Remembering George

George Carlin died Sunday night, and I'm pissed off.

No, not for that reason. We all have to go some time, and his bad heart was bound to get him eventually, but what I'm pissed off about is some networks' coverage of the fact.

Fox, in particular. They called him a "controversial comedian" and that was about it.

WFT is up with that? He was not merely "controversial." He was a freaking legend. Lenny Bruce, another freaking legend, passed the torch to Carlin, who ran with it, performed new tricks with it, got arrested for it (when radio station WBAI aired his "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television," and he inspired every single half-assed dirty comic out there today who thinks that swearing is the way to get a laugh.

There's a difference here, between, say, Jim Norton and George Carlin. A huge difference. Carlin used language appropriate to his point. A fine-bristled brush at times, and at others, a sledgehammer.

For the kiddies out there who haven't heard Carlin's genius, he made fun of the peculiarities of our language, the freak show that is the human race, and our amazing, astounding, head-scratching, infuriating idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies. Welcome to the freak show, he said once (and I'm paraphrasing), and those of us in America have a front row seat.

Another thing that amazed me is that his delivery sounded as if he were making up the whole act as he went along. Yet from what I heard about him in an interview, he very carefully wrote and rehearsed (and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed) each performance. I don't know how he kept the spontaneity in his act, but that's another thing I admired about him

I was first introduced to Carlin when I, a curious ten-year-old, "borrowed" my father's copy of FM and AM, and Class Clown (which I still have to this day). I played them and laughed my ass off. My friend Deanne came over and we both laughed our asses off, (and I got in trouble with her mother) but from then on we repeated his best lines to each other like certain folks do with favorite Monty Python skits now. (our favorites were from his rants about growing up Catholic, which neither of us were doing)

I began to collect each new album as it came out. Occupation: Foole, Toledo Window Box, A Place For My Stuff, and others. Over time, Carlin began to influence me as a writer. I think that's where my fascination with words began. The way he crafted them amused me, startled me, woke me out of my stupor, and made me think.

And for your amusement and thought processes, I leave you with a few of my favorite Carlin rants.

And the knowledge that whatever anyone is saying about him on the news, he'd probably hate it.