Class Clown

Goodbye, George Carlin

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
6/23/08
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/carlin.htm
 

    We were driving east on one of the main arteries in the city when the radio station announced that tickets were going on sale at the theatre for a George Carlin concert next month.  We were headed east, and the theater was two blocks west of us.  “Oh, we have GOT to see that!” I yelled, and pulled an improbable and highly illegal u-turn.  No cops, and in that part of California, people were used to suicidally reckless drivers.  Nobody even honked their horn.

    I pulled up in front of the theater and jumped out, leaving her to park the car.  A line was already forming.  By the time she parked and came back, I had two tickets.

    We drove to the cabin, and she regarded the tickets thoughtfully.  “This George Carlin guy.  Is he funny?”

    Oh.  Shit.

    We already had a complicated relationship.  It was one of those romantic comedy cliches were two people who can’t stand each other wind up in the sack and love, or at least a lot of lust, blossoms.  We were at the stage where we were both starting to realize that we really didn’t have a lot in common; I was a yahoo whose sense of humor kept getting me in trouble, and she was a fastidious church goer with bad taste in men. 

    It belatedly occurred to me that George Carlin might not be her cup of tea.  Hell, she didn’t even know who he was.  But then, she wasn’t familiar with Monty Python, either, a fact which allowed Gordie and I to pull a major practical joke on her once in the not too distant past.  She didn’t know I was involved, and I hid my Monty Python album to make sure it stayed that way. 

    I had a scratchy old copy of Toledo Window Box – the album, not the plant – at hand, and I played it for her.  Her laughter had a perfunctory note to it.  At the best of times, humor wasn’t really her strong suit, and George Carlin represented a steep learning curve for the humor-impaired.

    I didn’t dare push more of my Carlin records on her.  She was no dummy, and would figure out quickly enough that I had gone over the line from “fair warning” to trying to prep her.  I really did want her to have a good time.  Part of it was the usual ego thing; you want people to recognize and share the genius of your great taste in comedians.  And part of it, I’m sorry to say, was that I genuinely wanted her to have a good time.  Maybe that doesn’t put me in a very good light, but what can I say?  I’m human!

    While I was trying to prep her without appearing to be prepping her, it didn’t occur to me that maybe my expertise about George Carlin was incomplete.  Yes, I had all his albums, and yes, I got most of the jokes, but it wasn’t until the night of the concert that I discovered that George, that sly old fox, had been holding out on me. 

    What George had forgotten to mention to me in all those meetings we had via the blown speakers of my ancient stereo was that if he was funny on his record albums, he was a whole order of magnitude funnier live and on stage.  You would think he could have mentioned in his intros on one of his LP that he was even funnier in person.  I don’t know why he didn’t do that.  Perhaps he wanted to trick me.  He was probably calling me paranoid behind my back, too.

    I don’t think there has been an evening in my life, before or in the many years since, that I have laughed longer or harder than I did that night.  Carlin was brilliantly funny talking from a record studio; on stage, with his matchless repertoire of postures, facial tics and out-and-out mugging, his comedy was irresistible. 

    He got around to religion, as I knew he would, and I remembered to sneak a glance at my friend to see how she was handling all this.  She had her arms crossed over her chest, and she was pushed back in her seat.

    No, she wasn’t horrified.  She was, if anything, laughing harder than I was.  (Years later she admitted that she wet herself a little she was laughing so hard). 

    Carlin didn’t save the relationship.  We each went on to marry somebody else.  But he did make a friendship afterward possible, because he appealed to elements in our respective personalities that we each thought were missing in the other.  She was surprised that I could react to the sophistication of the irony in Carlin’s routine; I was surprised that she could see the absurdities of faith and conventionality. 

    That was Carlin’s real genius.  He didn’t just make you laugh at others; any good comedian can do that.  He made you laugh at your own absurdities.  He could take your sacred cows, grind them into hamburger, and make you ask to please pass the A-1 sauce. 

    As the years went on, he was less in the public eye, mostly because the public had been forced to catch up to him.  Unlike other comedians like Bob Hope, or Groucho Marx, or Steve Martin, he couldn’t translate his skills into a successful movie or TV career.

    And he had problems with drugs, a lot of scrapes in the early days with unamused minions of the law, and to his great credit, he managed to maintain a solid air of dissolution and irreverence.  None of which made him “A List” with the type of minds he based many of his routines upon.

    But he keep doing standup, and he wrote novel-length versions of his standup routines, and he never ever stopped thinking about what was funny in life.  The French have a saying: “To the man who laughs, life is a comedy.  To the man who thinks, it is a tragedy.”  Carlin saw the deeper truth that life is a tragicomedy, and as you laugh, think about what you are laughing at.  That makes it even funnier.

    When they announced last week that George Carlin was to be awarded the Mark Twain award for comedy, I couldn’t think of anyone more deserving.  Samuel Clemens, I’m sure, would have approved strongly of George Carlin.  Carlin probably wasn’t too impressed with the honor, but I hope he felt at least a little sense of gratification at this final acknowledgment that he had won his battle with the bluenoses and wowsers of the 20th century, just as Twain did in the century before. 

    Ask a Canadian who Canada’s greatest comedian of the 20th century was, and most will say it was Stephen Leacock.  A few might hold out for John Diefenbaker.  For Americans, the answer is nearly as straightforward. Carlin was America’s greatest humorist in the 20th century. 

    “Forecast for tonight: Dark.  Continued dark until early morning, followed by widely scattered light.”