RIP George Carlin

Aka The Mad Misanthrope. As a young angry disgruntled atheist, Carlin was ironically like a God to me in high school. I came into contact with him via his Back In Town album, which saw him at perhaps his most angry and most curmudgeonly. After a huge obsession for that lasted several years and a few attempts at yearbook quotes, his cynicism eventually became too unfeeling and too simplified for me to bare sometimes. This, combined with other grating elements of his personality- his annoying boomer pony tail, his commercial career despite vitriolic assaults on advertising, the material he stole from Bill Hicks, his iconic "don't vote" routine, the fact that he was incredibly rich and charged upwards of $60 for his stand-up tickets- turned me off a bit. Yet reexamining his repertoire, there materializes a sense of general mistrust and disappointment in the society he seemed to care for earlier in his career. His late era career, by far more important in my view, saw Carlin divorcing himself completely from reality as it had come to be known and defined (doomed, in his view). He viewed our world with eyes as alien as Sun Ra's, the culture as a whole as a Debordian spectacle. Rather than try to recast himself as the mythological hero to save our broken planet, a truly American egotism in Carlin's eyes, he chose instead to view humanity's self-destruction as pure entertainment. Admittedly, it was from a very privileged perch that he could sit on and cheer for war, destitution, school shootings, and the general downfall of Western society. But part of the point was that his willingness to accept the fate of humanity was often an ironic gesture to wake up the rest of the world to a holistic picture. To some degree, this meant oversimplifying issues and avoiding current events altogether (Carlin always seemed to aiming for posterity over relevance- an odd take for such an apocalyptic prophet). Though within the terrifying truths he espoused often emerged a grander vision of a world so immensely fucked that you almost needed to step outside of it altogether to find it the least bit funny. Like Chaplin said, "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot". Carlin, whose later life especially was filled with close-up sadness, probably would have responded with "Close-up? Long-shot? Move out of the fucking way, I'm trying to watch that!"

He will be missed.


Here is a track composed in high school using a clip from Carlin's Playing With Your Head album.