Jun
23
I remember when I was 12 or 13, I taped a George Carlin special on HBO during one of their free preview weekends. We didn’t have pay cable when I was a teenager. The stand-ups I mostly saw were the toothless variety on “A&E’s An Evening at the Improv.” But I still loved stand-up comedy when I was a kid. I remember cooking up a game with my friends in which I pretended to be stand-up comedian. I got up on their porch, and holding a cylindrical block like a microphone, I made jokes about a wife I didn’t have and rattled off bits of observational humor about the other kids in the neighborhood while my friends stared at me blankly. We never played that game again. But if I’d ripped off George Carlin’s routine from his hour-long “Jammin’ in New York” HBO special, I’m sure it would’ve gone over better.
I must’ve watched that special a hundred times. In it, he riffs on the then-recent Persian Gulf War (”It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel, plus cable.”), the prefix “pre,” a magazine called “Walking,” getting caught talking to yourself and airline travel. Airline travel’s a common theme among comics, but Carlin made it his own: “About this time, someone is telling you to get on the plane. ‘Get on the plane. Get on the plane.’ I say, ‘F*** you, I’m getting IN the plane! IN the plane! Let Evil Knievel get ON the plane! I’ll be in here with you folks in uniform! There seems to be less WIND in here!’”
Carlin was a comedian known for his bad language, having rattled off the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” early in his career, but his gift for deconstructing the English language is what elevated him above comics who just spout obscenities for effect. He provided insight beyond the simple, “Do you ever notice…?” banality so many stand-ups have built their sitcom careers upon.
With Carlin’s passing, now all my favorites of the form are gone. He’s joined the other greats — Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks and Andy Kaufman — but left a wealth of performance material that will never seem too dated, too out-of-step. I could watch or listen to any one of his performances a hundred times more and find it just as funny. He was always ahead of his time, operating from a different plane of reality; you still can’t say those seven words on TV. With that in mind, I’m not sure if we’ll probably never make it to the same plane that Carlin was on…or in.
May 12th , 1937 - June 22nd, 2008
-Brad Lohan
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