George Carlin

I just discovered that George Carlin has passed away at a Los Angeles hospital.

My shock and grief over his death is suitably expressed through his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television:"

SHIT PISS FUCK CUNT COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCK TITS!

George Carlin was one of my favorite stand-up comics. When I was a kid I used to sneak to the downstairs television after my parents were asleep just so I could watch his profanity-laced HBO specials. I appreciated his observations about the absurdities, oddities and hipocrisies of everyday life. But I found him especially poignant and compelling when he talked about language and the way people used - or misused - it:

Mr. Carlin was a surprisingly effective physical comedian, prowling the stage with a microphone and delivering his punch lines with body English and facial acrobatics. But the heart of his humor was verbal. One of his favorite bits was an extended riff, a mock tirade, against what he called “soft language — the language that takes the life out of life.” Soft language was the substitution, say, of “bathroom tissue” for “toilet paper”; it was calling the dump the landfill and saying you were experiencing a “negative cash-flow situation” when what you really meant was that you were broke.

Mr. Carlin had dozens of examples, and he could cite them for minutes on end, alternately rueful and disbelieving. But what came through, even as he shook his head and used one or more of the seven forbidden words to say how stupid we were, was his love of language itself and how various and evocative it was. Even the expletives — or perhaps especially the expletives.

His contention that Vietnam veterans would have received better care if the condition known as "post-traumatic stress disorder" was still called "shell shock," as it was during the era of the First World War, has always been a favorite of mine.

I didn't find Carlin's more recent material to be quite as funny as his stuff from the 70s and 80s. It was darker, angrier, more contemptuous. But it was still relevant. Carlin never became irrelelvant. That is something he will always be remembered for.

For some reason, I've always had an affinity for foul-mouthed shock-comics Sam Kinison, who died in 1991, is still one of my favorites.

Carlin apparently died of heart failure. He was 71.

UPDATE: Carlin's New York Times obit is here.