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George Carlin's legacy
(by Ed Flynn - July 02, 2008)
As John Donne wrote, “Any man’s death diminishes me” and so I mourn George Carlin’s death at the too young age of 71. However, in the interest of honesty, I should point out that I wasn’t always a George Carlin fan so it would probably be hypocritical for me to join in the chorus of unadulterated praise now being heaped upon him.
Probably my mixed feelings toward Carlin’s humor had to do with his reputation as a “counterculture” icon, a satirist who delighted in poking fun at establishment values. As a member of the World War II generation, I was part of that established culture. I was what some people derisively dismissed as “a suit,” a man who wore a tie and shirt and went to work every day and tried to raise a family in the traditional Ozzie and Harriet fashion. As a result, I didn’t always appreciate his comic rants.
Actually, it seemed to me that there were two George Carlins.
One of them was the Will Rogers (does anyone remember him?) style humorist who commented on the sometimes silly and frequently stupid conventions of society and wondered, “Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?”
His “hippie-dippie weatherman” was a comic classic – “Tonight will be continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light toward morning” – and his football vs. baseball comparison – football is violent warfare where the object is to capture the other guys territory, in baseball the object is simply to get home safe – rivals Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first” routine for laughs. That George Carlin was the witty, stand-up comic who appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 100 times with Johnny Carson.
The other George Carlin was a satirist to whom no subject was taboo and who increasingly came to depend on obscenities and the shock value of his words as the basis for his cutting edge humor. That was the Carlin who said, “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is and cross it deliberately.” Maybe. Sort of depends, doesn’t it, on what’s on the other side of that line.
The turning point in Carlin’s career came in 1972 with his “Seven dirty words you can’t say on television” monologue. Actually the words were first uttered not over the air but on stage in
Milwaukee . As a result of that performance he was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, but a
Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, ruling that while the words may have been indecent, Carlin had a constitutional right of free speech to say them.
However, when the monologue was later broadcast over a radio network, the Federal Communications Commission fined the station for airing indecent material. That eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the FCC’s right to prohibit the use of “indecent” language on broadcasts “during hours when children are likely to be among the audience.” You still can’t use the words on network television but they are now commonplace on cable outlets and in the movies.
The notoriety resulting from that controversial case catapulted Carlin into the ranks of the highest-paid comedians of the era, although Carlin himself always claimed he couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about.
“When I was a boy,” he told an interviewer, “I was told to look up to policemen and look up to sports stars, and look up to the military. And we all know how they speak. Apparently it hasn’t corrupted them.”
The only thing wrong with that statement – and I was in the military myself and worked both as a police and sports reporter – is that really isn’t the way they speak; at least they didn’t when I was young. Sure sailors and cops and athletes occasionally cuss – just like a lot of other people – but the assumption that they can’t put a single sentence together without using four-letter obscenities unfit for polite society is both an insult and a fiction.
George Carlin, who once said he would never attend the first annual anything, was scheduled before his death to receive the 11th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor this November. If he could send a message back to be read at that ceremony he probably would have something funny to say about having waited too long for the award, about how maybe he should have showed up for the 10th one.
The program will be aired on PBS. In addition to the tributes there will be a lot of film clips of some of his best standup comedy bits. Just don’t expect to hear his infamous “Seven words you can’t say on television.” If you really want to know what they are you’ll have to look them up for yourself on the Internet where there doesn’t seem to be any lines left to cross.
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