Author’s warning: Though the contents of this column are clean, those of some hyperlinks are NSFW.
George Carlin, who lived for seven decades and change and first turned heads through his controversial “Seven Dirty Words” routine, would have been 80 this Friday.
Nearly nine years after his death from heart failure at age 71, his body of work as a groundbreaking standup artist resonates for perfectly explicable reasons. He enriched every moment of his career with so much more before and after the 1972 bit that drew as many guffaws as it did gasps.
Had he lived through this year, he doubtlessly would have made like a ranting Roomba through the messes of today’s culture and discourse. He also may have been honored for 60 years in the business the same way he was in 1997’s George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy.
As it was, and still is, his output — from his first strides in the late ’50s to his last HBO special and album in March 2008 — leaves something for ears of all tastes.
Anybody who accepts air travel as a necessary evil can appreciate the 17-minute “Airline Announcements” track from Jammin’ in New York. Exactly 25 years ago last month, Carlin picked up and picked apart every absurd turn of phrase one is bound to hear before, during and after a commercial flight to this day.
Surprisingly, “boarding process,” “pre-boarding” and “final destination” have stuck in the industry vernacular. Or maybe that is not a surprise. Perhaps the airliners know a trick to alleviate aggravated and anxious travelers who have had the pleasure of hearing the bit. This author, for one, has made such listening a ritual on the eve of any plane trip.
The speech’s subject matter and placement in the middle of its show was appropriate. It marked a point at which Carlin took off from a steady diet of goofy to grouchy deliveries.
From the rant about golf courses in the latter half of Jammin’ to the bulk of the next five dual special-albums, he derived his humor through an angry persona for his final 16 years. His shock value no longer leaned on language alone. He now had a habit of hailing exaggeratedly violent potentialities that were literally unheard of in the A Place for My Stuff, let alone Hippie-Dippie Weatherman era.
Through his admission and his style, Louis C.K. is one of Carlin’s most prominent emulators. (Photo by Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic via Getty Images)
There was at least one of those for nearly every major performance in the ’90s and ’00s. There was the “bad news” bit in Jammin’, the first half of Back in Town, the airport security rant leading off You Are All Diseased, his idea of “looking for a little fun” in Complaints and Grievances and vision of a mass national catastrophe in Life is Worth Losing.
But each of those productions still had comparatively tame content, even with the salty syrup still drizzled on it. Carlin never tired of the “…ever notice…?” adage, often following it with something we may indeed have never otherwise noticed. And yet, once he brought it to light, the observation was obvious, not to mention amusingly conveyed.
“Brilliantly observational” was this author’s first assessment upon hearing Carlin’s oft-recycled baseball-versus-football speech. The meat of the monologue concerned the formal and informal terminology of each sport, all of which the same sportscasters tend to utilize in the same tone.
Carlin opportunistically drew up 14 quick hits for a side-by-side contrast of baseball and football parlance. By alternating a sunny voice for the former and an ominous one for the latter, he shattered new thinking ground for countless consumers in fewer than five minutes.
Yet even after Carlin’s two voices force one to think critically about those distinctions, plenty of Americans retain their passions for both games. In the same vein, the many listeners with a broad comedy palate can appreciate the late entertainer’s range that reflected his rich life and times in the industry and our culture.
That makes it all the more fitting to remember that he used the bit as the opening monologue when he hosted Saturday Night Live’s inaugural episode. On that autumn evening in 1975, a well-known, yet still-coming-into-his-own comedian underlined unexamined aspects of America’s two most popular sports to set a standard on what became an American late-night TV institution.
Fast-forward four decades, and the best hosting monologues come via the likes of Louis C.K., who in his particular case is expressly and patently influenced by Carlin in many of his forms.
C.K., one name on one of multiple laundry lists of Carlin scholars, directly addressed that influence at a 2010 speaking engagement. There, he highlighted Carlin’s insatiable appetite for new material and how he made that prolong his relevance.
Because Carlin’s mouth never stopped watering for fresh angles to take to the comedy circuit, it never stopped emitting enjoyable bits until fate silenced it.
Yet the rampant residuals live on nearly a decade later. That’s not bad for anyone.
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