Last week I watched George Carlin do stand-up for the first time. “You Are All Diseased”.
I can tell he’s a funny guy, and many of the bits are hilarious. I liked the 90’s pop-culture puns, the advertising song, the hover-parents part, and the religion segment. But it really took me back how much didn’t age well.
The airline security he whines about - in 1999 - is nothing compared to what we have today. And being thrilled with terrorism, even in a comedy routine, just rubs me wrong. Maybe because I grew up after 9/11. I assume terrorism jokes are to me like Nazi jokes would be to someone of that generation. “Hitler/Osama had balls” is meh, “setting off a bomb in a marketplace and killing hundreds of people I find exciting and stimulating” is unfunny.
ETA: disproven The ‘get real about terrorism’, ‘it’s not going to happen to you’ bit. I was actually a little curious and tallied the total number of people who have died or been injured in terrorist attacks, per this list, since I was born. The total I got is 9,945 people over 25 years, including 9/11. Times three for a rough life expectancy of 75 years, (The cynic in me expects to see another 9/11 attack, or two, in my lifetime,) divided by 3,250,000 for U.S. pop, and I get a very poorly estimated figure where nearly one in a hundred Americans will be injured or killed in a terrorist attack. Compare with roughly a little over one in a hundred Americans who will die in a car crash.
The fear of germs and fuck-immunizations segment also fell flat on me, even satire on that subject has lost its humor what with the anti-vax movement and over 790,000 Americans dead from disease in the span of two years (compare ~420,000 total U.S. dead from WWII).
Some of the other things, cigars for example, or shock-value of the words “fuck” or “cocksucker”, just don’t apply any more.
So overall, I thought it was a mixed bag.
~Max
