Somebody’s gotta say it
Posted by TFG on June 24th, 2008
Lookie here…George Carlin was a pretty funny guy, but his admirers are a tedious bunch (and lordalmighty, they’ve come out of the fooking woodwork), given to lavish swoops of praise and pedantry that are more commonly attributed to Ayn Rand fans, who are much less regularly encountered in daily life. But there’s never not some pothead standing around doing an interpretive wink-wink-nudge-nudge Carlin routine, hungrily awaiting praise from the proles he despises.
Regardless, even though he was an atheist and let everybody know it, I hope he made it through the Pearly Gates intact and isn’t just worm-food. That would be sad.
Me, I’ve seen two comedic geniuses in my life: Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. George Carlin ain’t a patch on either one of them. George’s wallet doesn’t say Bad Motherfucker on it…it says Check Out My Big Brain, but it was never quite as big as he planned. It was big, fershur, just nothing to write home about.
June 24th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Shit, I’ve been following this blog for a long ass time. Let me tell you, you’ve said some shit that has made my hair stand-up on the back of my neck…shit, you know I loved you even when you had a penis in the forms of balloons on your head. But you done cross the line here. George was a funny MOFO who played on words like a rapper before even Biggie…that’s right…I went there after brooklyn’s finest. Holla!
June 24th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Carlin will be a footnote in comedy history, along with Mort Sahl, while Cosby marches into eternity ranked up there with Stan Laurel, the Marx Brothers, etc. Carlin would be a footnote now but for all the counterculture acolytes in the news media and liberal blogosphere still waiting to make the dark journey.
June 25th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Calm down, Joaquin. I said he was funny, and I meant it. He’s just not the funniest man to stride the earth EVAR, as the recent hosannas would have it. Anyway, it’s entertainment and therefore subjective, by definition.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Carlin was funny in the early 70’s, when his counterculture/anti-establishment style was fresh and observational. As he tried to get more and more “relevant”, either by yelling more or being more left-wing political, he got less and less funny.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
George Carlin was more clever than funny. I enjoyed his cleverness very much. He wasn’t that funny the last ten years or so, more just an angry, distempered old man. Most of the boomers sitting in his audience didn’t realize he was laughing at them, not with them.
Still, R.I.P. I will miss him.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I am with you on this TFG. He was funny, no question. I loved his query as to how/why white people sing the blues (he guessed that GAP must have been out of chinos). But i do not get the newly deceeased president-level of attention this is getting….