"... and Tits"

Yeah that guy Carlin. The dude with the obscenity riff. The thing with the seven deadly words you can't say on television. He died. What did he do? Was he really funny? Was he as important as Lenny Bruce? Lenny Bruce used all those dirty words in his act, but he wasn't a "Blue comic." Red Foxx was a Blue Comic! Belle Barth was a Blue Comic. They said Lenny was a genius. George Carlin was a regular stand up comedian. He came from the Bob Newhart and Shelly Berman School. Guys who didn't tell jokes so much as do bits. You know, little acts, plays, monologues. The things you expect from comedians now, but it was all new after Lenny made it hip and these other guys honed it cool. It's easy to understand if you look at Lenny Bruce as Jazz and Carlin as Folk Music, good folk music, but Folk Music.
So George went along and started growing his hair and opening for musical acts in the big clubs. Acts like the Kingston Trio Stuff that was very popular, and he sort of paved the way for comics and music to exist in the same formats. You wouldn't have seen that with your famous comics of the past like Bob Hope and Milton Berle. Those guys might have worked with a big band, but there was no question that the comic was the top banana and when you look back you see that Hope and Crosby and Berle were not particularly nice men and enjoyed humor at other peoples expense. Then came Lenny with his Jazzy ways and his way out hop head morals and things were never the same and even though Hope and George Burns lived to be 100 years old they could not change a thing. Lenny did not live very long, lots of junkies don't, but he lived long enough to give us the likes of Carlin and Newhart and Steve Martin and Richard Prior and comedy flourished. George was funny. He did comparative bits like Foot Ball vs Base Ball.
He would growl in a real tough voice that football was played on a gridiron and then gently murmur that baseball was played in a park. Funny. Obvious, but still funny. George was quite expressive. Well for some reason George felt a need to embrace the "counter culture" and he came out with some questionable choices like Al Sleet, "The Hippy Dippy Weatherman" Trouble there was he did this in the Summer 'O Luv ––sometimes known as 1966 ––and there were many movers and shakers about who took their status as Hippies quite seriously, so Carlin's portrayal, while humorous, cast him in the light of grownup from then on and when you measured the man against the competition he was a pretty goofy one at best. George didn't get it though, so he kept on, becoming involved with those dirty words, the seven words you could not say on TV. It wasn't that he cared about the words so much as he worried about the the bad thoughts underlying the nation. His point was not that we should use the seven words. It was on the order that there are not any bad words just bad ideas made by bad people using all sorts of words. Carlin pressed on that point through a period of self destructive drug abuse but he came out OK, and even though his late material was a tad scary in that he seemed to feel the human race had been given a fair chance but blown it beyond redemption, his sweet demeanor never left him. I think we loved George Carlin for that sweetness; his anger was more sadness than anything else. Carlin said religion was BS and I am apt to agree especially these days, however; to bang a dull gong of irony I could point out that in the gospel of Luke the last seven words spoken by Christ were " ... for they know not what they do." Because of George Carlin and those who came after we have a platform where those odd men and women who practice the art of social comedy can keep us well informed as to exactly what "They" might be up to at any given time. It is a good thing to be able to laugh as you take stock of those who would be your enemy on the basis of how you think. You probably don't think too much about comics operating behind the lines, but when you think about guys like Rush Limbaugh getting exposed as a pill head pervert, you can bet some funny person was behind it.
So, yes it is very important that we give George Carlin his due as an innovator of the 1st generation of social comics. More important still is the fact that he is far from the last