George Carlin: An Appreciation

Scientists have discovered that saliva causes stomach cancer–but only after swallowing small amounts over a long period of time. –George Carlin

I first encountered George Carlin’s singular combination of wit and profanity in 1975. My best friend Jeff had bought FM & AM, along with Class Clown, and we were both hooked. This guy cut through the inherent silliness in human behavior, and was popping cultural balloons right and left. Eight years in a Catholic school made me particularly receptive to Class Clown, though I gotta confess that I never had the stones to ask Sister Mary Reginald if God could make a rock so big that even He couldn’t lift it; Sister Reginald wielded a vicious ruler. I promptly recorded on my spiffy new cassette recorder (Suck it, RIAA!) so that I could listen at home. Listening was a cautious, often nerve-wracking affair; if my mother, vice-principal at my Catholic school, actually heard some of this stuff, the consequences would have been grim indeed.

With the fervor of the converted, we hunted out the next few albums—Toledo Window Box and Occupation: Foole. While FM & AM represented a formal change in Carlin’s act—the AM side has his more traditional material, while the FM side had the beginnings of his transformation into a countercultural comic—the other albums represented key steps in that transformation, as he started to tear down the underpinnings of his traditional routines, whether it was the Catholic Church, tearing down the walls of “good taste” whether discussing the seven words, urinal etiquette, or snot (the original rubber cement). Jeff and I couldn’t get enough of this stuff. We learned some of the routines, but most of the time we couldn’t get through them without cracking each other up. But I did get pretty good at some of Carlin’s voices, getting an inkling of just how much prep work went into his routines.

Then it happened. In late 1975, An Evening with Wally Londo (Featuring Bill Slazlo) was released. If Toledo Window Box and Occupation: Foole tore down the existing comedic infrastructure, then here is the where the new George Carlin finally emerged from the rubble. Here was the staggeringly brilliant comic sensibility that we’d see for the next 30 years—riffing on the stupid little things we do every day, for instance. But above all, this was an album about language: “Flesh Colored Band-Aids”, “Wurds”, “For Names’ Sake”… Carlin deconstructed the way we used language, leaving me trapped on the floor, gasping for breath. In a stunning turn of events, I managed to con my unwitting parents into buying the album for my birthday, carefully hiding the “Parental Advisory” sticker as we headed to the cash register. The teen-aged cashier figured out my game, and whisked the album into the bag with a wink. I still have the album, though my turntable has long since turned into a postmodern Lazy Susan.

Next was 1977’s On The Road, While it wasn’t as consistent as An Evening With Wally Londo, the album is worth it for “Death and Dying”, which has the famous “Two Minute Warning” sequence. Two minutes before you die, Carlin posits, you get an audible warning: “Two Minutes; get your shit together”. So what do you do make the most of those two minutes?

Carlin’s career was derailed in 1978 when he suffered a severe heart attack that kept him sidelined for several years. During that period, my own interests drifted some, as I finished high school and started college. His new albums registered in the back of my mind, but priorities shift once you get to college, and I had concluded that if you were trying to get laid quoting comedy routines, Monty Python was your best bet (I can still quote “Crunchy Frog” in its entirety; make of that what you will).

So George faded into the background for me. But in 1991, I was in grad school at Penn State, and as luck would have it, cable+HBO came with my apartment. So I actually caught his eighth HBO special, Jammin’ in New York, and it was like rediscovering Mozart. From beginning to end, it was magnificent. Interspersed with riffs on contemporary society (he opened with a blistering attack on the Gulf War (the first one)) were new takes on old bits, such as the weird things that we all have in common (“You know that stupid face you make when you drink grapefruit juice in the morning? I make it too! Why do we drink this shit?”). The centerpiece of the entire evening (for me at least) was a 16-minute take on the airline industry’s assault on the English language. Some of this stuff was old (“Please get on the plane.” “F— you, I’m getting IN the plane!”), but the routines had been expanded to cover every bizarre part of air travel, from the boarding process to the safety lecture to captain’s announcements. I ended up in a job that had me traveling almost every week, and every single time the flight attendant began the safety lecture, I had this urge to start asking some of Carlin’s questions.

In fact, the routine did such a perfect job of illustrating how sloppy language can cause ineffective communication that I started using it in my college composition classes. When the tape started, most of my students had this look, silently accusing me of trying to get out of doing the lesson; but then a funny thing happened. Some of them started to realize that the things Carlin was complaining about—wordiness, imprecise language—were the same things that I had been hammering into their skulls for eight weeks. And for some, Carlin’s routines finally brought things into focus. That’s the thing that set Carlin apart from all the others; he understood the rhythm of language to a degree that most writers can only reach in their most fevered wet dreams. Like Michaelangelo with stone, Carlin honed every word, every pitch, cadence, gesture for maximum effect.

For what it’s worth, George, thank you for your intelligence, your wit, and your irreverence. And if God has a sense of humor, I like to think that you found Him waiting for you just inside the Pearly gates, at the Terminal Snack Bar.