On George Carlin, 1937-2008
George Carlin
Four days before he died on Sunday at age 71, The Kennedy Center announced that George Carlin would be this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Carlin was never much for formal recognition, so the timing of his passing could not have been more appropriate.
I saw Carlin only once, in 1990 in a performance at the DeAnza College Performing Arts Center in Cupertino, Calif. While it’s hard to recall specifics of his set, what I always held in awe was Carlin’s ability to find ironic juxtapositions and isolate the outright lies in conventional wisdom. With this laser-like skill at parsing language and sussing out the culture’s fine art of obfuscation, Carlin had an uncommon gift, and if he had chosen to use that gift in the polar opposite direction, he could have been a wizard on Madison Avenue.
As he is eulogized today, Carlin is mainly regarded as a comedian of the counterculture, but that is specifically incorrect, and I’m not sure that such an animal exists. He was a member of the counterculture whose knowledge base and focus was aimed at the culture at-large. His comedy was fueled by righteous anger at the collectively dumb things that we do as players in society and the globally stupid things done by our surrogates.
Chase pointed out to me that there’s some irony in Tim Russert and George Carlin dying so close together, since they both had acutely sensitive b.s. detectors. But while Russert had entre to the halls of power, Carlin was screaming outside the security gate. Society needs both players to keep things straight.
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2K in Vegas. C’ya, George.