The world lost another gem in George Carlin this past week.
In the few spots where I had the opportunity to watch his show, I came to love George Carlin. His politics became one of the things I really admired. He was never really worried about saying what he actually thought.
The following statement from slate.com summarizes Carlin very well:
Carlin’s career spanned more than 40 years, remarkable longevity for a stand-up artist, and All My Stuff offers a window on how his routine adapted across the decades. Though the infamy of “Seven Words” may doom Carlin to be remembered as a blue comic, early in his career he pioneered a form of observational humor now often classified as Seinfeldian. At the USC show, he describes his vocation as sharing “little ideas that occur to me.” (“Why aren’t there any Chinese guys named Rusty?” he asks at one point in the performance.) In 1982′s At Carnegie Hall, Carlin discusses his craft in more philosophical terms—his expertise, he says, lies in “reminding you of things you already know but forgot to laugh at the first time they happened.” The bulk of the material in his early shows was concerned with such pedestrian acts as grocery shopping and, yes, walking. In one early performance, he constructs a bit around the phantom stair phenomenon, when we accidentally trick our legs into thinking a staircase has one more step than it actually does.
