R.I.P. George Carlin
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Man, do I feel an overwhelming urge to say some dirty words - seven, to be precise - over this.
George Carlin was one of my early comic heroes. I discovered him (like many my age) via Dr. Demento. One day during my lunch break at school I walked over to the nearby department store and picked up a copy of FM & AM. It just fit in my locker, where it stayed until I was able to take it home in the afternoon. I picked a time when the house was empty and played the LP.
It wasn't the dirty words that had me howling; it was the incredibly literate wordplay around said dirty words. In fact, the entire album was full of the same sort of stuff. The Hair Poem was the one piece that had me floored. It was an amazing piece of social commentary wrapped up in fabulous wordplay. ("Lenin had a BEARD." "Santa Claus had WHISKERS!" The beard, of course was the root of evil, while whiskers represented happy and jolly, and therefore, safe.)
One afternoon, when it was just my dad and I in the house, I told him about this album I'd bought. I wasn't sure whether he'd kill me or not, but I was relieved to hear him laughing out loud. Like me, he was stuck by Carlin's commentary. He had to play that cut for my mom. A year or so later, when Carlin hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live, she was practically in tears over his monologue. He did a bit about grocery shopping, and she still quotes the line, "put it anywhere, Marge," whenever she sees that someone has just dumped something they didn't want on a shelf.
Geroge Carlin: Fun for the family? In this case, yes.
And now if you'll pardon me, "I'll repair to my lair and use Nair. Do you care?"
Tags: George Carlin
Filed under: George Carlin
Comments are closed
|