George Carlin, the thinking man’s comic, is dead

I suspect the notion of listening to a comic on CDs the way one listens to a singer or rapper is alien to most people these days.

But I actually own three comedy albums that I still listen to as much as I listen to any of my musical CDs: two of them are by Richard Pryor entitled That Nigger’s Crazy (1975) and Live on the Sunset Strip (1983) and the other is by George Carlin entitled Class Clown (1972), on which he gives the following notorious riff on “dirty” words:

There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of
them that you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad….

You know the seven don’t you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.

Yet, as funny as he was, I have no doubt that Carlin derived far greater satisfaction from making people think than from making them laugh. His genius, of course, is that his observational humor made us think and laugh in equal measure:

Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

Speaking of dead people, there are things we always say ‘I think he’s up there now smiling down at us.’ Now, first of all, there is no ‘up there.’ And why doesn’t anyone ever say, ‘I think he’s down there now smiling up at us?’