George Carlin was a brilliantly funny observer when he trained his eye on the ordinary and overlooked. What happened in his career’s last 15 years?
Carlin was a brilliantly funny observer when he trained his eye on the ordinary and overlooked. What happened in his career’s last 15 years?
G eorge Carlin cycled through about five comic personas in his nearly 50 years as a standup, but only three of them matter. He was Lenny Bruce, he was Jerry Seinfeld, and he was, at his most unfortunate stage, Bernie Sanders. Guess which one of these styles today’s commentariat would have you believe is the one we should be talking about?
George Carlin’s American Dream is a mostly excellent but occasionally stridently left-wing HBO documentary directed by Michael Bonfiglio and Judd Apatow that features lots of fright-montages about racism, police brutality, and the necessity of a right to abortion, backed by Standard Hollywood Doom Soundtrack Number Four. Carlin, we’re repeatedly told, is speaking to us right now. No. His best stuff was timeless.
Carlin’s Lenny Bruce–like social commentary on human foibles was, for instance, often brilliant. But he excelled equally in minutely observed dissections of ordinary life and in picking apart the peculiarities of our language. “A hernia should be called a his-nia and a hysterectomy should be called a hers-terectomy,” he contended. In his celebrated “A place for my stuff” bit, he pinpointed why it’s annoying to stay in someone else’s bedroom: “Have you noticed that their stuff is s*** and your s*** is stuff?” He smartly noted that when a comic is not successful, he says, “I died onstage.” If he does well? “I killed them!” “So it’s either me or you, you know?”
This type of playful, easygoing, widely appealing, and inoffensive comedy reached its apotheosis when Jerry Seinfeld did it, and Seinfeld acknowledges his debt to Carlin in the film. This was Carlin’s greatest and most lasting contribution to his form, and these bits still sparkle, even though they inspired legions of inferior imitators who, in their pastel blazers, surged into the Laff Lounges and Giggle Rooms in the Eighties.
In the Eighties, Carlin dropped this style. He grew envious of the buzz around the shouty, foamy-mouthed comic Sam Kinison, and in his last 15 years, Carlin unwisely tried to be Kinison. He abandoned precise observation and started flailing around like a blindfolded kid trying to destroy a piñata. “F*** these Boomers, f*** these yuppies, and f*** everybody, now that I think of it!” he’d say. “Brilliant!” say the comics interviewed for the documentary. Judge for yourself. This is the priceless material that makes Patton Oswalt and W. Kamau Bell purr:
There’s a reason education sucks and there’s a reason that it will never, ever be fixed. It’s because the owners of this country don’t want that.
And:
It’s all one big ownership class in his country.
You have owners. They own you.
And:
Nobody questions things in this country anymore. Americans have been bought off and silenced by toys and gizmos. With our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit. Fake dog s*** and cinnamon dental floss and lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in their heels.
And:
That’s what the owners count on. They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly s****ier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and now they want your f***ing retirement money. They want it back. So they can give to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
Is that all, Senator Sanders, or would you like to yield your time to someone a bit more nuanced, like Hugo Chavez? “For me, I never heard a comic bit that changed my mind on anything” is Seinfeld’s dismissive assessment of all this. Explaining that it’s false to say Carlin got bitter in his old age — “bulls***!” — Carlin’s older brother Patrick offered this rebuttal before his recent death: “He got tired of the f***ing people, the f***ing stupidity, and the hopelessness of expecting anything from them.” So: Pretty much the definition of bitter, then.
When these later Carlin bits are transcribed, it becomes clear that they are not even comedy. They’re barely informed, argument-free political potshots of the kind you’d expect the most boring columnist in the Washington Post to phone in on any given Friday before that Beltway rush-hour traffic kicks in (at 2:30 p.m.). There is nothing original here, no insight into the human quandary, no twisty subversion of expectations. Carlin covered the weakness of this material by doing what he hadn’t needed to do when he was actually funny:
DELIVERINGITREALLYFASTANDLOUDANDINTHEHIGHESTDUDGEON. Audiences responded with what later would be dubbed clapter. Woot! Clearly the reason we haven’t solved homelessness is that there’s no money in it, Carlin would claim. Yeah, that sounds right. (How come there’s almost no homelessness in Florida, which spends nine dollars and 45 cents on it, but lots of it in California, which spends billions?)
Carlin indulges a thought, or rather a cliché, that pro-life conservatives care about fetuses but not children: “Once you’re born, you’re on your own!” Yawn. Conservatives are now, as always, pro-family, which is why conservatives have more children or, to put it another way, people with children vote Republican. If Republicans make it hard to raise children, funny that parents seem to like Republicans, no?
Naturally, the New York Times’ clapter correspondent Dave Itzkoff contends that the Old-Man-Yells-at-Cloud phase was actually Carlin at his finest. Itzkoff informs us that Carlin used to send jokes to Keith Olbermann for the latter’s early 2000s lectern-pounder Countdown, which . . . yeah, that sounds about right.
Carlin died in 2008 and would be stunned to learn that the censorious impulse traditionally associated with the Right is now almost entirely a left-wing phenomenon. Meanwhile, virtually all major institutions have now turned ardently progressive and are hiring speech cops — sorry, “sensitivity coordinators” — as fast as they can. Get your pronouns right, son is the new that’s obscene, pal. Whether Carlin would approve of this on grounds that it’s good for the underdog, or bewail it as a fast-spreading regime of thought control, I couldn’t say. Maybe, like Orwell, he’d have had a late-life awakening to the dangers of leftist control. One of the few political bits from the doc that actually departs from well-worn expectations and makes the audience think a bit is this one:
I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. . . . Environmentalists don’t give a s*** about the planet. . . . You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that someday in the future they might be inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. . . . The planet has been through a lot worse than us, been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles . . . and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
Mostly, though, the later Carlin was obtuse, ineffectual, off-point, and strange. “How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelet?” Carlin once asked. I hate to sound like a stuffy conservative, so I’ll just throw the question out to our friends on the left: Do you really think there’s no moral difference between what’s in your McMuffin and what’s in your womb?