GEORGE CARLIN--Comedy's Dark Genius is Gone

[patrickmurfin]

George Carlin has died.  The bad ticker that had plagued him for years finally got him at the age of 71 Sunday in Santa Monica, California.  Just four days earlier the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that the edgy comedian would be the awarded the 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor this November. It was a brilliant choice.  None of the previous honorees, however dazzling and accomplished, ever matched Twain’s combination of the playful, the whimsical, the bad boy naughtiness, the piercing intelligence, the abiding skepticism, and the deep gloomy disapproval of the human species.

I have vague black-and-white images of Carlin’s early television stand-up in the tight suit and skinny tie era of the mid-sixties in my mind.  Even then there a kind of sweet bitterness to his conventional act that set him apart from the legions of young comedians who trooped across Johnny Carson’s stage seeking fame, fortune, and an invite to the couch from the master.

But it was his routines such as Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman (“with all your hippy-dippy weather, man’) and the Indian Sergeant that convinced me that there was something completely new and exciting going on.  I have been an unabashed fan ever since.

Carlin was often cast as the heir to Lenny Bruce , a notion Carlin embraced.  His former comic performance partner,  Jack Burns said that seeing  Bruce completely changed Carlin’s approach to comedy.  He wanted to be edgier, to say something deeper.  Carlin was even present the famous night that Bruce was arrested for obscenity and was reportedly hauled off in the same paddy wagon for refusing to produce identification (“I don’t believe in Government I.D.s.)

But Carlin was a much deeper and much more complex comedian than Bruce, whose early career was as bulesque emcee.  Bruce had about two years of brillian night club work before his arrest.  He spent the years following in an increasingly self-absorbed justification.

Carlin was never, ever self absorbed, even when he was caught up in the parallel controversy of Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television and its aftermath.  That episode became such a defining moment in his career that it appears in the lead of most of the obituaries appearing today.  But Carlin never let it define him.  He moved along, as Bruce couldn’t.  He wasn’t interested in what it meant to him.  He was more acutely interested in observing, with an increasingly jaundice eye, the sad foibles of the human race.

Some of Carlin’s humor could be actually sweet, in an observational kind of way. His classic routines on the difference between baseball and football and A Place for My Stuff are examples.   Jerry Seinfeld , would base his whole career on this sliver of Carlin’s, just as  Lewis Black , Bill Maher , Colin Quinn and Dennis Leary -the latter three also Irish Catholics-would mine Carlin’s dark side, politics,  misanthropy for inspiration.

Despite the long hair, beard, earrings and beads of that became the trademarks,, he was never a hippy in anything but his enthusiasm for recreational drugs.  By age, outlook and early experience, he always remained rooted in the earlier Beat culture.  While contemporary Jewish comics were still starting out in the Borscht Belt and the first wave of Black comics to reach a wider audience were on the Chitlin’ Circuit .  Carlin and early partner Burns were doing their thing in the Beat coffee houses that still dotted the American landscape in the early Sixties.  The sensibility of the intellectual outsider in a crass American culture which was at the heart of the Beats, stayed with him throughout his career.

Other influences ran even deeper, to his New York City childhood.  He returned to these roots as he grew older in his HMO specials and writing.  He spoke of street life in “White Harlem, which is what we called Morningside Heights, where I had General Grant as a neighbor.” He was also the son of a struggling single mother and an unhappy student in Catholic schools.  The streets put him in contact with both Black culture and drugs.  The Catholic Church strangled him.  In rebellion, he dropped out of school at 14.  He spent the rest of his life rejecting and battling with his ingrained Catholicism.  This broadened from early, crude anti-clericism to a broad ranging critique of organized religion in general and a mocking of “The invisible guy in the sky.”  He could have been the poster child of the militant “New Atheism” we hear so much about these days except that so much of his anguish in life clearly came from internalizing Catholic morality not in superficial sexual issues, but in a deep and abiding sense of right and wrong.

In a lot of ways, Carlin reminds me Kurt Vonnegut, who also got eulogized on this blog last year.  Both we funny men overwhelmed by the sadness of the world.

And now, because he blazed a trail that made it possible for me to post it here with out fear of arrest, are the famous Seven Words:

1. Shit
2. Piss
3. Fuck
4. Cunt
5. Cocksucker
6. Motherfucker
7. Tits

Good bye, George.  We’ll miss you.