KING GEORGE
by Daren Foster

ALSO ON SITE

KING GEORGE
By Daren Foster

George Carlin died this week. It’s one of those deaths that cause you to pause and realize that, yes, in fact, you too are going to die. In all likelihood sooner than you had planned. If George Carlin can die than we are all susceptible to that particular affliction.

It’s not his larger than life, celebrity status that made him seem immortal. Hell, there are lots of famous people out there who not only do I know will die but their demise couldn’t come soon enough for my liking. Or more charitably, I wish for their appearances to be restricted exclusively to daytime talk and cable reality shows. The world would simply be a better place once they are dead and buried, literally or figuratively. I’m easy either way.

Carlin’s seeming imperviousness to death stemmed from his fearlessness. Not necessarily fearlessness in the face of death although he certainly appeared unruffled at the prospect of dying in recent interviews. Fervently and outspokenly anti-religious, Carlin faced the void without any crutch or dissembling, demanding in one of his routines that every effort be made to keep him alive. The alternative, as he saw it, wasn’t something he felt necessary to rush into.

The fearlessness I’m referring to was a daring to fly in the face of everything and anything everyone holds sacred. It isn’t just about the bad words that got him arrested back in the `70s and that each and every obit since his death has featured front and centre. Subsequent generations of comics made the mistake of assuming the profanity was what earned Carlin high marks and the notoriety, missing the point of his attack entirely. It was never about the words themselves but the repressive mindset that believed it had the right and obligation to filter what people could and could not hear.

In the 2005 documentary, The Aristocrats, Carlin is one of a hundred comics who talks about and performs snippets of what is considered to be the world’s dirtiest joke. He shows up early in the film and gives a precise dissection of how the joke works before launching into an eye-poppingly disgusting segment explaining the finer point of diarrhea and other such bodily fluids. He sets the bar impossibly high and reveals the likes of Bob Saget to be the lightweight, smirking little schoolboy he is. Alone amongst all the comics, only Gilbert Gottfried seemed to comprehend the affect of the joke on a level equal to Carlin.

Ironically, we watch Gottfried fall back on the joke at a Friars’ Club Roast when the crowd turns on him after he tries out some 9/11 humour. No one in the room thinks it’s a laughing matter and this is the raunchy annual affair where years earlier Ted Danson showed up in black face when Whoopi Goldberg was being roasted. Gottfried bails himself out, winning back the room with his version of the aristocrat joke, landing safely after traversing into verboten comedy territory.

That is a location where George Carlin spent much of his career. As the tributes to him pour in, the counter-culture label is always attached. While not incorrect, the term’s usually accompanied by an image of Carlin as the long-haired, pot-smoking, coke-snorting `60s hippy. Certainly that was one aspect of his counter-culture persona. The one Saturday Night Live sought to establish for itself when it debuted in 1975 and Carlin was the show’s very first host. But by that time, the 60s counter-culture had infiltrated the mainstream and Carlin seemed, briefly, out of his element.

It didn’t last long. Once the great conservative pushback happened with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, George Carlin picked up where he left off, doing what he did best: speaking truth to power.

That is what distinguishes the great comedians and satirists from the rest of the pack. A fearlessness to go public and poke holes in their hypocrisy, their prejudices and bias, their cherished belief systems which, in the comic’s view has led society astray. I can count the number of comedians who fit that description on one hand. Lenny Bruce. Richard Pryor. Bill Hicks. Sam Kinison when he wasn’t picking at his misogynist scab. And George Carlin.

Arguably, he was at his political best during the mess of the last 7 years. A native New Yorker, Carlin didn’t wrap himself in the American flag after 9/11. Instead he ridiculed the heavy-handed military response it brought about. He summed up American foreign policy with the pithy observation that it was simply about dropping bombs on brown people. When Barbara Bush suggested that Hurricane Katrina refugees camped out in Houston’s Astrodome were underprivileged anyway, so things had worked out well for them, Carlin called her a ‘silver douche bag’. An objectionable and offensive label for a former First Lady and the mother of the current President to be sure but not nearly as demeaning or derogatory as the sentiment which had provoked him.

George Carlin wasn’t simply a provocative, political comedian. He was nothing short of a genius. He didn’t tell jokes. He constructed stories. Interweaving thoughts, observations and, at times, jaundiced opinions, Carlin delivered a world view that consistently challenged conventional wisdom. His delight in the malleability of language gave rise to such classic routines as ‘Stuff’. Carlin performed the role of the court jester masterfully, succeeding wildly in pissing off everyone who took themselves too seriously.

While the post-Seinfeld trend in stand-up skewed heavily in the direction of the “Did you ever notice how..?” and “What’s the deal with.. ?”, comics throwing out non-stop one-liners in the hopes of securing a sitcom deal, Carlin plugged away, perfecting his craft both onstage and on the page. He was determined to tell the truth as he saw it and seemed unconcerned about the consequences. It’s that kind of fearlessness you hope might transcend death. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be the case.