 The Passing of Greatness: Notes on the Death of George Carlin
I find that as I get older, things suck more. Music sucks, novels suck, politics sucks, and few things suck as much as comedy. I'm a crotchety old man and I'm not even 40 years old yet. But the fact is that none of those things are as good as they were just a twenty years ago.
The only thing worse than watching everything suck more and more is watching the masters of those forms grow old and die. We're in an age where we're not just seeing artists go, we're seeing entire art forms go with them.
Will there ever again be an album as great as Exile on Main Street or Highway 61 Revisited? How about a novel like Lolita? Does anyone seriously think that there'll be another president who achieves as much as Harry Truman or even Richard Nixon?
Does anyone think there will ever be another comedian like George Carlin?
Anyone who studies comedy - which really isn't something to studied - will tell you that there's a holy trinity of the form. It consisted of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Carlin. Anyone who followed them modelled themselves on at least one. As brilliant as he was for about three years, Dave Chappelle was essentially covering the same ground as Pryor thirty years ago. The same is true of Lewis Black and Carlin.
What's different is that they don't have the same insight or humanity. When you watch Chappelle or Black, you'll laugh your ass off, but you don't feel like you would after 90 minutes of Bruce, Pryor or Carlin. You'll laugh a whole lot, but you won't really learn anything. Watching the first group, you walked away thinking "I never really thought of that that way before." And that just doesn't happen these days.
Unlike today's comedians, Bruce, Pryor and Carlin all structured their comedy like music. If you listen to it without paying particular attention to what they're saying, you start to notice little rhythms and counter-rhythms developing. It beautifully built to a point as opposed to race to a punchline, which is what you see all too often now.
Of the three, Carlin was the only one not to destroy himself. In so doing, we got to see that you can take that form of comedy and have it mature with you. Unlike George Carlin's predecessors from the fifties and early sixties, he wasn't doing the same act into retirement that he started out with.
If anything, Carlin's humor got much darker as he got older. Routines like Football and Baseball and A Place for my Stuff were gradually replaced with far more existential riffs that were far more entertaining, at least to me. As much as I appreciated The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, I fell in love with the more apocalyptic aspects of his last twenty years.
When I was a little kid, my parents were massively pissed that my older cousin introduced me to George Carlin. They were even more pissed that I loved his work so much. By the time I was twelve, I could recite several of his albums by heart - not just the material, but all of the breaks and inflections in it, too. That made them truly nuts.
But the more he listened, the more my father, at least, understood that Carlin was much more than just a guy who said the word "fuck" a lot. Nothing that he did was done for the sole purpose of shocking an audience. When he did it, which was often, there was always a larger point to be made. There was a universe of difference between George Carlin and an idiot like Andrew Dice Clay. Having a point in recent years has been the death of otherwise great comedians. If you look at Bill Maher and Dennis Miller, as just two examples, you see how true that is. Both have suffered from the syndrome that killed Lenny Bruce's humor; they wanted to be right more than they wanted to be funny. But Bruce had been persecuted to the point that he earned that right. Maher and Miller just want to please their respective political comrades. Consequently, Miller has had a string of failed shows and Maher isn't far behind. Perhaps the greatest tribute to George Carlin was on Monday's Larry King Live. Some of the biggest names in comedy were on the show, and only one of them, Lewis Black, has been remotely funny over the last decade. Carlin was on stage three times as long as Jerry Seinfeld, but he always stayed hungry and wanted to always be better at his craft, while Seinfeld was happy driving his Porsches and making bee cartoons. Carlin worked for fifty years. He recorded 23 albums and made 14 HBO specials. He was one of the truly great ones and he will be missed Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: A Legend in My Time By: Johnny Cash From: American V: A Hundred Highways Permalink
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