrisy and linguistic quirks — why, he once asked, do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died of heart failure later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

And

In one of his most famous routines, Carlin railed against euphemisms he said have become so widespread that no one can simply "die."

"'Older' sounds a little better than 'old,' doesn't it?," he said. "Sounds like it might even last a little longer. ... I'm getting old. And it's OK. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won't have to die — I'll 'pass away.' Or I'll 'expire,' like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they'll call it a 'terminal episode.' The insurance company will refer to it as 'negative patient care outcome.' And if it's the result of malpractice they'll say it was a 'therapeutic misadventure.'"

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I used to say that I don't have any heroes. But after awhile, I was like, well, John Lennon is a hero to me, Paul Robeson, too. More recently, I've been thinking of adding George Carlin to my brief list.

After all, both Carlin and Lennon came into my life at around the same time. When I was in fourth and fifth grade in the late 70s, while I was devouring my older brother's Beatles collection, George Carlin specials were a staple on the newly created HBO. Needless to say, I totally grooved on his work, which kept me in stitches for months. Thirty years later, it is impossible for me to not believe that he did something to my thinking. That is, when I was a kid it was all about laughing; as an adult, however, I fully understand just how subversive George Carlin was, intellectual even, and deeply sophisticated.

For instance, I loved Carlin's baseball/football routine from the moment I first saw it:



And yeah, I "got it" at the age of eleven or twelve: baseball is a pussy sport; football is a real man's sport. But decades later, with the cultural criticism background I got from studying radio, television, and film at UT, I now get that Carlin was also commenting on historic changes in American culture. Baseball was a sport for a more naive and optimistic agrarian America, a nation that had no desire, for the most part, to impose its will on its citizens or other nations. Football, however, is a sport for twentieth century America, a nation of industrial and military might, projecting its values and power on the world during "the American Century." For that matter, I now also get the criticism of American materialism and consumerism implicit in Carlin's "Stuff" piece.

I'm certain his cultural criticism masquerading as comedy I experienced as a child put me in an intellectual space where I was ready to reevaluate my role as an American later in life. For that, and his more obvious leftward political leanings, George Carlin was truly a Real Artist, going well beyond the entertainment function of a comedian, toward subversive political activism.

And his death makes me as saddened as I was by John Lennon's passing.

Farewell, George Carlin.

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