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  • Jun
    23

    seven-word epitaph?

    Filed under: obit;

    carlin.jpg

    1937-2008

    the really sad thing about carlin is that his despair and general old-guy crankiness overtook his sense of humor years ago, and he ran out the clock on an otherwise brilliant career coasting on pure bile thinly disguised as standup. lenny bruce said comedy is pain plus time, but i guess george didn’t have enough of the latter.

    regardless, and ironically, i expect he’ll live on in the form of chipper, uplifting witticisms mistakenly attributed to him in the kind of blandly humorous email-forwards my dad likes to pass on. a more fitting version of hell george carlin could not have devised himself.

3 Responses to “seven-word epitaph?”

  1. charlie said on June 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 am

    He made me laugh from the earliest stuff I heard, right up through the last HBO special. I always appreciated that along with his observations came a solutions. It wasn’t all rant, it was hilarious solution after hilarious solution. I’m still waiting for the State Prison Farms solution to come into play:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_Town

    “Here’s another idea. I’m going to save you a whole lot of money on prisons, but at the same time we are still going to remove from society many of our more annoying citizens. Four groups are going away permanently.

    First group: Violent criminals. Here’s what you do with these Emmy award winners. You take the entire state of Kansas. You move everybody out. You give them a couple of hundred dollars for their inconvinience, you know. Got to be fair. And then, you move them out, you put a big ten story electric fence around Kansas and Kansas becomes a permanent prison farm for violent criminals. No parole, no police, no supplies, the only thing you give them is lethal weapons and live ammunition, so they can communicate in a meaningful way. Then you put the whole thing on Cable TV. The Violence Network, VNN. And for a corporate sponsor, you get one of those companies that loves to smear it’s logo feces all over the landscape. Budweiser will jump at this shit in half a minute.

    Alright, next group: sex criminals. Completely incurable, you got to lock them up. You could outlaw religion and in most cities sex crimes would disappear in a couple of generations. But we don’t have time for rational solutions! Much easier to fence off another rectangular state. Rectangular states are cheaper to fence, saves the taxpayers money, you know? This time Wyoming. But only for true sex offenders. We’re not going to bother consenting adults who liike to dress up in leather boy scout uniforms and smash each other in the head with ballpeen(?) hammers while they take turns blowing their cat. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It’s a victimless hobby. And think of how good the cat must feel! No, we’re only going to lock up rapists and molesters. Those hopless romantics. Who’re so full of love they can’t help getting a little of it on you. Usually on your leg. You take all of these heavy breathing fun seekers, and you stick them in Wyoming. And you let them suck, fuck, and fondle, you let them blow, chew, sniff lick whip gobble and cornhole each other, until their testicles are whistling ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’! And, and you turn on the cameras and you’ve got The Sperm Channel! And don’t forget our corporate sponsor, we’re going to let Budweiser put little logo patches on the rapist’s pant right here, ‘This Bud’s for you’!

    Alright, next group: Drug addicts and alcoholics. Not all of them, don’t get nervous. Just the ones who are making life difficult for at least one other person. And we’re not going to bother first offenders. People deserve a chance to clean up. Everyone will get… twelve chances to clean up. Alright, fifteen! Fifteen! that’s fine, and that’s it, if you can’t make it in fifteen tries, off you go *fwit* to Colorado! Colorado! The perfect- a perfect place for staying loaded. Each week, all of the illegal drugs confiscated in the United States - that the police and D.E.A. don’t keep for their own personal use - will be air-dropped into Colorado. And we’re going to turn the Coors brewery over to the beer-drinking assholes, and everyone can stay wasted wired stoned bombed hammered smashed and shitfaced round the clock on another new cable channel, Shitface Central ‘This is the real Rocky Mountain HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH!!!

    Ok I’ve saved my favorite group for last. The maniacs and crazy people. Yeah. The ones who live out where the buses don’t run. And I distinguish between maniacs and crazy people. A maniac will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo, but he’ll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time. So you can’t put them all away. You know you got to keep some of them around just for the entertainment. Like a guy who tells you the King of Sweden is using his penis as a radio transmitter to send anti-semitic lesbian meatloaf recipies to Soupy Sales and Marvin Hamlisch. A guy like that you want to give him his own radio show. No, the maniac farm will be reserved strictly for hopeless cases. Like a guy who gets a big tatoo on his chest of Liza Minnelli taking a shit, you know? And he tells you if he wiggles a certain way it looks like she’s wiping her ass, you know? A guy like that, you want to get him into custody as quickly as possible. Now, for the maniac farm, I think there’s no question we got to go with Utah. Utah. Easy to fence. Easy to fence. Right next to Wyoming and Colorado and Colorado is right next to Kansas, and that means all four groups of our most amusing citizens are now in one place.

    Except for the big fences. And I think I have another one of my really good ideas for Cable TV. Gates. Small sliding gates in the fences. Think of what you’ve got here. Think of what you’ve got. Predators, degenerates, crackheads and fruitcakes. Nine hundred miles of fence seperating them. Every fifty miles you put a small sliding gate. But, the gates are only ten inches wide and they’re only open once a month… for seven seconds. And you know something? Fuck Cable, this shit has got to be on Pay-Per-View. Because, if those gates are only open seven seconds a month, you are going to have some mighty interesting people pushing and shoving to be first in line. Deeply disturbed armed cranky lunatics on drugs. You know the ones. Lot of tatoos… lot of teeth broken off at the gumline… the true face of America. And every time you open the gates, some of the more aggressive ones are going to get through. The creme de la creme. The alphas. They’re going to get through, they’re going to find each other and they’re going to cross-breed. And pretty soon you’ll have a melting pot. Child killers corpse fuckers drug zombies and full-blown wack-a-loons. Wandering the landscape in search of truth and fun. Just like now! Everyone will have guns, everyone will have drugs, and no one will be in charge. Just like now! But at least we’ll have a balanced budget.”

  2. josh said on June 23rd, 2008 at 10:43 am

    like i said. there are some great lines in here, and of course he never lost that wonderful ear for language. but overall the amused/depressed ratio is just way out of whack. compare it to his earlier stuff, when he was actively doing social & political commentary, and this is just a nihilist screed — and kind of an adolescent one at that. call it satire if you want, really dark satire, but to my ear it lacks that element of warmth and humanity that distinguishes comedy from simple, fuck-it-all ranting.

    i mean, a guy who has reached the point where he’s dropped all comic pretense and is telling reporters flat-out: “I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas” …is a guy who has no more jokes left in him. he’s become something else. still somebody who has things to say that are worth listening to, perhaps, but somebody who’s lost (or deliberately forfeited) the comedian’s ability to transmute ugliness into beauty. that’s what i find sad.

  3. josh said on June 23rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    on further reflection, maybe this post is in poor taste. the important thing is that a great performer has passed on, and the world is poorer for it. no disrespect for george, just sadness.

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