So Long and Thanks for the Laughter and the Insight

For those of us who don’t take the world at face value today is a sad day indeed. George Carlin, the voice that woke me up to the bull that the world puts up in front of your eyes to hide the way things are, passed away Sunday from heart failure.

I remember the first time I saw him doing stand-up. I was maybe 13 or 14 years old. He made me laugh until my sides hurt. After it was done and I started to think about what he had been discussing, I realized that there was much more to his talk than simply humor. There were concepts and thoughts swimming below the surface of that humor that the people it was aimed at would probably never recognize.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of his material was just plain old blue humor. I am reminded of the list of 7 dirty words that over the years had grown to over 2000 words that people found vulgar or obscene. It took him almost 5 minutes to read it. His delivery while simply reading a list of words made me nearly hurt myself laughing. But thinking back the thing that makes it so very funny is that they are just words, but words that people find offensive. The list pointed out how stupid we, as humans can be to find words bothersome.

I’m still at kind of a loss here. I almost feel like I have lost a childhood friend. I am embedding a clip here. It is NOT WORK SAFE nor is it child safe, so please exercise some restraint. In a perfect world, the words in this clip shouldn’t even matter, but the world is as the world is.

He was due to receive a Mark Twain award in November. I think that the celebration should still be held and the award given posthumously. This man deserves it for the influence and the endurance of his career.

He will be missed.







If you're a fan you might check this out. I think it would be well worth the cash. If you've never really seen him before, it would be well worth your time to rent a few of his dvds.

George Carlin's All My Stuff


Tole