George Carlin has died.

So shit! piss! fuck! etc.

Those are “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television¹” – which he famously did. Carlin (“how come when it’s us it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?”) was a breath of fresh scepticism, an angry antidote to the pious and self-righteous as well as to the apathetic, the incurious, the compliant and the merely bourgeois.

“I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas.”

I have been a fan of Carlin since the early 70s. I remember with fondness listening to a cassette (remember those?) of Class Clown with a table-full of other travellers in a youth hostel in Jakarta in ’75. Culturally inappropriate, perhaps, but hilarious nonetheless.

“Fighting for peace,” he said, “is like fucking for virginity.” Here is his piece on the first Gulf War which is startlingly familiar. It was all the same people. And we learnt nothing:

I don’t know why I bother. Carlin says all I really want to say.

And here he is on death:

“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating…and you finish off as an orgasm.”

…and on religion:

Looks like god struck George dead after all…

^{¹It was America, of course, and it was the 70s}

Technorati Tags: carlin, george carlin, gulf war, iraq, bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Vietnam, penis, obituary, comedy, humor, humour, stand-up comedy, death, birth, retirement, orgasm, religion, god, virginity, Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, values, ethics, morals, worth, standards, principles