George Carlin: comedian, philosopher, thinker

[COMMENTARY] When George Carlin died on Sunday at age 71 from the heart problems that had plagued him for more than 30 years, much was lost. America lost perhaps its greatest comic voice; I lost a personal hero; and we all lost one of the few remaining voices of free and independent thinking. George Carlin was far more than a comedian. He was a cultural, social and political critic, a man who helped shape how two generations viewed American society and the entire human race.

It is possible to be a great comedian without provoking one’s audience to think. There are many fine standup comics who write very clever jokes that make us laugh but do little else, who reveal nothing of who they are or what they think or feel about anything. But comedy in its highest form does more than that. It provokes and inflames, it disturbs our comfortable assumptions, it forces us to think. As the late great Bill Hicks, a man firmly in the Carlin tradition, liked to say, “The job of a comedian is to say ‘wait a minute’ while the consensus forms.” And no one did that as brilliantly, as prolifically or for as long as George Carlin.

His career spanned half a century but had several distinct periods with very different approaches. He began as part of a radio comedy team with Jack Burns in the late 1950s but broke out on his own in 1962. He became a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show and the Tonight Show, becoming famous as a mainstream comedian doing relatively benign but clever observational humor. But there was a rebel lurking inside that safe, accessible package and it came out more and more as the 60s progressed and society began to change. Inspired by the example of Lenny Bruce, Carlin began to incorporate more serious subjects into his act, weaving social and political commentary into his jokes. His audience didn’t like it.

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Carlin once wrote, “The Playboy Club, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan and the Copacabana were all part of a path I found uncomfortable but necessary during the early 1960s. But as the decade churned along and the country changed, I did too.” He was chafing against the restrictions that such establishment venues placed on him. He loved to tell the story of his last gig at the Copacabana, when he was doing the material he really wanted to do for an audience that didn’t appreciate it and the manager of the club slowly turned down the volume on his microphone. When the volume reached zero, Carlin set the microphone down on the stool, walked off stage and never looked back.

He began playing to a different audience, to the children of the people he’d been performing for up to that point, in the coffeehouses and on college campuses around the country. This, he said, was where he found his comic voice, and it brought him an even higher level of stardom. His album FM and AM was on the Billboard charts for 35 weeks in 1972 and he began selling out large arenas all over the country. He was the host of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and became a big draw for HBO as it began broadcasting live comedy in the early 80s. HBO offered him the kind of freedom that network television never could and he seized the opportunity, producing 14 concerts for them over the course of 25 years.

In at least one respect, Carlin quite literally changed our political and legal system. In 1973, his infamous routine about the seven words you can’t say on television was broadcast by a radio station in New York, prompting the FCC to issue a letter of reprimand to the station. That resulted in a Supreme Court case that established the authority of the FCC to regulate the content of TV and radio shows that broadcast “indecent” material at hours when it might easily be viewed by children. This led to the creation of the “family hour,” a time when the networks promised not to broadcast anything even mildly offensive.

It is appropriate that Carlin was chosen earlier this year to receive the 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, an award given by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Like Mark Twain, who still captures the American imagination a century after his death, George Carlin will be remembered long after so many lesser wits will have faded. In the decades to come, when Jay Leno’s pedestrian attempts at humor blend perfectly into our background memory, Carlin’s legacy will still stand out from the rest of the pack. In a world where most comedians are the artistic equivalent of a Big Mac — bland, substanceless, prepackaged, indistinguishable from one another — Carlin was a great meal, one that we remember not only because it nourished us but because it excited us and brought us joy.

One of Carlin’s heroes (and friends) was Paul Krassner, co-founder of Mad magazine and publisher of The Realist, a brilliant magazine of political satire. When Krassner was profiled in Life magazine once, the FBI actually sent a letter to the editor of the magazine calling Krassner a “raving, unconfined nut.” George Carlin responded to this by saying, “The FBI was right. This man is dangerous–and funny; and necessary.” The same can be said for Carlin himself; he was not only funny, he was necessary. Now he is gone and we are left wondering who we could ever find to replace him.