Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics

"Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time."
--George Carlin.

He swallowed his last spit on Sunday. And although he sure wouldn't want us to piss and moan--the man always said he was just "passing through"-- I gotta tell ya, the world has lost a giant of a man, and I, for one, am more than a little bummed out.

I'm too young to remember Carlin's first transformation from beloved guest of The Tonight Show to defendant before the Supreme Court of the United States, brought up on obscenity charges. (They found his material "indecent but not obscene", and ruled the FCC had the authority to prohibit its broadcast when children might be listening). This child was listening, though.
The first time I heard a Carlin album, I was with my dad. That would have been Playin' With Your Head (1986). I was fourteen years old...the youngest fourteen-year-old you can imagine. Of course, I was captivated by the language: this guy said words that would get me whipped, and said them without flinching. Before too long, I had the entire album memorized (except for the last track: I'll get to that later). I performed George's routines, word for word, at school that year, earning a fair bit of notoriety. (I remember once riffing off pretty much the whole album to the school janitor, who was having trouble standing up, he was laughing so hard. When I'd finally finished everything I knew, he told me I'd done a great job, I sounded just like his cassette."
"You mean you've heard that before? How come you didn't stop me?"
"'Cos you were doing so well. Also, I wanted to know how much you'd memorized."

That felt good.

I slowly gathered unto myself the entire Carlin discography. The biggest benefit of leaving home, for me, was being able to listen to George Carlin at top volume, not giving a fart in a glove who heard.

Very quickly I realized there was more to Carlin than those famous Seven Words. Unlike, say, Eddie Murphy in his Raw and Delirious phase, George Carlin didn't make dirty words the centerpiece of his comedy. Even the actual "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" routine exists to question whether there really are such things as "dirty" words:

"There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions...and words."

That resonated with me: it sounded to me like I was being given permission to speak my mind, so long as it didn't hurt anybody. What a liberating thought.

George Carlin said his job was "thinking up goofy shit" and his purpose in life was "to serve as a warning to others." Actually, what he did was hold a mirror up to Western society and describe in no uncertain terms what he found in it. The more uncomfortable things looked, the more Carlin positively revelled in showing them to us. No sacred cows; no taboos. In a sane world, we'd canonize people like him.

Carlin became more and more political as time went on, and I found myself agreeing with most of his politics. His take on prostitution, for example:

"Selling's legal. Fucking's legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal? Why is it illegal to sell something it's perfectly legal to give away?"

On school uniforms:

"The idea is that if kids wear uniforms to school, it helps to keep order. Hey! Don't these schools do enough damage makin' all these children THINK alike? Now they're gonna get 'em to LOOK alike, too? And it's not even a new idea; I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand, because the narration was in German."

On feminism:

"A long time ago in England a guy named Thomas Culpepper was hanged, beheaded, quartered, and disemboweled. Why do I have the impression women were not involved in these activities?"

On radical feminism:

"This is the noblest thing that women can think of? To take a job in a criminal corporation that's poisoning the environment and robbing customers out of their money? This is the worthiest thing they can think of? Isn't there something nobler they can do to be helping this planet heal? You don't hear much about that from these middle-class women. I've noticed that most of these feminists are white middle-class women. They don't give a shit about black women's problems. They don't care about Latino women. All their interested in is their own reproductive freedom...and their pocketbooks."

Then there was Carlin's obsession with the quirks and oddities of the English language, a trait I have myself in spades:

Here's one they just made up: "near miss". When two planes almost collide, they call it a near miss. It's a near hit. A collision is a near miss.

Oh, I could go on, and on, and on, like that last track of Playin' With Your Head I mentioned above. Carlin was a master at reeling off endless lists of things, seemingly without taking a breath and without notes. I laboured for months to cram this routine into my head and it simply wouldn't go.

Carlin's small reminder of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about:

anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence flash floods rabies torture bad luck calcium deficiency falling rocks cattle stampedes bank failure evil neighbors killer bees organ rejection lynching toxic waste unstable dynamite religious fanatics prickly heat price fixing moral decay hotel fires loss of face stink bombs bubonic plague neo-Nazis friction cereal weevils failure of will chain reactions soil erosion mail fraud dry rot voodoo curses broken glass snake bites parasites white slavery public ridicule faithless friends random violence breach of contract family scandals charlatans transverse myelitis structural defects race riots sun spots rogue elephants wax buildup killer frost jealous coworkers root canals mental fatigue corporal punishment sneak attacks peer pressure vigilantes birth defects false advertising ungrateful children financial ruin mildew loss of priveleges bad drugs ill-fitting shoes widespread chaos stray bullets runaway trains chemical spills locusts airline food shipwrecks prowlers bathtub accidents faulty merchandise terrorism discrimination wrongful cremation carbon deposits beef tapeworms taxation without representation caped maniacs sunburn abandonment threatening letters entropy nine-mile fever poor workmanship absentee landlords solitary confinement depletion of the ozone layer unworthiness intestinal bleeding defrocked priests loss of equilibrium
disgruntled employees global warming card sharks poisoned meat nuclear accidents broken promises contamintion of the water supply obscene phone calls nuclear winter wayward girls mutual assured destruction rampaging moose
the greenhouse effect cluster headaches social isolation Dutch elm disease
contraction of the universe paper cuts eternal damnation, the wrath of God,
and PARANOIA!!!

(I once referred to the act of trying to memorize this routine as "doing the anal rape thing"--not knowing my girlfriend's parents were within earshot. I had to do some fancy talking to get out of that one.)

I had the honour and privelege of seeing Carlin live, at Center in the Square here in Kitchener, five years ago. (Thanks again, love, for those tickets.) What a laff riot. More than fifty years that man's been in comedy, and thankfully, age did not mellow him. I can picture him now, up there on his own little cloud, pointing at us and laughing.

George Carlin, 1937-2008