| the blog of human failure
Ah, my buddy George Carlin. I owned every book. I saw every HBO special. I saw him three times live since I was 9 years old. I owned every album without exception from Take-Offs and Put-Ons through Life is Worth Losing. I lied on my dirty mattress on the floor in my shitty studio apartment in New Orleans by myself three months ago and watched his last HBO special It’s Bad For Ya and cried. I laughed with tears streaming down my face the entire time. This fucking old guy who had every right to not bother put together over an hour of unmitigated magic as harsh and wonderful as anything else I’d seen him do. I have no higher expectations for anyone in life than I do for George and he kicked my ass.
Fuck Lenny Bruce. He creative and revolutionary, but he wasn’t funny. Fuck Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. They were insanely influential and hilarious, but they didn’t even write their own material. They were like actors in a one man comedy play. Only Carlin did it all.
There was a segment at the end of the album Jammin’ In New York that changed me indefinitely. George Carlin wasn’t really my favorite before this. In fact I didn’t really have much of an interest in stand-up comedy at all. I always liked jokes and funny movies but the extent of my exposure to pure comedy was listening to Howard Stern in the car with my dad and then late at night listening to his Jackie “The Joke Man” tapes quietly on the stereo in my room when I was supposed to be asleep. I must have bought this CD on some strange whim. Maybe I saw Carlin on TV; I can’t remember. The name of the track on Jammin’ is “The Planet is Fine” and something about George’s logic put a bug in me. The hubris of man trying to save endangered species when we couldn’t even help each other. The idea that everything is horrible and that there’s very little that we can do about it except enjoy the show. The big electron. It doesn’t hate, it doesn’t judge. It just is: for a little while.
The theme of this piece didn’t seem to me that George was suggesting that we shouldn’t care about saving the whales or that we should sit back and not care as people suffered and died around us. The point was that you could say these things out loud. Everyone can think the same thing, that life is precious, that death should be avoided at all costs, that life must be embraced and should have the same irrefutable meaning to everyone. Everyone can say these things and believe them but you don’t have to. There’s no writing in the sky that makes it true no matter how many people believe it. That’s the kind of thinking that moves like the bubonic plague through your mind, killing one third of all the ideas you hold dear as it passes from neurological village to village. My eyes changed shape as I looked at the things in this world that people believed because of moral, ethical, emotional, religious, and indoctrinatory reasons and started shoving the garbage aside.
Everyone pushing you to believe something has an agenda. More often than not they started off as scared children and started collecting simple truths about the world as they saw it or were told to see it and used these precepts as building blocks for the foundation of their personality. These unsubstantiated ideas are the support beams that hold up men’s souls and the only way they are able to validate the unkown is by eliciting your consensus. And it’s bullshit folks, and it’s bad for ya.
This is an insight that I can say without hyperbole changed my life. This was the man who grabbed my child-sized brain and pulled at it with both hands. It could have been Mark Twain or Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or Baruch Spinoza but it wasn’t. It was George Carlin.
I know Carlin didn’t like the word hero, but fuck him, he’s dead. There’s no other person whom I never met that affected me so much. Don’t take shit from the zeitgeist, be prolific, work hard and work constantly, keep a small circle of friends and loved ones who you protect furiously, treat language seriously and with respect, have a healthy disdain for religion, treasure individuals but be suspicious of all groups, and tits always look best in a pink sweater.
After Jammin’ in New York it was Brain Droppings. After Brain Droppings it was Back in Town. After Back in Town it was the Little David Box Set. After that it was everything else all at once. And then it was Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks and Woody Allen and Chris Rock and Doug Stanhope and a lifetime love with stand-up comedy that will die with me.
I don’t know what to say. I can’t say enough. My ex-girlfriend sent me a text message. My dad left a note on the front door. George said he wanted to live to be 94. He said he was going to write some fiction books. He definitely had another great special in him. I never got to shake his hand and tell him how much I liked him. How many hours I spent alone without a friend in life listening to him and how much he helped me out.
Ah, my buddy George. No one has to get out of your way anymore.
Take care of yourself and take care of someone else. Thank you. Good Night.
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George was like the grandfather I could only wish I had. He raised me as Mr Conductor and then taught me about the world as a comic.
There will never be a replacement.
Comment by D14BL0 — June 24, 2008 #