Yeah, I saw him on his first tour after her death and he sort of admitted that he was looking a bit more on the darker side of things.
Even if he got bitter and unfunny in the last few years, I thank him for all the fun he did give us over the years. Reading these posts all those bits are coming back into my consciousness. My Carlin records are long gone, but I think I’ll be visiting iTunes this evening.
I’ll miss you, brother.
(bolding mine)
Fuck, now I’ll die curious.
Goodbye, motherfucker, indeed 
He did one after the first Iraq war. Paraphrasing…
George H. Bush: What? They have bigger dicks than us? BOMB THEM!
Police are searching today for a deranged geography teacher who shot six people because they did not know the capital of Scotland. Be advised that he is armed and dangerous, and that the capital of Scotland is Edinburgh.
Even when he wasn’t so funny he was worth listening to. From The Nation:
True dat, many, every motherfuckin’ word.
I just checked to see if I listed George Carlin as one of my death pool picks; glad to see I didn’t. Scoring points on him would have been a dubious honor at best. The man was a legend of legends and his contributions to the comedy world will be sorely missed.
Like most everyone else, I felt that his bitter tirades against American society were tiresome and unfunny. I noticed that hardly anyone in the audience would be laughing during these segments. His older material was better and I could definitely tell the difference between then and now as I was recently listening to his Carlin on campus CD (circa 1984 I believe).
Hardly anyone has mentioned Carlin’s books in this thread. I have all three (ALL THREE!!!) Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? I like Brain Droppings the best, though he does get bitter in some of the latter parts of the book. Napalm and Silly Putty is mostly his standup routine transcribed in print. When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? is a nice read, but the tone is mellower overall.
I have to wonder if George ever completed his Incomplete List of Impolite Words.
No, it’s not, not a bit of it, and it’s one of the reasons he sucked so bad at the end. He should have stuck to comedy and language, when he got into pseudo-political Marxist rantings, he sounded just as stupid as you usually do. Bullshit from the mouth of a brilliant man is still bullshit.
My father worked in a bank in Manhattan, and every now and then I’d get to go with him. We’d take the train up to the city, I’d have fun playing in the bowels of the Greenwich Bank building, and then my godmother (who lived in the city) would pick me up and we’d go sightseeing.
During one of these trips – I’d have been around nine at the time – we went to a record store. Now this was around the time my friends were starting to pick up comedy albums…the kind that we sure as hell couldn’t let our parents know about. Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy and Comedy Is Not Pretty!…Robin Williams’ Reality…What a Concept – that sort of thing. So, I’m walking around the record store and I find the “comedy” section. I decide to try and find something new. Something none of my friends and I had heard before. And there it was…this long-haired guy was sitting on a stool with his finger jammed way the hell up his nose, and there was a sticker telling me that this album contained “The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television”. Sold.
I also bought K-Tel’s Wings Of Sound, as a cover story. After all, I had to sit in a train for a couple of hours with dad, and there was no way I could let him know I had bought filth such as this.
I wasn’t in the door two minutes when mom swooped over and grabbed the bag away from me. She inspected my purchases, found my brand-new copy of Class Clown, and was practically overcome with the vapors. I was told to take that album straight outside and throw it right in the trash where it belonged. I protested, but it was no use. Out it went, to be placed very carefully on top of the trash bags, making sure not to get anything particularly slimy on it. That evening, of course, it was retrieved and stashed under my bed.
The next day, while dad was at work and mom was busy upstairs, I crept into the family room, put the album on the family stereo, turned the volume down to “1”, and pressed my ear up against the speaker. I lasted about three minutes before I had to stop…I couldn’t stifle my laughter any longer, and mom would surely become suspicious if I kept busting a gut over “nothing”.
It was another two or three days until I was left alone in the house long enough to give it a full listen. I made sure to bring my little portable tape recorder with me, that way I’d be able to stealthily listen to a recording of it whenever I liked.
In retrospect, I have to wonder if mom knew full well that I’d go and fish that album out of the trash (dad, of course, would’ve snapped it right in two). If so, well, thanks mom…and thank you George…you both did a wonderful job in giving me a balance of nurturing and corrupting influences.
I have the first two. I looked at Pork Chops but it looked like it had a lot of the same material in it.
RIP.
Having said that, I never got it.
What’s the deal with jumbo shrimp? Hilarious. Wondering too why we park on the driveway but we drive . . . snore.
Similar fodder makes it into e-mail lists that get widely circulated by the faint of intellect and my maiden aunts.
Oh, but he was a rebel, man, he really stuck it to, like, the man, and Wall Street. Okay Maynard. If nothing else, his contrived “edgy anger” has to answer for the sins of Dennis Miller and his moronic “rants.”
One of my favorite things about him was his ability to grab you with the very first line of his stand-up routine. A few of my favorites:
“Why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”
“Don’t you think it’s just a little bit strange that Ronald Reagan had an operation on his asshole and George Bush had an operation on his middle finger? What are these two men trying to tell us?”
Probably was favorite bit was (I assume) ad libbed at a heckler in the audience:
While I like his older work, I didn’t really discover him until right before his “bitter” phase. I heard somewhere that his wife died a week or two before his 2000 HBO special You Are All Diseased (which, incidentally, has the greatest cover picture of any of his albums), which explains why he was so much angrier there than he had ever been before. Sure, he had done the bitter old man routine for a while, but I always sensed that he was sort of winking at the audience behind it all. But after his wife died, I think he forgot he was joking.
Wherever he is, I hope he’s found some peace.
Sig gratuitously added.
This is not the Pit, Weirddave. Keep your insults confined to there.
You’re out of line there Skip. I said that BG usually sounds stupid. That’s a comment on someone’s posts, not on the poster, and is in perfect accordance with board policy.
Sorry, I’m not buying it. You said he sounds stupid, not that his posts come across as stupid, or what he writes is stupid.
Furthermore, Cafe Society is not about other posters; your comments about BrainGlutton don’t belong in this forum. The dicussions in Cafe Society are meant for the subject-at-hand, not what you think about any of the other participants. You’ll want to take a look at the forum rules.
Lastly, as you’ve been told numerous times before, comments on mod decisions can be made in the Pit, or, nowadays, in ATMB. If you have anything else further to say, do so in one of those forums.
I’m saddened beyond words.
My favorite comedian. My favorite celebrity.
Goodbye, Air Marshall Carlin.
My favorite bit of his was about growing up Catholic in the Bronx (or Brooklyn or wherever it was). I don’t remember word-for-word, but the gist of it was this:
CARLIN: My friends and I, our parents always made us go to confession. Our neighborhood was all Irish, and Father Mulligan was big on penance, so we used to hate going to him for confession. Then some Puerto Ricans started moving in to our neighborhood, and the diocese sent a Puerto Rican priest into one of the churches nearby. It wasn’t long before my friends and I got wind of the fact that Father Lopez’ penances weren’t nearly as bad as Father Mulligan’s. “Bless me father, for I have sinned, yada yada yada…” “Tres Santa Marias!”
“Oh, and, uh, covet…heavy on the covet, Faddah…”
I’ve felt kinda lost all day. George was the greatest smartass the world has ever known. He was my hero, my role model.
And I saw a quote, about himself, and unknowingly about me, “Scratch a cynic, and underneath you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
RIP George.
