“a war on crime, a war on poverty, a war on litter, a war on cancer.” There’s no war on homelessness, “because there’s no money in it.”Ĭarlin proposes: “I know just the place to build housing for the homeless: golf courses. In his “Golf Courses for the Homeless,” Carlin commented: “When the United States is not invading some sovereign nation-or setting it on fire from the air, which is more fun for our simple-minded pilots-we’re usually busy ‘declaring war’ on something here at home,” i.e. Will it force smaller competitors out of business? Will it create hazards for my workers? 5. Or consider “The American Businessman’s Ten Steps to Product Development”: “1. When it comes to the taking of human life, the federal government doesn’t want free-lance competition.” The state doesn’t actually oppose murder, it simply objects to those who go into business for themselves. “I believe the killing of human beings is just one more function of government that needs to be privatized.”Īfter outlining his “Legal Murder Once a Month” plan, he continues: “I want you to know there’s nothing in the Constitution to prevent any of this.
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For example, in the routine, “Legal Murder Once a Month,” in which he suggests that killing is not one of those things that should be left up to the state. His humor had a Swiftian, mordant quality at its best. He is one of those comics, and there are not too many around at present, whose material can be read and appreciated.Ĭarlin expressed nothing but contempt for official political life and religion. To give him credit, the comedian had an extraordinary command of words and a serious attitude toward language and its misuse, especially by those with power and money. The scatological element in Carlin’s routines could be overdone, and often was, but there was more to his comedy than that. The US Supreme Court eventually ruled that the material was “indecent but not obscene,” and that the government could ban such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be listening. When the routine was broadcast on WBAI in New York in 1973, the radio station was cited by the Federal Communications Commission. Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee in 1972 for performing the routine, which is an extended and sometimes lyrical consideration of “filthy words.” A portion of his longer routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” i.e., ‘obscene’ words, appeared on that album. After some career setbacks as a result of his new material, he developed a wide following with his album “FM & AM” in 1972. Swept up by the radicalized times, Carlin changed his image and the contents of his act in 1970, and never looked back. Speaking of his success in the 1960s, Carlin later told an interviewer that “I was a traitor, in so many words. Carlin was influenced by famed comic Lenny Bruce and was supposedly present at the latter’s arrest in 1962 in Chicago for obscenity.
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Carlin enjoyed enormous mainstream success, but his anti-establishment side was chafing.
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He began his comedy career as a solo act in the mid-1960s, appearing dozens of times on programs such as the “Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. He teamed up with Jack Burns in 1959, and the pair headed for California in 1960. Carlin was discharged from the air force as an “unproductive airman” in 1957. Endowed with an extraordinary gift of gab, he became a disc jockey at a radio station in Louisiana near the base where he was stationed. He explained on another occasion that he’d been a Catholic “until I reached the age of reason.”Ĭarlin quit high school at 14 and later joined the Air Force. “I used to be an Irish Catholic,” he would tell audiences. His was a critical voice in American public life.Ĭarlin was born in Morningside Heights in Manhattan his mother was a secretary, his father worked as an advertising manager for the New York Sun. American comedian George Carlin, an acerbic commentator on life and at times a sharp social satirist, died June 22 in Santa Monica, California at the age of 71.