For me, his top notch material was in the comedy albums between about 1972 and 1981. The pinnacle was Class Clown, which skewered cultural conventions, asked some biting questions about the Catholic Church, and contained those infamous 7 words you can't say on television. Don't worry, I won't say them here, but the intro to that section says a lot...
"I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. I love them, as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid (la la la la). And then we assign a word to a thought (pop!) and we're stuck, with that word for that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words y'know, that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them."His observations about religion are infamous; I won't quote his most famous quips. His wry skepticism about the Christian concept of God never devolved completely into full-on materialist atheism (at least not in the 70s and 80s material that I know the most), and in fact he seemed to flirt with a kind of pantheism for a while. In 1975, he said, about God,
"He's a cool guy. He's us. That's what we always said...what every religion told us. 'Love yourself, love your neighbor, love your God. You're all the same guy.' We just don't have uniforms yet."Still, his takedowns of the legalistic nitpicking in the Catholic Church of his youth were just hilarious...
"It's what's in your mind that counts; your intentions, that's how we'll judge you. What you want to do. Mortal sin had to be a grievous offense, 'sufficient reflection and full consent of the will.' Ya had'ta WANNA! In fact, WANNA was a sin all by itself. Thou Shalt Not WANNA. If you woke up in the morning and said, 'I'm going down to 42nd street and commit a mortal sin!' Save your car fare; you did it, man! Absolutely! It was a sin for you to wanna feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to plan to feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to figure out a place to feel up Ellen. It was a sin to take Ellen to the place to feel her up. It was a sin to try to feel her up and it was a sin to feel her up. There were six sins in one feel, man!"
I saw him live when he came to my college round about 1985. I can't remember much from that show... but those earlier albums have stood with me for decades.
Testing... testing... bleep blop bloop.
ReplyDelete(This post isn't appearing on blogrolls... maybe the appearance of a comment will kick it in the rump...)
Maybe it did? It's up now.
DeleteI love George Carlin! It's hard to believe he's been gone since 2008!!
ReplyDeleteConnie
A to Z buddy
Peanut Butter and Whine
I know... that's 5 years now. I remember he was just starting a new TV show in the year before he died.
DeleteI saw in one of his live shows in his later years - it was kind of a downer. One of my fav routines of his is the shtick about "stuff" and the 7 words you cannot say on television (unfortunately, I have that bit memorized ...)
ReplyDeletethriftshopcommando.blogspot.com
"A place for my stuff" is definitely in that classic time period of the 70s and early 80s.
DeleteThe life of a comic must not be easy... time and the road exact a high toll. My wife and I saw Gallagher a few years ago -- a similar downer in comparison to his upbeat material from the early 80s. We can be grateful that their heydays were well recorded, and hopefully they can make enough cash to retire before getting too bitter about it all.
I like the bleep blop bloop. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd I also like the flirting with Pantheism though I would call it something else.
What would you call it?
DeleteI had two different quotes on the pantheism thing... I'll look for the other one tonight. There's also a much more recent interview.
I dunno. But it's closer to what I believe than Pantheism. God is an emergent phenomenon. He's all of us.
DeleteMore like Emerson's Over-soul, maybe?
Delete'We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.'
DeleteThis is very, very close. Though, I must be allowed to add,
'I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. I love them, as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid (la la la la). And then we assign a word to a thought (pop!) and we're stuck, with that word for that thought, so be careful with words.'
Here's that other Carlin quote, from the album "Toledo Window Box," about God...
DeleteBecause God, first of all, we claim that He is us.. and that's probably the best way to get at it, ok? Most of the major religions have said, "Love your God, love your neighbor, love yourself" and without saying it, they meant, "because basically it's the same guy!" And we don't get that part; we learn later a bit if we do at all. And it's true, it's nice. "Hey guys, I'm God.." It's not an official thing that you buy, and you get a stamp or a medal or a thing. But it's something that ya kinda carry with you... Even if you don't tell a truck driver right out that he's a flower, he's a tree, and you're him, you know that he could buy it if someone else told him!
:) Thanks for that.
DeleteI love George. I, too, have posted about him - his baseball/football routine. I also love his "place for my stuff" routine and, naturally, the "7 words you can't say on television."
ReplyDeleteBaseball/football, as well as "there is no blue food," made an appearance when he hosted the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. He did only standup; refused to be in the sketches. :-)
DeleteCan't quite picture him in a sketch. You have to be something else on top of funny to be in the sketches. Silly, maybe? Whatever it is, it's not Carlin.
DeleteIt's interesting that it's the "thought" idea that drove him away. It's one of the doctrines that the Church itself came up with. You'll notice that Chris really was keen on being just another guy (well, mostly), and being nice about judging others.
ReplyDeleteI go back and forth about that. It depends how much of the gospels I'm thinking were inserted later, versus how much was an accurate record of what the Dude was all about...
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